GOING DEEPER ON PONUI ISLAND

GOING DEEPER ON PONUI ISLAND NEVILLE BARTLEY | Youth Team Leader, SUNZ

Ponui Island has been the location of many successful camps, including one called Ponui Extreme which has been held during spring school holidays. However, 2019 brought a change. A new camp Going Deeper was birthed out of the foundations of the old Ponui Extreme.

Why did we change something sucessful you may be asking? Well, Ponui Extreme was originally intended for senior high school students looking to go deeper in their faith walk with God. However, that aim was not reflected by the camp name: Ponui Extreme seemed to reflect an extreme adventure on Ponui and not necessarily a camp aimed at deepening people’s faith walk. The last thing we want to do is entice people to camp with false expectations. As we talked about how to get across that the camp is designed to help senior high school students explore deeper with God and delve deeper into scripture, it seemed Going Deeper conveyed exactly what this camp is all about.

Why go deeper?

All of our high school camps include great Bible engagement, but we have realised that some campers really want an opportunity to spend even more in-depth time exploring their faith. And so we planned a camp with extra opportunities to connect with scripture and engage with its message to us. If students came together with this common aim, we hoped that they would gel together and feel comfortable to go deeper and open up more about faith issues. So what was the outcome?

What happened?

An amazing group of senior high school students came to 2019 Going Deeper ready to go deeper in everything. They went hard-out with the activities. We couldn’t hold them back when it came time to do a service project on the farm — in fact, they even went back and did more on the farm during their free time. When it was time to engage with scripture and faith issues, we were not dissapointed either. They were very open, asked lots of questions and continued many discussions beyond the designated engagement times. Spending time with these students really made us realise that we have some amazing followers of Christ who, on a daily basis, are out there representing Christ in our schools. I think the things I liked most

DEEPER

about the group were its diversity and the campers’ ability to push back and challenge concepts and ideas, so that they could go away with a robust faith at the end of it all. We asked campers what they had learnt, here is what a few had to say.

‘How to listen to God. Which I loved learning about as I haven’t really been taught that.’

‘How to pray and my possible gifts. Now that I know my possible gifts I am more confident in using them.’

‘Because of the studies on camp I have decided to get baptised. I cannot imagine living my life without God, I have been motivated to start a new life with Him…’ ‘How necessary it is to listen to God rather than just talk, this has helped me to get closer to Him.’ These young men and women came to camp wanting to ‘Go Deeper’ with God, and that’s truly what they did.

The next Going Deeper camp planned for the end of term 3 and we hope there will be more camps like this in the future. Keep an eye out for them!

THE CAMP IS " DESIGNED TO HELP SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS EXPLORE DEEPER WITH GOD AND DELVE DEEPER INTO SCRIPTURE