Off and running

Hey everyone,

Welcome back to iNFUSE 3's blog glad you could join us!  Well we have been here in Drayton Valley almost 4 weeks now and things here are going just great.

Mike and Lisa talking about Ontario's Bagged Milk

So far we have had two Reach nights (our Junior High Youth Group) our first one was and ice cream scavenger hunt where the youth were given clues and the had to solve the clue in order to find the next one and the prize for the teams were different types of toppings for their ice cream. Our second reach night we took them for Slurpee's at 7-eleven, and then had small group at the church and then played line tag with them.
We also had our first Revive Night (our High school youth Group) for that we had them make pizza either really good or really disgusting  (that was up to them)but the catch was that when they were done we sat them at a table and they had to switch half of their pizza with the person to their right so there were some very funny reactions.

This past Saturday we kicked off our Young Adults Program with lunch at Boston Pizza.

Myself and Jillian explaining the Ice Cream Scavenger Hunt

We are also having our second Revive Night and will be talking to the student about the importance of Prayer in their life, so we are all very excited for that.

One of our team days we were able to see a real buffalo stampede which was super awesome to see and kind of scary at the same time
Anyways that is all for us today,


God Bless,
iNFUSE 3,Drayton Valley,AB
"The spirit of Humility is sweeter than honey, and those who Nourish themselves with this honey produce sweet fruit"
-St.Anthony of Padua

Hello from iN2!

        

Hello! A few introductions, we are NET Canada iNFUSE team 2, a parish team at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church (STM) in Edmonton Alberta. There are seven of us, (from the picture above) starting top left and going clockwise: Joseph from British Columbia, Josh B from Ontario, Josh H from New Brunswick, Brooke from Ontario, Samantha from Trinidad, Jessica from Prince Edward Island and Joanna from England.

After a five day road trip westward through four provinces we arrived Saint Thomas More Parish. Since then we have been introduced to the office and parish at the five weekend masses. STM is super excited for youth ministry, weather its starting the youth mass a month before we even arrived, forcing the parish organizers to cut off registration for host homes having already tons of extra homes for our eight month stay, or already starting to gather names for volunteers. Needless to say we as a team are super excited to work with everyone in Edmonton.

We just did our first series of youth nights and have visited the schools, more on that to come soon :)

God is Good!

This week we had our second senior high youth group and the theme was «Qui croit, pourquoi?» (Who believes, why?). Kristen shared with the youth that it is reasonable to believe in God using an analogy with a can of peas, explaining that just as it is reasonable to believe that there will be peas in the can once she opens it because other people have told her that they've bought canned peas before and found and there were indeed peas inside, it is also reasonable to believe that God exists because other people such as martyrs have testified to the existence of God even when all they needed to do to save their lives was renounce their faith. She also explained to them that while we can’t definitively prove God’s existence, no one can definitively disprove God’s existence either. The youth loved it and got a lot out of it.

We also had 8 new students come out to join their friends who came out last time! It was crazy to see the courage our youth have to talk about youth group with their friends and invite them out. Some of the new students seemed unsure about things and the event in the beginning but by the end of the night they were all having fun and said they’d come back night time. A big highlight for many of them was the prayer time which is AWESOME!

We played Chaos to start the night off!

God is doing so many amazing things through us this year already and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us!

Katelyn Sutton

Les Équipes

Continually Amazed!

This weekend we had our very first Youth Mass! It was the first time the youth were offered a Mass on a Sunday evening that was really directed at them; it included contemporary music led by our team and we were able to recruit youth to do the readings and altar serve. We were really amazed to see that about 75 people came out, a lot of them were families, and about a third of them were youth! It was a huge success for our first one and we can’t wait to see what happens next month.   

We also got some really exciting news from one of the high schools in our region. Pio and Teresa went and met with one of the principals this week just to introduce themselves; they spoke with one of our contact people and they agreed not to ask for anything because it’s not a Catholic school (in fact, there are no public Catholic schools in Québec). The principal was very open to NET when they went however, and we were given permission to advertise our events in the school and to come and eat lunch with the students once a week! We couldn't believe it and we feel so blessed to have this amazing and unique opportunity!

Also this week, on team day, the ladies baked an apple crisp the guys!

