September 26-October 2, 2011
General Assembly News
PCT Sunshine Camps for youth get ready to share the gospel and train the next generation
Reported by Sam Lee
Written by Lydia Ma
In its latest efforts to get youths involved in PCT’s “One-leads-One, New Doubling Movement”, PCT Youth Ministry Committee will do a census toward the end of September 2011 to get a scope of the number of teens who attend youth fellowships in every church. This census will help the committee plan better programs for its Sunshine Camp series, with activities such as exposure tours, spiritual formation classes, Life Education classes, and more.
A seminar in preparation for Sunshine Camp was held on September 23-25, 2011, at Hsieh-Wei Memorial Youth Camp in Puli led by PCT Youth Ministry Committee Secretary Etan Pavavalong. He explained that the census would provide an overview of active youths in all 27 PCT presbyteries and help the committee in much needed quantitative analysis as well as setting targets. This data will also be available to all churches through an internet database at a later date.
“Youths play important roles in PCT’s ‘One-leads-One, New Doubling Movement’ because they can invite their friends and classmates to Sunshine Camps. At these camps, there will be spiritual formation, life education, self-assessment seminars, and more,” said Etan Pavavalong.
He added that what makes Sunshine Camps unique is that they aren’t huge camps boasting hundreds in attendance, but rather, they are very local camps held all across Taiwan, which allows each camp to really explore local history and come up with its own special features.
At this seminar, the topic of discussion was mainly how to teach youths to share the gospel with others and equip them to be channels of blessing to their peers by offering God their money, talent, time, etc.
The seminar also touched on designing a curriculum that would fit the needs of youths while staying sensitive to their different levels of understanding. Among the topics included in the curriculum were: Nuclear-free Taiwan, Taiwan’s diverse ecology, indigenous culture, the ministry of George Mackay, etc. It is likely that some of these lessons or camps will be held at Alangyi Trail, Smangus Indigenous Reservation, Orchid Island, etc.
