By Lisa Holmlund, Associate Pastor of Youth, Grace Community Covenant Church and Tim Anderson, Youth Pastor, Cascade Covenant Church
From Lisa:
Hey friends! Just wanted to write up a quick recap of our conference wide Sr. High Winter Camp, affectionately called The MUD retreat. We are so thankful to Cascades Camp and Conference center for being our hosts! This was our largest Sr. High retreat to date, with over 400 in attendance. We brought in Tara Hollingsworth from Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, MN to be our speaker. Kids loved her authenticity as she shared about how we were each created for a purpose and on purpose by a great God who loves us. Our theme was the Family Reunion… so imagine awkward family photos, the Family Feud game, and on the serious side, some time to process what family is to each of us. Tim Anderson from Cascades Covenant is an accomplished graffiti artist and led an art seminar for students. We had Mended Wings Ministries come and share native american worship dancing with us, we had hip hop dance artists and MLK speeches shared. As we are coming off of a CHIC year, the theme of UNITE was still in our minds. Our vision was to find a way for students to still grasp onto the idea of being united as the family of God even though we are SO different from each other. Our annual highlight is having the North Park University Worship team lead us in worship during the weekend. We are thankful to NPU for sending the team out to be with us! We have the dates saved for next year, Feb. 7 – 9, 2020, so put it on the calendar and plan on joining us next year!
From Tim:
MUD was an incredible weekend with incredible students and youth leaders! It was a privilege to connect and engage with hundreds of high school students, hear encouraging and real-life messages from Tara Hollingsworth, and worship together as one body from many churches. Our Pacific Northwest Conference youth leadership is so strong, with great relationships and genuine care for one another, that weekends like MUD become not only life-changing moments, but lasting memories made possible by the Holy Spirit. Thanks for sending your students and leaders to MUD, and we can’t wait for the next one!
Lisa and Tim served our MUD Planning team along with Jessica Palmer, from Cascades Camp, and Erik Cave from the Pacific Northwest Conference office.
[Click Here] to see the MUD 2019 Highlight Video