Guest Post from Michael Bayne / Why we are doing our own Middle School Camp

This is a guest post from Michael Bayne!! (for more info on him go HERE) Michael is the family pastor at a church in clarksville called Grace Community. If you do not follow this dude, you need to! i have learned a ton from him and count it an honor to be his friend.

When i first started out here in Clarksville and was processing how to get a student ministry started me and Michael sat down and had a crazy idea. Lets do one student ministry at 2 locations. So every week we teach the same things and we create the same kind of environment! It has been amazing. 


We also do our big events together (i.e. camps, retreats) and this summer we have decided to put on our own Middle School Camp. Michael wrote a post on so rather than write my own i stole his. HA
5 reasons we are doing our own Middle School Camp

1. We can reach more middle school students if we are closer to our city >> many middle school students are so insecure they don't like the idea of being far away from home. I know, I don't understand that either but since we an hour away we are close enough to calm much of that fear for teens and parents. Because it cost less and it is closer we can reach more middle school students.
2. Middle School students need an environment crafted to grab their attention, hearts, and minds >> this is the driving force for our team! We know middle school students need a week optimized for them and no camp we partner with can do that since it has middle and high school students. We get to create a program that impacts middle school kids where they are at!
3. We have the chance to develop high school and college leaders >>this just creates another environment to develop leaders and empower high school and college students
4. We can enforce our strategy on the camp level like we do in our weekly environment >> since we are crafting the experience we can connect what happens all year with our strategy with what goes down at camp. This synchronization pays off in the end.
5. We can better partner with parents because we are crafting the experience >> parents get to drop their middle school student off at camp and we are going to have a cookout for them...we know what is going to happen each night on stage so we can inform them and invite them to pray with us as the week moves and engage their teen after camp...these are just 2 ways we feel we will be able to partner with parents through our middle school camp.