Our new summer catalog is here. And because we love trees, we won’t be printing it and putting it in the mail. It’s deliveried to you online for you to flip through, mark products, and jump right over to SimplyYouthMinistry.com to see the latest resources and releases. Be sure to check out page 3 to see the top secrect project we’ve been working on.

Click HERE to read the catalog.

Here are the winners of our Mission Trip Stories:

Lee Porter

Several years ago our group took a trip to work in inner city ministries in Dallas, TX. We worked in benevolence thrift shops, food pantries, cleaned up a former crack house to be used as a rehabilitation/transitional house. Our practice has always been that we begin every phase of our trip with prayer. We had a great trip, God truly blessed and challenged all of us. On our way back to Indiana, we headed out and were about 2 hours on the road when the group began to be hungry. We exited into a small town and drove the main road and found no acceptable places to eat…not even fast food. Giving up on our search, we pulled into a church parking lot to turn around. We pulled up to the stop sign, getting ready to turn left to head back to the interstate. Just as I stopped, I looked up to see a pickup flying down the road…no problem, I was stopped. At the last second, the truck decided to turn on the street where we were sitting. I saw the ladies’ eyes very clearly and at that second decided the next eyes I would be seeing would be Jesus’. I screamed to the teens and my wife to hold on. The lady had not slowed at all to make the turn, she cranked the wheel with all she had, I gunned the van and wheeled to the right. Her bumper scarred the plastic cover on our bumper and she continued turning too hard and rammed her truck into a tree in a yard across from the church building. Long story short, she was running from an abusive husband and due to the wreck, the police and protective services got involved…she and her daughter did not suffer any injuries from the wreck. No one in our church van was injured. After the police took statements from all of us, one of the girls came up to me and lovingly put her arm around us and said, “God took care of us, but we forgot to pray before we left…I don’t think we should forget anymore.” To the best of my memory, we have never forgotten again…even when we are just going out to eat or across town. Maybe our prayer account had a few unused credits and God cashed them in for us that day. Praise God for his angels watching over us.

Matthew McNutt

On my last mission trip I took a team to Uganda! One of the best parts was watching all the Americans get used to the outhouses. Somehow, one of the team members managed to drop his cell phone into the outhouse pit (seriously? how did he manage to do that???). There it was, 20 feet down, lighting up and ringing off and on the whole time we were there until the batteries died! The best was when it would go off while someone was on the seat.

Tony Richmond

We took our high schoolers to work with the Native American community in Albuquerque, NM. One of our junior girls was hanging out with some children at the block party that we were doing in the community. She began making one of the “evangelism” bracelets (the ones with the colored beads for explaining the gospel) with one of the little girls. As they interacted and our student explained the gospel to the little girl the little girl expressed her desire to accept Jesus as her own personal Savior. Our student answered her questions and the little girl went on to receive Jesus Christ. As the two of them finished up, our student asked the little girl if her parents were at the block party. The little girl said that they were so off they went to find her parents. As they found the girl’s parents, her father was talking with one of our adult volunteers. They found out that her father had just accepted Jesus Christ as his own personal savior with our adult volunteer. What an incredible way that the Lord worked in that family’s life! The little girl and her father both accepted Jesus as their personal Savior at the same time, in different places of the block party, with different people. Praise the Lord that he allowed us to experience this awesome movement of the Holy Spirit!

A solid, hands-on devotional for your students to dig into. Download the sample and check it out.