I can’t even begin to explain the warm fuzzy feelings I got taking some of our youth group skiing this weekend. We were invited by our sister church, in the next town over, to join their group and enjoy freshly fallen artificial snow up in the mountains.
What a blessing it was to see our two groups interact and enjoy this first shared fellowship event. Two great groups of great kids having fun on the slopes and, thankfully, we all returned in good health. I’m always so proud of the kids of our group and it’s clear that our sister church has great reason to boast of theirs.
It is my hope that we will be able to continue pairing up with our brothers and sisters just over yonder and build upon this occasion and foster even more camaraderie between the two groups. I’m only chairing the board of youth for five more months but I’m gonna do my best to see that those who we share a common confession with will be made to feel as welcome at our functions as we were at theirs.
I often teach in my Sunday school class that we in the Church, the body of Christ, are a family. The warm fuzzy feelings I got this past weekend was being able to see that family work and play together as one even though we’d never met before Friday.
We have a very astute Youth Pastor at our church who has reached out to area churches. As a result, he now heads up a group that is called "Common Ground." It's made up of area church youth groups and they do mission trips together, have a monthly youth meeting (where we bring all of the groups together) and more. It's also spilled over to our men's retreat, the leadership of our churches and even a young adult ministry that I'm involved with. It's such a neat thing to see these individual churches working together instead of thinking that they are competing or the only "real" church in town.
ReplyDeleteBD, did (or would) your youth pastor include those who confession on what the Christian faith is differs from your congregation?
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