Fall 2009

Youth Campers Joined in "Journey towards Jubilee"

We’re on the road to Jubilee; come join us on the journey home." That refrain from an often-sung song this past summer reflects both the adventure and the deeper directions implicit in the Christikon life experienced and shaped by the 249 young people ages 10-18 who joined our 21 summer staff people at camp.

Building upon themes of the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25) and its re-casting as "the year of the Lord’s favor" in Isaiah 61 and Jesus’ inaugural address in Luke 4, the 2009 Christikon program led campers into exploring the way this ancient vision calls forth our faith, touching down in the challenges and possibilities of our life and our life together in this world.

Ministry with young people makes up the bulk of the Christikon program, comprising over three-fourths of user-days at camp.

In 2009 the on-site residential programs attracted over two-thirds of our youth campers. Sessions included the half-week Pathfinders camp for fifth- and sixth-graders, designed as a "first taste" of the Christikon life, and week-long sessions which added an overnight away from camp, for grades 6-8 (Prospectors) and high school folks (Trailblazers.)

During one of the Prospectors camps, Christikon also again offered its Sojourners Camp at no cost to youth ages 11-13 who face special life challenges. Christikon staff were joined by Sojourners coordinators Eric Thorson (pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran in Billings) and Julie Donald (who teaches in the Billings school system), along with former staff person Anne Christ. Together they sought to share the

Christikon life in sensitive and situation-appropriate ways with twenty-one at-risk kids who had been referred to us by social service agencies, mental health centers, and school counselors.

Some high school youth also came to participate in Christikon’s back country trails programs, journeying into some of most lovely mountain wilderness this world

has to offer, and journeying also more deeply into the life faith, discovering the challenges and the joys of life together at the top of the world.

Most trails campers last summer took part in regular Mountaineers backpack groups. But we also hosted a group of CreationCare campers, who worked with the Forest Service to build trail-marking rock cairns and do clean-up and rehabilitation in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

Kids come to Christikon for all sorts of reasons: They come to have fun; they come to experience the outdoors, to find adventure; they come to get away from a life that gets boring or oppressive; they come because their parents make them, or because their friends are going; they come to meet girls, or guys; they come for a hundred other reasons.

And they come with all sorts of things. Besides their sleeping bags and hiking shoes and suitcases often stuffed with too much, they bring with them their fears and their failings, their hormones and their hurts and their hopes, their doubts and their dreams.

They come needing to find something more of themselves — an expansion of who they are, in a setting that helps them explore who they really are, and who they’re becoming.

They come longing for a deeper sense of belonging: belonging to others, belonging to something greater.

Sometimes they even come hoping to catch a glimpse of God’s hand in their lives, even as they doubt the possibility of it.

Part of our life together at Christikon is trying to open eyes more widely, so folks can better see what God is doing with us, where our Lord is headed with us. We seek to move towards a deeper experience and awareness of Christian community, where all are welcome, where individual and community can grow together with a sense of proportion and balance.

With trained staff people and wilderness experience and worship and games and Quiet Time and service projects and a whole lot more, we try to model Christian character as we face this world’s hungers and hopes. We seek out fitting shapes for faith’s witness in the world. We explore the biblical story together, listening for God’s Word to us.

Together we try to make sense of faith’s claim that Christ comes to each of us, and also to all of us together, because faith is something none of us can really

do just on our own. We seek to find ways where hopes and dreams and fears and desires come together with who we think

we maybe are, and who we think we maybe might become in Jesus Christ.

We seek to grow in the way we see what’s going on in this world....so we find ourselves grasped by a vision of the world around us not simply as Nature, but as Creation — as the gift of the One in whom we live and move and have our being.... so we can see ourselves as God’s own beloved sons and daughters... so we can see each other as those for whom Christ died, as those whose very lives and destiny are tied up with ours, as those with whom we are called to follow our Lord into a life of service in a world that sits in darkness and the shadow of death.

And we discover again and again that lives are touched and shaped — sometimes even transformed—by it all.

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