Recently the Japan Presbytery had a youth camp held at Shiawase no Mura, a camp ground / facility that the church often uses for events. We had 5 high-school /college students, plus 6 adults, and 8 younger children attend.
Below are some pictures of the camp facility. It’s quite large with open areas that we used for sports, fireworks for the kids, the food court, lecture halls and etc.
The conference theme was “Learning about human relationships from the Bible” and was broken into 4 lectures across 3 days. Below is a picture of one of the evening studies where students reviewed the lecture material for that day.
The points of that particular lecture were
- Being satisfied by God’s love.
- Not fearing man.
- Loving your neighbor (rejoicing and seeking their well-being)
- Forgiving your neighbor.
- Waiting for our Hope.
- Understanding the call (“for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” Roman’s 13:8).
The lectures and discussion time with the high-school / college students was great and the students were quite open with their questions which was really encouraging to see. But along with the studies we also had great recreation time and fellowship opportunities, and that was mixed with the younger 8 children (ages 1-13). The picture below may be hard to see, but it’s the fireworks that we did for the younger children attending (and the older students also seemed to enjoy it as well.)
The church also has a youth group meeting once a month which consists of most of the same students shown in the image above. The camp is only held once a year, but it’s a really great time to go more in depth about the students personal faith, and along with that the free time is a great blessing as well so that the students and adults can get to know each other better.
Thanks to Benaiah Hovee for putting together this article. Benaiah grew up in Indiana at Southside RPC but went to Japan on the RP short term mission trips starting 2012. Eventually he transferred his membership and moved to Japan in 2018 where he and his wife Izumi Hovee currently attend the Mukonoso congregation.
