Covenant News

Fruit-Packing Trip Highlights Newsletter Activity

OLYMPIA, WA (October 15, 2003) - A total of 13 adults and youth from River Ridge Covenant Church were involved in a unique Gleanings mission trip recently to Sultana, California.

The primarily junior high aged contingent lived at a Youth With a Mission (YWAM) facility in a small central California camp called Gleanings for the Hungry. The camp serves as a fruit production base. For most of the time, youth and adult volunteers helped dry fruit at the YWAM base. They also packaged previously dried fruit into five-gallon buckets that are later sent to disadvantaged countries, Paula Reiner writes in a church newsletter article. The group often worked from around 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. processing fruit.

The group included adult leaders Paula Reiner, Gary Melhaff, and Jim Patterson as well as a number of youth, including high school leader Greg Reiner, Melissa Patterson, Adam Eastman, Hannah Norby, Ian Theibert, Holly Price, Katie Melhaff, Kevin Bedard, Phillip Kendall and Marshal Heffernan.

"It's hard to explain to people why anyone in their right mind would go to Gleanings," reported Reiner. "It's hot (in the 100s), the work is excruciatingly boring, it stinks of rotten fruit . . . you get motion sickness from the conveyor belts, and then there are the blisters and slivers and the flies. And yet over and over again the youth say they have fun. How can that be? While they may have trouble expressing their thoughts, I think our junior highers have discovered what God is all about - relationships . . . at Gleanings they learn they are one in Christ and it frees us to build relationships with each other despite our differences."

The River Ridge experience is just one of many reflected in the more than 250 local church newsletters received each month by the Department of Communication. The following newsletter highlights are grouped by conference or region.

CENTRAL

• Chicago, Illinois: Jessica Bergstrom of Ravenswood Evangelical Covenant Church is headed overseas on a Peace Corps project in January. Bergstrom graduated from North Park University with a degree in International Business in May and is currently at Illinois State University in Normal working on a Master's in Applied Economics.

MIDWEST

• Arvada, Colorado: Arvada Covenant Church's Kinsey Anderson, a student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, did a unique Campus Crusade project last summer, working in Vail, Avon, Minturn and Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and doing friendship evangelism. She served as a waitress at a Vail resort along with six others from her project. The group did outreach events during the summer and were involved in leadership training. Anderson, a junior at Colorado State, works with Campus Crusade's program on campus and is majoring in Human Development with hopes of continuing her education in graduate school and becoming a physician's assistant.

NORTH PACIFIC

• Salem, Oregon: Trinity Covenant Church youth and adults helped their city by painting fire hydrants for a recent service club project. The city's volunteer coordinator, Tibby Larson, wrote a thank you letter to the club, noting that the efforts of the 22 people involved are listed on the city's web site. Their volunteer work saved the city more than $180 by painting more than 20 hydrants.

NORTHWEST

• Dawson, Minnesota: Kevin Lindblad of Dawson Covenant Church pitched for the Cerro Gordo fast pitch softball team that placed second in the Class B finals and went on to finish seventh in a national tourney in Wisconsin. Another youth at the church, Kari Pearson, is modeling for a local clothier.

PACIFIC SOUTHWEST

• Oakland, California: First Covenant Church high school student Kiah Hooks of St. Mary's High School in nearby Berkeley played for the East Bay Xplosion, an under-14 division girls basketball team that captured first place at an Amateur Athletic Union tourney in Dayton, Ohio, this summer. Another youth at the church, Zachariah Stephens, placed fourth in his division in a Junior Olympics Judo event in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
• Redwood City, California: A Skatechurch ministry that has been in existence for nearly three years at Peninsula Covenant Church is making its mark on area children and teens. Nine students in the program were baptized in a roadside waterfall on their way home from Skatechurch's annual trip to Portland, Oregon, in August. Chris Probasco directs Skatechurch at Peninsula Covenant.

To learn more about the activities of youth and young adults in the Covenant, regularly visit the Covenant news report on this website at www.covchurch.org. To submit material for consideration in this news report, call 773-907-8333 or email the material to the Department of Communication at newsdesk@covchurch.org.

Printable version of this page.