God bless,

Katelyn Sutton

Les Équipes blogger  

Food.

Hello Everyone! I hope you’ve been having a great week so far! This is Shaina again; from iNFUSE 1 in Montreal, bringing you a little update on what we’ve been up to. We’ve been regularly attending the daily and weekend Masses at St. Ignatius in order to meet more people and build relationships with the community in the parish.



Our visit to St. Joseph's Oratory. Featuring Saint Brother Andre!



Our team went to our first Almighties youth group night! Since it was our first time there, we wanted to meet the youth involved so we could start building relationships with them, and also to observe the layout of the night so that we would be better able to help in any way the leaders may need us to in the future. It was revealed that the theme of the month for The Almighties is…Food! The night included: a discussion with True or False statements on food consumption and waste in the world, a video with statistics on the same topic, and an activity in which we had to split ourselves up into different continents, based on their populations, and estimate how many hotdogs each continent would get based on food distribution in the world today. For example, Asia had 15 people but only had 4 hotdogs to share and North America had 2 people, but had 10 hotdogs to share.

This night was very eye-opening for the youth and it got them thinking about the value our culture places on food. Some were upset to discover that food is not easily accessible for everyone or distributed evenly throughout the world.

 Also, we had lunch with Bishop Thomas Dowd and attended the wedding of a couple that we met our first day in Montreal! It was so beautiful!

God Bless,

Shaina Wreede

iNFUSE One - Montreal, QC 

Expect Nothing Less than Miracles

Hey Everyone,

We have been here now for about two weeks and we have been just loving it.  The people here have been so loving and welcoming, they have made the transition really easy.  This Friday we will be having our first Reach night (our Jr.High Youth Group) which we are really excited about.

Our First Sunday here the parish community held a potluck lunch for us, which gave us a chance to meet some really great people in the community, during which we performed a song for them ("Build Your Kingdom here" By Rend Collective Experiment to be precise). After the potluck we were given the opportunity to participate in the Life Chain here in Drayton Valley, it was such an amazing opportunity to pray and stand up for the rights of the unborn.

On the Wednesday we went to the High School here called Holy Trinity Academy and had our Popcorn Survey, it was so much fun just getting to know the youth here and what there Favorite Breakfast Cereal is and which writing Utensil the prefer.
I also had the opportunity to speak with a student who shared with me that he was Baptist but was going to the Catholic High School because he felt that it held much of the same beliefs he did and I then invited him to come check out our High School Youth Group Revive, he was really open with me and he told me that while most high schools tend to create bullies, that this school was different and from what he could see everybody in some shape or form respect each other so I am really looking forward and hoping to see if this is true which I believe it is.

We are all very much excited to really jump into Ministry with our Reach and Revive Kick-off Events coming up so look out for our next Blog with updates from those events.


From all of us here, God Bless,
Jonathon-iNFUSE 3
Drayton Valley, AB

Guys...It's Started!

One of the many blessings of working with 12 parishes is that we have the opportunity to attend many Masses. Two of the parishes have Mass Saturday nights so half our team attends Mass at St. George and the other half attends Mass at l’Assomption. We are also hoping to be present in every parish during the month of October to introduce NET a little bit so every Sunday we split into three groups in order to attend three different Masses! It’s been really great so far to get to see the parishes and familiarise ourselves a bit in our new home.

Our events also started this week! Our first event was a sports night Wednesday night and we had about 17 youth come out to play Ultimate Frisbee with us in St. Côme. We played Frisbee for about an hour with them and then we all ate our bagged suppers together and hung out for another hour or so. The weather was great that day and it was really nice to have the opportunity to just hang out with the youth here and get to know them a little bit.

Friday night was our first night for the senior youth group and we played ‘Minute To Win It’, which is a game that consists of different challenges to be completed within a 60 second time limit. Some of the challenges were harder than others, and some were just plain wacky, such as moving an Oreo from their foreheads to their mouths using only the muscles in their faces. We had a great turnout for the first night and everyone had lots of fun!

We also got to celebrate Paul’s ‘Unbirthday’ this week! We spent the day Thursday in Old Québec and had a photo scavenger hunt that was super fun and exciting!

Until next time,

Katelyn Sutton, Les Équipes Blogger