There’s no age limit on serving the Lord and serving others. Praise Church in Beaumont, Texas discovered a way to disciple the entire Next Gen ministry in one fell swoop. It’s called Serve Camp.
Before Serve Camp existed, each camper had to pay $400-$500 to attend camp with the church, organized by outside groups. Despite fundraisers, this price limited who could attend—so they only had about 65 campers.
Last year they decided to take camp ministry entirely in-house. By Praise Church for Praise Church. They reimagined summer camps to make it more accessible to the church family. They worked hard to get the price point down to $199 and created the Serve Camp model. The older Next Gen students/young adults pay to go to camp to serve. Yes, you read that correctly—they pay the same price as the campers and help lead in many different ways. (Much like paying to go on a missions trip, to help offset the costs.) They rent a Christian camp and take over the whole site, so that kids going into third grade all the way up to age 25 are all doing camp at the same time. Now, instead of taking 65 kids to camp, there are 342 registered to attend camp this summer!