And we're off!!!

Hey there! Tim here, Encounter One's blogger for the year!

Man, has it been a crazy week and a half. We've done nine retreats already all around Toronto. The week and a half may have been crazy but it was also amazing. Our youngest crowd was grade seven and our oldest crowd so far was grade tens. I know we've hardly even started the year, but just seeing how God's been working through the youth is amazing.

The retreats have been running really smoothly. The youth are having a great time and God's definitely been busy at work with them to say the least. Seeing so much change in such young people in only six hours is really inspiring. One thing we learned pretty fast is that while these youth may be learning a lot from us, we learn even more from them. Having done a lot of volunteer work in the past, we all know how great it feels to do good, but nothing compares to the feeling of directly experiencing God at work in the retreatants.

We got to stay in Peterborough for four nights last week, which was amazing. Peterborough really brought us closer together as brothers and sisters on our team as we had some funny mishaps, but we stayed united as a team throughout all of it. For example, one of our vehicles got lost in downtown Toronto on the 401 highway (named the busiest highway in North America) during rush hour traffic on a Friday. Or when we celebrated Rachel's birthday, we hid her cake in the oven...then our host dad went to cook supper and preheated the oven...resulting in a charred black cake...
But while we had some mishaps, we're completing our mission of contacting the youth of Canada and bringing them to Jesus as best as we can and that's what's important.

Encounter 1

Beginnings of Youth Ministry

Last week kicked off our junior and senior high youth groups, "Compass" and "Cornerstone". The nights were great, bringing out more than  40 youth in total. We had lots of fun with games, music and getting to know the youth!

Just seeing God working in the lives of these youth has been incredible, their love for God, intelligence and openness was astounding.
While Jessica was giving her testimony on how trying to please her friends and make them happy just drained her and left her empty searching for God, a young woman said "That's me!"

God is working! Praise be Jesus Christ!

iNFUSE2, Saint Thomas More Parish

Edmonton Alberta

Another Week of Firsts!

We had an All Saints party for all ages on October 31! It was a great opportunity to involve the younger youth that we don’t often get a chance to work with. It was also the first time any of us had ever organized an All Saints party! We had different stations with different carnival-style games with candy for prizes and caramel apples too! Later in the evening we did a skit and played a big game of Drop the Keys and finished off the night with a litany of the saints. We had lots of youth and some younger families come out and it was a super fun night!

 

Another awesome experience this week was leading our first ever Adoration night! Paul shared a little bit what Adoration is, then I shared my testimony, and Kristen and the band led music. Matt also led a really great reflection. It was amazing to see how many of our youth came out to spend some time with Jesus. It was also really great to see some of the older parishioners that we don’t get to have contact with on a regular basis come out. 

God bless!

Katelyn Sutton, Les Équipes NET blogger

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 :)