A roundup published by the Evangelical Covenant Church in the United States has gathered four youth-ministry stories from across the denomination. The most striking comes from Newport Covenant Church in Bellevue, Washington, where a group of high-school students who belonged to no church programme emailed the youth pastor asking whether they could use the building for a worship night. They had already invited four other high schools to join them before they asked. Between sixty and eighty students eventually filled the sanctuary's wooden pews, most of them unchurched or connected only through Christian clubs on their school campuses.
Tre' Crume, the church's pastor of youth and families, said the students were the ones who initiated it, and that it challenged the stereotype of the Pacific Northwest as an entirely secular region. The evening had been scheduled to last two hours, but the students did not want to leave and began making up songs so that they could keep singing. One student shared a testimony and adults around the room prayed over the group. Crume has since been in contact with the adult sponsor of the school club to plan further gatherings. The Covenant is one of the historic free church denominations in North America.
The same roundup marks forty years of MUUUCE, the Northwest Conference's weekend gathering for middle-school and junior-high students, which began in 1985 when a youth pastor brought fifty young people from his own congregation and grew to 700 students from forty-seven churches by 1997. In August, 519 students and leaders from thirty churches met at Crossroads Covenant Church in Woodbury, Minnesota, under the theme "Found"; when the speaker invited them to follow Jesus, more than a third of those present stood up, and the group gave 1,261 dollars to a conference camp badly damaged by this summer's wildfires in the Boundary Waters. Two further items round out the collection: Thornapple Covenant Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has for more than twenty-five years paid students to work through a summer alongside nonprofit ministry partners in their own city, a programme begun in memory of a church member and family doctor who wanted young people to meet lives unlike their own; and David A. Washington, pastor of Kingdom Covenant Church on Chicago's South Side, saw his book on renewing urban youth ministry tie for first place in a national award for new books for youth workers.
Source: Evangelical Covenant Church / Covenant Companion — covchurch.org
