AGM Report for 2022
I’m excited to get the chance to update you on some of the really great things that have been happening in our youth ministry here at Hillcrest. God has been moving powerfully and continues to give us fresh ideas and inspiration.
2022 had a graduation event with nine youth graduates, we had four of our students get baptized over the summer, and took two retreat weekends out to Whispering Pines Camp. We were also able to hire on Levi Cochrane part-time as our Youth Coordinator. Levi adds so much to what we do by using his God-given talents for promotions, his understanding of tech & worship, and his heart for God.
Over the Summer many of our teens spent time out at Whispering Pines Camp. When they came back, they had a fresh hunger for God, and they had many questions about their faith. As we prayed about it, we sensed that God was asking us to focus more on helping our teens to have a deeper understanding of Him. If teenagers can learn difficult subjects in school, they can handle deeper theology at church. This year we’ve discussed topics like sanctification, the problem of sin, and where the church as we know it came from. We’ve also helped students to discover their spiritual gifts. One of the things I noticed about our students is that many of them lacked confidence in reading and understanding their Bibles, so, for the first semester, we took the last Tuesday of each month, and we did a SOAP study instead of a sermon time. In their small groups, teens would read a section of scripture and then write down verses that stood out to them, they’d observe what the scripture says, they’d work on applying it to their lives and then spend time in prayer (Scripture, Observation, Application and Prayer). I’m thrilled to report that they loved these experiences and want more of them.
Friday nights have also changed. Over the summer, our Medicine Hat and area youth pastors decided to start meeting together monthly for a time of encouragement. We have also started running monthly city-wide youth events together, called YXH. The heart behind it is to help our students grow in their faith, to not compete with each other, and to help students to see who else is a Christian in their schools. These events have been growing and we have seen many students added to our youth group who hadn’t been attending church previously. They were simply invited by a friend to something awesome, they liked it, and wanted to come back. Each month it’s hosted at a different church and the youth pastors take turns preaching. Besides that, we still do our regular youth events here at the church. Some of our favourite events included the fry run (this was a great outreach event where students invited friends, we rented busses and drove around town trying out French fries), diamond smugglers, karaoke & chill, and our red-carpet Christmas gala. Each of these events saw our teens bringing out their friends who have never been to church before, and their friends have been coming back. Praise God! Our youth ministry has also had the opportunity to spend time with our Legacy Adults this past year. We had the Hunger Games event (formally known as seniors pie and games night) where many teens even came the night before the event to help make desserts. Our students also had the opportunity to serve at the Legacy Christmas banquet.
One of my favourite changes has been the youth room on Sunday mornings. We had previously had the youth room open for the 10:00 and 11:20 services, but we really desire to see our teens attending services and growing in their faith. Though we’d had the youth room open for both services in the hopes that they would attend a service during one of those times, most weren’t taking that opportunity. With our push towards theology and challenging our students to grow, we’ve been opening the youth room for the 10:00 service time only and encouraging them to sit with us during the 11:20 service. At first, we only saw a couple of students attend, but now we have an entire pew filled with them and they’re loving what they’re learning from Pastor Steve’s sermons. It’s great to see teens in the services and making this a regular part of their lives. My hope is that we can continue to build this, and our teens will make attending church services a part of their lives for the rest of their lives.
On behalf of our amazing youth team, we hope that you catch our excitement as you’ve read this report. God is doing a new thing in youth ministries, and we are excited to continue to follow Him into what He has in store for us next.
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