Sabbatical

FYI – I’m taking a sabbatical from urban children’s ministry. Maybe it’ll be for 6 months or maybe it will be forever. The jury has not decided.

The last seven to eight years I have had the privilege of doing something that I absolutely loved. Working in urban ministry was my dream job. I met amazing people, matured and grew as a leader, had profound, life changing experiences, was able to live and travel all over the world. But, six months ago I woke up and felt restless. The feeling continued and intensified and I decided it was time to re-evaluate.

So, I quit my job and left my very full and rich life in Camden, to take a few months to process. I’m excited about the projects I’ll be working on in the next few months, and I’ll be updating Facebook and Twitter if you want to keep in touch.

It’s been real. Thanks for being with my on the journey!

-Jenn

Advice to Children from Rapper Nas

Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more learn more, change the globe
Ghetto children, do your thing

Nas grew up in Queensbridge, one of the housing projects I worked in for three years, in NYC.

Self care advice from Rick Warren

Interns 2010-2011

These are my interns for the school year. Craig and Rachel from England, Promise from Malawi and Ashley from New Jersey. They seem like a great group of people and I’m looking forward to working with them!

We got the crate!

We won!!!!!!!!!!! I know it’s means nothing to those not involved in our ministry, but winning the golden crate is a big deal. We got the crate! It was all thanks to our StreetLeaders for writing the song and helping the kids learn it and to our interns for spending hours on the mascot and decoration! Great team work!

When we found out we won, we screamed, jumping up and down and hugging each other, for 15 minutes. 🙂

All Camp Day

All Camp Day

A quick look at All Camp Day. It’s an intense day!

All Camp Day

All Camp Day is the most important day of the summer. All seven summer camps in our ministry join together for a day of competition, songs, games and Bible lesson. Each camp dresses up in their camp color, we have a camp mascot and vehicle, and camp song. It’s very competitive and winning the “Golden Crate” (a basket full of candy) gives you bragging rights for an entire year. This year our mascot was Captain Crunch, the kids dressed up as pirates and our camp song was soooo good.

“We just havin’ a good time,
The devil tryin’ ruin it,
Shout out to to the fact that we the
youngest camp doin’ it!”

Finding shade.

Finding shade.

I thought the kids were pretty creative in their attempt to find shade on a hot day. 🙂

Summer Staff ’10

My summer staff – StreetLeaders and Interns (minus a few). We got along really well! There’s a great wall of graffiti near the skating rink and Camden and it’s tradition to have our staff group photo taken there.

Promise got his head stapled!

My intern from Malawi named Promise was playing a game with the kids and slipped and hit his head against a steel rod (a dunk tank, actually). He had to get his head stapled! Scary, but also kind of funny.

Watch a video of him in the emergency room here.