My last post was about transitions. You can read it here. This last week I participated in my last event as a youth pastor. I took our kids to Austin to SWITCH Camp. It’s described as a little bit camp, a little bit conference, and a little bit mission trip. This is a reality. I’ll come back to that.
Let’s talk about values.
A while back I wrote on values, you can read that here. Our values listed are Love God. Love Each Other. Love Those Who Don’t Know Jesus.
Let’s talk about camps.
It’s a good mix of both. Also, it’s the only “summer camp” I’ve found where I can justify the cost. With the average cost of a camp being $200-$300, SWITCH runs in that price range. The difference comes in that most camps look something like: bring a bunch of teenagers together out away from all other people (which causes immediate drama), have them play games and then on Thursday night have a cry fest and make commitments that won’t last a week. SWITCH isn’t that.
SWITCH was a values win.
There’s certainly was awesome worship and preaching for students in the evenings. There were excellent morning bible studies. There were great games from Camp Gladiator and Ice Cream from Amy’s Ice Cream. It was definitely a camp experience geared towards teenagers. Those cover the Love God and Love Each Other values…but what about Love Those Who Don’t Know Jesus? That’s the best part. We weren’t at a campground. We were in the middle of Austin, and during the day we’d go and do service projects for non-profits and serve those in need.
We got the last value.
It was excellent in terms of meeting all the values. Not only did we play games, and get to spend time with each other. Not only did we worship God and talk about making disciples. We actually got to apply what we were learning while doing all of that. If you want to see more of what we did go here (the linked post is password protected. If you’d like to see the specifics of what we did, please place a request through my contact page).