They climbed off the bus in Gainesville with bags in hand and smiles on their face. For many, this is their first mission trip. They look around for friendly faces trying to figure out which of these people are their teammates and if they recognize them from facebook or the team blog. Most are a bit nervous but really excited about what lies ahead….and so begins the first day of training camp.
For all the participants that attend an Ambassador trip (one month ages 15-18) and Real Life trip (one to three month 18-22) the first week is spent in Gainesville GA at the AIM headquarters where they receive training. Because these participants come from all over the country, much time is spent with team building.
The team building is accomplished through a number of activities. We have scheduled times for each team every night to spend getting to know each other, processing through the day, and sharing each others stories (we refer to these as timelines). All of the teams also participate in team building exercises. This year every team went through an obstacle course, which was timed and filled with many challenging obstacles that required the whole team to accomplish. There was also a spider’s web course. This is similar to an obstacle course. It is a course of strings that are strung between trees that each team must go through with out touching any of the string (very challenging). We also had other team builder type games. With each team builder the teams always worked on setting goals specific to the challenge and attitude goals. Many of the students after the week was over commented on how hard the team builders were, but instrumental in bring the team together.
Another focus of training camp is equipping each individual with ministry tools that will help them on the trip. We do this through training seminars that are both informative and interactive. We cover topics like children’s ministry, public speaking (sharing your God story), ministering cross culturally, listening prayer, relational evangelism, spiritual warfare, and practical ministry prep time. The teams are also trained in drimes. Drimes are musical dramas about the length of one song that involve drama, mime, and dance elements. The drimes all have a spiritual message that can be used to draw a crowed in order to share the gospel.
The final thing that we focus on at training camp is spiritual formation. We spend time making sure that we are sending out ministers of the gospel that are spiritually healthy or at the very least have begun the process of working towards spiritual health. During each of our evening sessions we tackle topics like boxing God in, letting Jesus care for your emotional bucket, surrender, and being sent out. During each of our training camps we saw many participants receive forgiveness, freedom and deliverance from the past. A number of the participants began to walk in their identity in Christ for the first time.
At the end of the trip much of the feedback in evaluations from participants stated that the training camp week played a significant part in their spiritual development and equipping them for the ministry that they were involved with while in their ministry country.
