Super Summer impacts adult volunteers_71105

Posted: 7/08/05

Super Summer impacts adult volunteers

By Mike Midkiff

East Texas Baptist University

MARSHALL–For more than 30 years, Texas Baptist churches have sent their young people to weeklong Super Summer camps for leadership training and times of inspiration. But adult volunteers who give up vacation time to work in Super Summer insist they experience the same kind of spiritual renewal.

Amy Broom, a first grade teacher in Hardin and the volunteer youth director at First Baptist Church in Daisetta, served at two sessions held at East Texas Baptist University in Marshall. The Baptist General Convention of Texas Center for Strategic Evangelism sponsored four one-week sessions of Super Summer–two at ETBU and two at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene.

Dusty Kinslow (left) is expecting her first child, but wanted to work at the camp. Amy Broom (right), volunteer youth director at First Baptist Church in Daisetta, served as a Super Summer team leader. It was her fifth consecutive year volunteering.

“I came with my kids to be a team leader,” Broom said on her last day at Super Summer. “On Tuesday of the first week, I was asked to stay over for the next session because there was a need for another team leader.”

Students are grouped into small family units, and team leaders facilitate family group time.

“When I was approached about staying another week, I felt like God was working on me. He was not through with me, and I wanted to stay to hear more of what the Lord was speaking to me personally,” said Broom, who has volunteered five consecutive years. “God can use a Super Summer camp to speak to adults, also.”

Another two-week volunteer, Kelsa Blair, an elementary school teacher in Joshua, and his wife, Brandy, worked in the office during the two sessions held at ETBU.

“I just want to be a part of Super Summer in any way. Whether it was as a team leader, part of the marketing team or as the comptroller counting, I just want to serve,” said Blair, a Howard Payne University graduate who has volunteered three years.

Blair told his wife during one of the Rainbow Celebration worship services: “I think this must be what heaven is like. The kids are unhindered, totally worshipping God. … The very structured schedule and curriculum takes them to a very deep level. Seeing that in person is just great.”

Kelsa Blair, a sixth grade teacher in Joshua, volunteered two weeks at Super Summer. He has been a volunteer three years.

ETBU sophomore Sydni Thomas has been a student at Super Summer the past five years. This year, she was a team leader.

“I had never been through anything like it,” she said. “I was challenged not only to be a spiritual leader in my church but in everything I do. I believe that if I had not been given the opportunity to go to Super Summer and learned the things that I had, I would not have had the leadership opportunities that have been given to me today.”

Thomas, who grew up in First Baptist Church of Grandview, has served as a Girls in Action leader, a member of her church's youth committee and a pastor-search committee. She is an instrumentalist in the praise band at First Baptist Church in Marshall and is editor of the ETBU yearbook.

Ben Carter, a ninth-grade Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Henderson, attended his first Super Summer. Carter took off a week from his job to be a security volunteer and play bass in the worship band.

“The week was an experience I will cherish,” he said. “God requires our availability and honesty. God takes our five loaves and two fishes and uses them for his glory. What I witnessed is that he is raising a generation of young people who are truly amazing. They want to serve him with all their heart.”

Sydni Thomas, a sophomore at ETBU, has been to five Super Summers as a student. This was her first year as a team leader.

Dusty Kinslow, who is expecting her first child in December, wanted to be a team leader and experience the week with 21 students from her church. Kinslow, the interim youth pastor at First Baptist Church in Willowbrook, learned she could not be a team leader because she is pregnant. She e-mailed the Super Summer office to ask if she could participate anyway.

“I was so happy when I learned that I could attend by volunteering as an on-site office staff member and be here with my youth,” she said. Serving in the office kept her out of the East Texas heat.

“Just being involved in Super Summer has been a blessing,” she said. “The Lord has shown me that my passion should not be students; my passion should be him and him alone. Sometimes I think, 'Oh, my students are my passion.' That is not the answer. Christ should be my passion.”