YL Training in Latin America

http://vimeo.com/35043233 ( Click on this link if you'd like to see a great photo tour of some of the leaders and teens we work with in our division of Young Life-- Africa, Asia and Latin America.    Our newest blog post is below.....

Dear Friends,                    It’s been a busy January and February, but in very good ways. I’d love to tell you a little about all the friends we’ve been getting to see. Leaders from the 2nd camp The first opportunity to see a lot of friends was at our Leader training camps for Central America which took place in Nicaragua in mid-January.   Thanks for your prayers—those camps were a huge success.   We had over 400 leaders there (!) over the course of our two camps, many from Nicaragua, but also others from Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. I’ve been thinking recently about a discussion with a good friend talking about our focus in Young Life of equipping leaders. He said: “ If you focus on building Young Life into a bigger ministry, you will hurt your leaders and likely fail.   But if you build up leaders in Christ, you will build YL.”   There is a LOT ...

Dear Friends,         Thanks for all your support and prayers for us in 2011. We’ve had a wonderful year as a family and in ministry. My job hasn’t changed as much as it might sound, but I do have a little larger role within Young Life now in helping with training for International South. My main focus and time investment is still Latin America, but I have begun to have more contact now with our leaders in Asia and Africa as well. We have a huge challenge in International South since the countries you see high-lighted above contain almost 75% of the world’s teenagers. But we also have some amazing blessings. Frederick Buechner once wrote,       "There come moments, I think, even in the midst of all our cynicism and worldliness and childishness, maybe especially then, when there is something about the saints of the earth that bowls us over a little…I mean saints who have their rough edges and their blind spots like everybody else but...

Dear Friends,         Happy Birthday! Just two weeks ago, Young Life officially celebrated its 70 th birthday.   In 1941 Jim Rayburn and some other folks in Texas had a great vision for how to reach out to teenagers who weren’t interested in the church and started this mission….what a wonderful thing to celebrate! They discussed how to live out Colossians 4:5 “ Walk in wisdom to them that are without ” and John 1:14 “ And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (KJV) with teenagers to help them hear the gospel with new ears and be discipled by a loving Christian. It’s how they formed their plan to reach teenagers and it’s what Young Life is still doing—going where kids are and helping them hear and experience the gospel for themselves. But, while Young Life is still very true to its roots, I like to think the mission has grown even more than Jim and his friends in Texas could originally have imagined. Camp in Colombia Jim a...

 Our camp group in Haiti       A couple weeks ago I went to Haiti to visit our Young Life leaders there and help them run camp. When I was leaving the US every headline was about the stock market crashing, how much net worth had been lost in a day, and an awful lot of doom and gloom about the economy—quite depressing stuff----- and then I entered Haiti, a place that is well beyond what our doom and gloom can even imagine. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with an unemployment rate of over 40% and over 50% of its population living on less than $1.50 per day (the definition of abject poverty); it’s also still trying to recover from a devastating earthquake, flooding, and a cholera epidemic that hit the country in 2011. As you can imagine, much of life in Haiti is focused on trying to get enough resources to just survive.   Our senior leaders in Haiti-- Noyo, Bouzy and Chedrick     Haiti can be a place that...

The VJ clubhouse decorated for the 4th On the 4 th of July many people (maybe you even) celebrated by spending time with family, grilling hamburgers or hot dogs, eating watermelon, watching a parade, lighting up sparklers and viewing fireworks.   That’s actually how I’ve spent a lot of Independence Days over the years.   But this year Jenn and I spent the 4 th of July doing a lot of painting, eating rice and beans in a Dominican barrio, and holding a merengue dance party….I’m not much of a dancer, but I’ve got to admit, it was a pretty good way to celebrate. J            This all happened because Jenn and I were able to go ‘home’ to the Dominican Republic for ten days with 17 teens and 3 leaders from the youth group of Brookside CRC and experience the DR with them as we worked at Pico Escondido--Young Life’s camp in the DR-- and spent several days in one of the neighborhoods where Vida Joven does ministry.   It was a ver...

How many campers would you put at a camp that has a capacity of 95? For most of us, that answer is pretty clearly 95 or less. But at our training camp for leaders in the Dominican Republic in March the answer was 157! It was our largest training camp ever and it meant people were sleeping in every available space-- on mattresses, sleeping pads, sleeping bags or whatever we could find. I ended up with a lovely space on our camp manager’s office floor. But it also meant a great deal of fun with a big group of potential leaders who were excited to learn and grow. The amazing thing about this is that well over half of that 157 are teenagers who accepted Christ in the last two years through Vida Joven and they’re now desiring to learn to share what they’ve come to know with their friends and classmates. This is the fruit of a lot of outreach and discipleship by our leaders in the Dominican Republic. They’ve really dedicated themselves to walking with these kids the last two years and helpi...