The last few years, we have had a great team of young adults leading our youth program. However, since their lives have gotten busy and some have moved away from Willoughby Church, the youth have been left kind of hanging. This year began with an attempt to meet as two small groups, a younger and older group. It sounded like it was going to be a super fun year and we were all really excited. After meeting once, nothing much happened. It was hard to continue because there just weren’t enough leaders. It was going nowhere, so I decided to ask what was up and if I was allowed to start planning some things for us as a group to do. My Mom, Julia Ravensbergen and Chris & Jay Versluis sat down and planned a few months’ worth of weekly “meetings”. These involve a series of activities, bible studies, “hangouts” and more. I was super excited to start up the youth program with this group of adults and plan things that we thought each kid would enjoy doing. Since then we have met around six times, had numbers of up to 25 kids (numbers bigger than previous years), and had kids asking to meet up more times than we planned. I have organized the events for the grades 10-12 group, as well as when we meet as a large group, with great help from Julia and my Mom. Ben Bouwman has been awesome and has been coming to every event for my age group, to make sure we stay safe and have TONS of fun. The younger group is led by Jason & Chris Versluis, which has been amazing and is turning out quite well. Altogether this year has started looking like fun again and from what I’ve heard the others are pretty stoked as well.
By Savannah Tuininga