The Main Thing is not the Adventure
An article Pete Morrill wrote for all people using adventure sports to attract and attach people to Jesus and His Church.
A note from Greg Weisman, AdventurePastor. Pete Morrill is one of my heroes and this article is important for every person involved in adventure sports ministry. First, though, a little about the author. Pete and his wife, Julie, started and grew a Christian Wilderness Ministry camp in Northern California called Kidder Creek Camp. His passion has always been to impact lives for Jesus. The two of them have been instrumental in helping me think through Bayside Adventure Sports and our non-profit ministry, G1 Outdoors. You can now find Pete and Julie serving others as Life Coaches through their non-profit, True North Quests at https://www.tnadventures.org/about-us . Tell them Greg sent you. Now, his article.
In the arena of Adventure Sports Ministry, I want to warn you about a big distraction that is common – very, very common.
It is the distraction of the Adventure. I love backpacking, and I have led lots of backpacking trips. When you lead a backpacking trip you need to think about lots of things. Things like:
The physical conditioning of your team
The logistical preparation of your trip
The extensive packing list for each participant
The potential education of your team
The marketing of the event
The collection of everyone financial contribution, and liability waivers
And endless other details
I have seen it happen over and over again. In the midst of the marketing, preparation for, and enthusiasm about an upcoming adventure people forget the main purpose. For this reason, I want to both warn you and encourage you to keep the main purpose for each activity both very simple and appropriately visible.
As a camp director for 20 years, outdoor activity was my profession. Each week of camp we needed to take absolute novices and give them enough education to allow them to safely and effectively enjoy a whole variety of outdoor adventures that included: mountain biking, horseback riding, backpacking, whitewater rafting and many, many more. It was fun and challenging to train college counselors and guides to be very focused on the hard skills, but not forget the most important soft skills.
What do I mean by hard skills? Hard skills are the things you need to run a trip safely, effectively. The things that I mentioned above about a backpacking trip above are an example of hard skills. We could have easily taken all of our time in staff training making sure our hard skills were first rate, and that is certainly an important focus of each adventure. But what I told our staff each year during staff training, is hard skills are the easy part. By far the more difficult part of training in an Adventure Sports Ministry is the soft skills. And the first step to this training is constantly reminding your team about the main purpose of each event. For this reason, we tried to keep it simple – One step closer to Jesus. We wanted to help each of our participants come one step closer to Jesus Christ over their week of adventure at our camp.
Training in soft skills can take a variety of forms, but here are a few things that I would consider training your team in.
“One Step Closer to Jesus” – what does that mean?
How to make an invitation that encourages attendance, but signals a Christian purpose
Keys to Friendship evangelism
Sharing their personal testimony
Sharing the gospel
Preparing and sharing a “Thought for the day” (Devotional)
Avoiding language and areas of offense
Basics of “Life coaching”
How to Ask Life Transforming Questions
A true challenge in any ministry is keeping true to your mission. At Bayside Adventure Sports the mission statement reads,
“OUR MISSION: To use Adventure Sports to Attract and Attach people to Jesus and His church.”
Every ministry needs a clear mission statement. And Bayside’s mission statement is very clear and precise. But maybe more helpful then a formal mission statement is a centering phrase or logo that reminds every leader of the purpose all the time. From the Bayside example above one could get a phrase like, “Draw people to Jesus and His people” or “Attract and Attach”. Either might serve as a helpful logo, to help your team and yourself to remember what it is all about.
This phrase should permeate every meeting and every planning session. Every team leader should ask, “how is this event drawing our participants closer to Jesus and His people?”
Planning an adventure sports activity is exciting in many ways. But naturally adventure leaders will fixate over the logistics, gear, and itinerary. So, you as the ministry leader must constantly remind and train your leadership team to keep focused on the main focus – “One step closer to God.”