August 2022: Lifelong Lessons from Summers at Learn & ServeEditor’s Note: Each month, we mail an article with our contribution statements to the previous month’s donors. This month, we are sharing two articles written by youth leaders that brought their groups to SIFAT this summer. One has attended Learn & Serve for years, while the other had her first experience alongside her students. Both believe in this program and its valuable lessons for youth and adults. Thank you for supporting SIFAT and our programs both here in Alabama and internationally! Click here to download a PDF version. Written by Clinton Wheeler, Youth Minister, Cookeville FUMC (Tenn.) SIFAT has been a part of my life for a long time. I came to my first Learn & Serve Summer Experience when I was in middle school. I remember walking across the bridge one morning and saying to myself, “I don’t ever want this feeling to end.” For the first time, I heard God’s voice telling me that I was called to youth ministry and that this is what he has in store for me. The next night, I accepted Christ as my savior and have been involved with youth and SIFAT ever since.  Each day during our L&S Summer Experience, participants have small group discussions and time with their youth groups to talk about their experiences and explore the week’s theme. Learn & Serve: Goodbye Summer!As summer ends and school is starting back, Learn & Serve (L&S) would like to thank all of our participants for making L&S Summer Experience 2013 such an amazing program! During our seven sessions, we had 393 participants from eight states across the southeast and midwest.
 During each of the seven week-long sessions of Learn & Serve summer experience, youth and their leaders took over the SIFAT campus. When the final groups left, our staff immediately felt like something was wrong…it was too quiet! Learn & Serve: “48: A Slum Experience” Retreat!January 19-21, 2013, eighty participants and thirty-four staff stepped into the life of over one billion people on the planet at “48: A Slum Experience”. This intense retreat allows high school participants, adult leaders, and college-aged staff to experience life in an urban slum environment.  Participants and staff of the 2013 “48: A Slum Experience” retreat celebrate gaining a new awareness of slum life around the world. Learn & Serve: New Retreat Programs Now Offered!Learn & Serve is excited to announce two new programming options for retreats! To continue to provide a diverse range of experiences connecting our participants to our brothers and sisters around the world, Learn & Serve has begun offering participants the opportunity to participate in a Refugee Camp Overnight and an Urban Slum Prayer Experience. Learn & Serve: Summer 2012 Worship, from Abstract to ConcreteLearn & Serve Summer 2013 Worship Leader Becca Griffin tells her perspective on how worship at Learn & Serve this past summer provided a bridge for students between concrete and abstract expressions of faith:
Many of the words that are used in singing/teaching/talking about faith tend to be abstract and make it difficult for youth to connect. There is no more lack of desire or devotion for them than anyone else, but a lack of concrete example when it comes to living out the faith that they sing about/learn about/profess. Perhaps connecting the ideas of faith with reality is not a struggle for youth alone, but abstract concepts like love, justice, and following Christ, when only spoken about and not experienced or lived out, make it hard for youth to really learn, practice, or live out those things that they affirm, or have been taught in word to do as Christians.  Learn & Serve students singing in worship at SIFAT’s Quonset Hut. |
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