Winter Retreat Recap

Dear Friends and Family,

Last weekend hundreds of youth from urban, inner-city communities around Southern and Central California descended upon The Oaks Christian Camp and Conference Center. World Impact, an inner-city Christian church planting organization, hosted its annual Winter Teen retreat. Our youth ministry met at 8 am last Saturday to make the hour and a half drive to camp. It was the first time we have attended and boy was it a great time (even with the crazy wind and rain)!

By and large the retreat was planned and organized by World Impact staff – everything from activities, to food, to accommodations, to the speaker. This enabled our youth ministry staff and me to focus our energies entirely on relational time with our youth. What a blessing! Whether it was time spent eating delicious dining hall food, enjoying daring activities like paintball and the high ropes course, or hanging out in our cabins late at night, the adult staff were around our youth 24 hours a day for the entire weekend. It’s definitely a frenetic pace that can’t be sustained for very long, but for a weekend it felt like such a rich gift and opportunity to partner with God in loving our youth.

With our abundance of relational time and the calm of being in a place far from the inner-city, God created space for the youth to share painful experiences where God has felt distant. One youth shared of his recent suicidal thoughts. Another shared the feeling of fear that overwhelmed him when his loving father was arrested by the police, seemingly out of the blue. Another shared of the hopelessness she felt at school, of being a good student and getting good grades. Several others resonated with these stories and shared similar stories of their own.

It became clear that school and home, typically places of nurture, love and development, are instead places of darkness, pain and insecurity. In these places we challenged and encouraged our youth to know that God is present, as it says in the Psalm 139:11-12 “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for the darkness is as light with you.” Several prayed for faith to believe that God is present in their ups and downs. As we return to Los Angeles, I hope that we will continue walking with our youth and God through these difficult places.

Another highlight of the weekend is difficult to quantify so I’ll just describe it the best I can. Prior to the retreat, we were a youth group. We’d hit a good rhythm with our Wed night and Sunday morning gatherings. People knew each other, were friendly and generally enjoyed being together. After retreat it felt more like family. We’ve become a youth group family, brothers and sisters in Christ across race, gender and geography! We hung out together in the dining hall playing silly games enjoying each others’ presence. We sung loudly and proudly for our friend Ingrid who celebrated her birthday at camp. We saved seats for each other in the auditorium. We stuck together and played honestly as a team in the camp scavenger hunt. We shared our stories and testimonies while listening to others. God knit us together like a family.

I find the timing of all this to be a really exciting development. In February we’re planning our third annual “REEL Joy,” an arts-based, film-making, evangelistic outreach event that culminates with a screening of the youths’ films in early March. My hope and prayer is that many new youth in our neighborhood will come for the opportunity to act in and make a short film, and then stay in our youth group because they’ve been touched by the love of Christ. In the past REEL Joy has been a volatile mix of youth from different parts of the neighborhood who are taught to not get along. Please pray for our youth and adult staff to demonstrate Christ in word and deed as we invite others to join our fellowship. Pray that God would do mighty things in the lives of all who come.

Peace and Grace,
Elliot Ling

Pray for Showers of Blessing!

I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing.
Ezekiel 34:26

The Adventures Ahead Tutoring Program started it's new semester on Tuesday. The good news is that we are once again at capacity, with 29 children enrolled. The bad news is that most of our families walk their children to and from the center, often pushing siblings in strollers. So you can imagine how torrential rain impacts attendance! Yesterday we had about 15 kids show up. If you are reading this early enough, pray for clear skies from 4-6pm today, and for God to give our kids a strong start regardless of the weather.

Some other good news is that students came back to a much improved learning environment. Lauren used her Christmas break to rearrange our classroom space and transform her own office into a computer lab with five workstations. The new floorplan gives each class a lot more space to work in, and a lot more distance from the next class over. At the end of a long school day it's not easy to concentrate on more academic work. A crowded room makes it even harder. Pray that our kids will work hard, stay focused and reap great rewards this spring!

One of our local partners donated some "new to us" computers that his company was replacing, and has offered to network them to a common printer. On the days we don't have enough reading buddies for each child, computers are a great way for kids to practice skills on their own. The new lab will help us make every minute count! Please pray that God will grant all of our equipment a long and useful life, and that the lab will indeed help our kids master skills they need.

Lastly, we still have a staffing shortage to work out before next week. For now, Lauren is serving as a floating instructor during the hours that we're short on teachers. Pray for God's wisdom and provision as she works on closing these gaps over the weekend. Pray too for our volunteer recruitment, that God will bring us enough committed reading buddies to give each child the attention they need!

Winter Retreat

This weekend the Church of the Redeemer Youth Group will be heading off on a retreat. We'll be joining several other church groups and youth ministries at The Oaks Christian Conference center, a ministry of World Impact.

After a wonderful fall of ministry, I'm excited and grateful for the time this weekend. The youth have worked hard to fundraise for the trip and we're ready to go! In the process of planning and preparing for this retreat I've been reminded of God's faithfulness and goodness in past youth retreats.

- This past October at our High School/Young Adults retreat, one our youth confessed for the first time the anger and pain he has felt as a result of his absentee father. He has begun to learn and grow in his understanding of God as his Heavenly Father.

- Last summer we challenged our youth to take risks of faith with Jesus. After struggling with homelessness in the last year, one young man returned home to find that his mother's work hours had been cut. With the family struggling to make rent he prayed for God's provision. The next day God provided a new housemate who was employed and able to contribute to rent and the young man's faith grew.

- In 2008 after experiencing the passing of a family member one of the youth encountered God in a new way. While worshipping at the retreat God gave him a comforting vision of him standing with Jesus and his family member. It proved to be a deeply healing time.

The youth group staff and myself are looking forward to being apart of God's work in our youth this weekend. The theme for the retreat comes from Psalm 139. We pray that God would work mightily through His Word, times of musical worship, fun activities and conversations to lead the youth into deeper relationship with Him.

We'd love to have your prayers for the weekend. As we've been praying, here are some things that God has put on our heart:


- New Decisions and Commitments: We hope for the youth to encounter God in a new way that leads to "decisions" - decisions to follow Jesus for the first time and decisions to trust even more deeply in Him

- Unity and Friendship: We pray that God will continue to grow the friendships between youth and adults in our group. It's our hope that the love of Christ will be evident in our youth group when we return to have our arts-outreach program "REEL Joy" in February.

- Spirit-led leaders: Please pray for our speaker Tommy Nixon and he shares the Word with the youth. Please also pray for our adult staff to pastor, play and pray with youth in a Spirit-filled way.

- Safe travels and Safety at camp

I look forward to posting an update next week!

Grace and Peace,
Elliot Ling