Church Together Across State Lines

My name is Kinna, and I am the Director of Youth and Family Ministry between two smaller congregations, St. Mark’s Lutheran and St. Stephen’s Episcopal, in a wildly diverse area on Del Mar Cir in Aurora, CO. One way we live out the claim that we are church, better together, is through our annual “Two Week Summer Camp”. This past summer, we had one week of camp at the Episcopal church, and one week at the Lutheran Church. We have a great challenge with our Summer Camp in that that each year our attendance of young people ages 4-17 continues to increase. However, our number of volunteers continue to decrease due to natural causes and a higher demand for help! So this last summer, I had to get creative…

In years past, we had done all of the programming from within, which required a large number of people and time. So this year, we reached out beyond our churches and asked Sky Ranch Lutheran Camp to run the programming for us. Then I invited youth groups from Minnesota and Washington to accompany us, and help me run this ministry with 90+ young people. It was their Summer Mission Trip that was a win-win, as I got the help I needed to run this ministry, and the youth groups got a different kind of mission trip experience that was more about listening and relationship building. After they helped me with the camp from 9-12PM Monday through Friday, they then were connected with nonprofits such as Urban Servant Corps, Food Bank of the Rockies, DOOR, and Luther Family Services.

It was a huge success and surely was a large scale picture of how we were church, better together across denominations, across state lines, and across the congregations and nonprofits in the community.

Search Tags: Faith Formation, Sky Ranch, Youth and Family Ministry