One of my biggest joys in life, is our youth.  I have been here in Banska Bystrica for 5 1/2 years and have seen our youth grow from two young people in our church, to a combined youth program of around 50 teens. We are in a place, where we have many new believers in all our programs.  These are young people who don’t have a presupposition of what a youth group should look like.  We are therefore able to mold what the youth group will look like.  This fall I am excited, because our theme in both Fusion and our Youth Group is outreach and the gospel.  Many of our students cross over between each ministry.  We have been casting the vision that the youth group is the place to grow in Christ and Fusion is a tool to reach out to non-believers.

The young people, in fusion, have a challenge to bring 20 new teens to Fusion before the end of the year.  So far, we are at 5 new students!  One of our boys, who has learned photography at fusion, is now working part time at the newspaper as a photographer in our city.  This is amazing in itself, but he also arranged for an advertisement in the newspaper!  Check out my blog about Peto, to learn more about him.

In our youth group, we are studying the gospel, each week we are talking through an element of the gospel and making sure we understand it well.  The students set a goal to go as a group out into the community and share the gospel in December.  The fun thing about this, is that it comes from the youth.  We asked them at the beginning of the year: What would you like to do as a group? What do you want to learn?  What goal should we set for our group? They had a number of answers, but the main answers were: We want to share the gospel with other youth.  We want to learn how to share the gospel.  We want our goal to be that our group is known as a place full of love.  They actually have challenged themselves to this!  How neat that this come from the youth and not the leadership!