Yesterday I got back from a weekend retreat south of Kansas City that YouthFront puts on twice a year. It’s called the Altar. This three-day retreat for youth was… well amazing. From the moment we drove onto the campground to the moment we left every corner, every nook & cranny of the 600 acre camp wispered “come and pray to the Lord.”

While YouthFront’s camp has all the “campy” stuff you’d expect for a year-round youth & retreat camp (a lake, canoes, a big sports field, etc.) what set it apart was the intentionality of creating sacred spaces all over the camp for retreatants to pray and draw close to the Lord. What made it even better was the intentionality of conveying a sense of sacredness in places such as the chapel, where once loud students became silent when they walked into a dark candle-lit room with blue pillars of light that told us visually, this is holy space. At the north end of the campground there was a huge prayer labryinth carved out of a shoulder-high field of wild grass. Prayer at the altar was not merely a “close your eyes and sit” kind of prayer, but the sacred spaces called us to pray as we walked, pray as you create art in the prayer tent, pray as you walk the path of the stations of the cross.

That alone would have made youthfront’s campground stand apart in my experience at Christian camps (and I’ve been around). But what made this weekend particularly special and might I add, Christian, was the focus on the poor. The theme of the weekend was God’s special love for the poor and our response to them. Wow. For some reason this crucial revolutionary part of the Christian faith is seldom passed down to our youth (at least in my experience), or if it is, we spiritualize it so that God doesn’t really love the poor that way, God doesn’t have a bias towards the downtrodden and oppressed, this is just to show that… whatever, insert spirtualized lesson here. Not this weekend. When we talked about the poor, we talked about real issues that the poor face. For instance, Friday night during our worship gathering as we sang quite possibly one of the best worship songs I’ve ever heard (Words to Build a Life On, apparenly by someone from Jacob’s Well), there were images of the victims of Hurricane Katrina on the screen. Interrupting these images were some disturbing facts like:On Sept. 8, President Bush issued an executive order suspending the application of the Davis-Bacon Act in the hurricane ravaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The law requires federal contractors to pay workers the average or “prevailing” regional wage for public construction projects. The act’s suspension allows contractors to pay as little as $5.15 an hour – the current federal minimum wage – for these projects. Wow. Well that might just ruffle some feathers out there. Of course it does, and so does the gospel of Jesus, the good news to the poor. But so often we don’t want to hear the good news to the poor because it is judgement on us, the rich. So for one, it was refreshing to talk about the poor and really talk about it, not skirt around the issue where we all get to stay clean and comfortable. And Hallelujah that this is what we’re teaching our youth that faith in Christ is. This is the meaty, revolutionary, life-changing gospel that they want, not the purpose driven, well-marketed gospel of their parents generation.

Built into our time of focusing on the marginalized were several conversations and a film viewing. The film we watched was a documentary called Invisible Children. Wow, that film blew my mind, and better still called my teens to action. We had several conversations about poverty. One that I joined was based around the question “Why are the poor poor?” The other was based on the question “Can we be Christians and ignore the poor?” Without getting into it all, I’ll just say that these were great conversations and brought to the forefront a lot of issues that many youths were just unaware of, but now want to be involved in following Jesus and cooperating with God in the redemptive restoration of creation by blessing the poor and working to make unjust systems more just. So this was a youth retreat… wow. I’m really stoked about the vision that Mike King and the leadership at youthfront have for youth ministry.