Te Mapua Camp, Easter Break Week 2

For the second week of Easter break, I volunteered as a counsellor at Te Mapua. This camp had a very different vision behind it than any other AmyBoss has ever run. This time, the camp, instead of being an evangelical thing, had the purpose of discipleship. The fifty campers were selected by the Te Mapua staff from their ‘God’s Warriors’ kids (a youth group that meets every Tuesday night) who have professed Jesus to be their saviour and were demonstrating a hunger to go deeper in their faith. This meant that the camp was much more relaxed because the staff knew all the kids and the kids knew the staff and knew the Te Mapua standards from attending God’s Warriors.

We got to talk to the kids about the role of the Holy Spirit in their lives, we got in depth into worship and what it is and what it means, and we had sessions on how to approach the Bible. It was really neat to see the kids getting excited about reading their Bibles and worshiping God.

God taught me one really cool thing through one of the kids at camp, and that is that these kids are capable of understanding so much more than we give them credit for. So often in kids ministries, I try to dumb down the content and bring it down to their level when in fact, they are perfectly capable of understanding complex spiritual topics. The only way material needs to be ‘dumbed down’ is the time since kids can sit and concentrate for much shorter periods of time than adults.

Anyway, there was this one girl there who was the same age as my sister, had the same name as my sister, looked like my sister, and even had similar hobbies and interests to my sister. Because she reminded me so much of my sister, I was able to talk to her like I would my sister and that made me realise that I could do that for all the kids there.

The last evening of camp, a bunch of the kids’ parents and neighbours came out and the kids presented the gospel to them through dance, testimony, ‘wordless book’ beads, and worship. The kids even led their parents in a prayer of salvation.

As is the norm for Te Mapua camps, all the leaders spent the night after camp at AmyBoss’ house for debrief. In the morning, since it was one of the leader’s birthday, we celebrated by having chocolate cake and left over cooking (from camp) for breakfast.

I met up with Jonas and Michael and later Colin at Sheryl’s family’s house and we all drove in a very full car) back to Geraldine on Sunday, thus concluding break!