When LAMB District youth gathered in August, it revived an effort to bring youth together for fellowship and teaching and is leading to leadership opportunities.
Moises Tagle, planning committee member, remembers when the district held monthly youth gatherings. As a young adult, Tagle was on the planning committee for these gatherings at locations around the district. But over time, as students became busier with school and extracurricular activities, attendance dropped, and the gatherings became quarterly and eventually stopped, he says.
Now, there is interest in starting them again.
“There’s been a lot of talk now about the next generation and wanting to start developing some more leaders,” Tagle says. “This is one of the ways that we want to do this.”
Connecting points
GracePoint Church, La Grulla, Texas, hosted the 40 youth from three churches.
District minister Aaron Hernandez, who pastors GracePoint Church, is encouraged to see district leaders investing in the next generation. “These kids are noticeably hungry for something different than what this culture is offering,” he says. “The message we communicate is clear: only Jesus gives life.”
The Aug. 25 event included “Minute to Win It” games, singing led by the GracePoint worship team, a message and pizza.
Joanna Chapa, Multiply mission mobilizer, spoke from Mark 1:16-20 about what it means to follow Jesus. Using the analogy of a sponge, Chapa demonstrated that we absorb what our lives are “soaked” in, and this is what will come out when life “squeezes” us.
“What excites me about reviving the south Texas MB churches youth gatherings is that it gives these young people a taste of what they were created for: withness,” Chapa says. “It was quite special to see the excitement in the adult leaders as they saw the different youth groups mingling and connecting with each other.”
Developing leaders
To involve as many churches as possible, organizers opened the event to a wide age range. Participants ranged in age from middle school to college.
Initial feedback from youth leaders has been positive, Tagle says.
The hope is to meet three or four times per year, with participation from even more churches, Tagle says. The next meeting is set for January. Current planning team members in addition to Tagle and Chapa are Elizabeth Tagle, Mirta Cantu and Joaquin Gutierrez.
“Our goal is to bring in some younger leaders from the different churches to become the official planning committee,” Tagle says. “Hopefully, that will both bring in new leaders as well as help promote amongst their own churches.”
Another result of the gathering has been an effort to identify and develop youth leaders. While some LAMB churches have organized youth groups with youth leaders, others do not meet apart from Sunday, Tagle says.
The planning team is encouraging pastors to identify potential youth leaders, and Tagle hopes to meet with these leaders in January to encourage, develop and resource them.
For Tagle, the hope is to provide today’s youth with fellowship opportunities.
“When I was young, that’s how we got to know people from other churches,” Tagle says. “I met (people) that I would later be working with. Those are the kinds of experiences that we want our kids to have.”
Janae Rempel Shafer is the Christian Leader associate editor. She joined the CL staff in September 2017 with six years of experience as a professional journalist. Shafer is an award-winning writer, having received three 2016 Kansas Press Association Awards of Excellence and an Evangelical Press Association Higher Goals award in 2022. Shafer graduated from Tabor College in 2010 with a bachelor of arts in Communications/Journalism and Biblical/Religious Studies. She and her husband, Austin, attend Ridgepoint Church in Wichita, Kansas.
