By JACOB PRAHLOW

Imagine a cool breeze coming off the ocean. The smell of salt water as it laps at your feet with the incoming tide. The warmth of sun on your back as you dip your feet into cool water. You hear the sounds of rustling palm branches.

Ah, this is Jamaica, right?

Not for one church youth group.

This July the Senior High Youth Group of Berrien Center Bible Church is heading down to the island country of Jamaica, not for some R&R, but to serve those less fortunate than themselves.

“We’re going to travel about 30 to 40 minutes outside of the city into villages in the country, work with kids and do some service projects down there, and also do a sports ministry”, says Pastor Brad Neese, BCBC youth pastor.

Pastor Brad is leading a team of about 30 students and adult leaders down to the Montego Bay area of northwestern Jamaica.

The youth are partnering with Praying Pelican Missions, a Christian Missions organization that caught Pastor Brad’s attention last year by giving him a free trip to Jamaica.

“I was at a youth conference, and the mission organization had a booth there, and they said, ‘Hey, sign up for a free mission trip to Jamaica,’ so I did. And they would draw your name, and I won a free mission trip to Jamaica.”

However, Brad was unable to go because of an earlier planned youth trip.

A unique facet of the BCBC youth group is the team of adult leaders surrounding Pastor Brad.

These adults take time to not only help with ministering to the youth, but they also help lead technical aspects of trips as well.

According to BCBC adult leader Frank Noble, while in Jamaica the Berrien Center youth will be “working with a pastor who is in charge of three churches that are in close communities just outside of (Montego Bay) … We will also have a construction team in the morning working on a church … The sports ministry is using the colors of the Jamaican flag and their meanings and tying it in with some Bible verses.”

As their July 3 departure quickly approaches, many of the Berrien Center high school youth are still looking for money to pay for the trip.

Fifteen year-old high school junior Samuel Prahlow said of paying for the trip, “Fourteen hundred dollars is a lot of money for a student without a job. But even as the economy is weak, the Lord has been providing for our funds, and He will continue to do so.”

As you can imagine, collecting more than $40,000 for a trip involving 30 people is no easy task.

Several weeks ago, the youth put together a community garage sale at the church that raised more than $6,000 for the trip.

Brad commented, “What is more important (than the money) is we had people who made a community impact and we had people coming who would never walk into a church, and we also had a lot of migrant workers, too … At the end of the garage sale we took a lot of stuff and donated it to a migrant ministry.”

In addition to the community garage sale, the youth at Berrien Center Bible Church have also hosted two fund-raising lunches, as well as sending support letters to members of the BCBC Congregation.

“The whole thing is actually up to the teenagers,” Brad commented, “but we help supplement that somewhat.”

Helping not only those across oceans, but helping those nearby, that is part of Berrien Center Bible Church’s mission to “love, learn and live. To love God and people more, we want them to learn more of God’s Word and we want them to live more like Jesus Christ. And those things are totally the backbone of our execution of that.”

While it sounds like Pastor Brad has a lot on his plate, that’s not all he’s doing this summer.

Brad is taking the Berrien Center junior high to Student Life Mission Camp in Wheaton, Ill.
“It’s like camp and a mission trip, all wrapped up into one” Brad says.

He’s taking about 10 students and two other adult leaders on the trip, during the third week of July, says Spencer Mrozeck, the BCBC summer youth intern.

This summer’s activities are simply the next installment of BCBC youth trips.

In years past, Brad has taken groups to Mexico, North Carolina and Canada.

In a particularly fond moment of recollection, Pastor Brad recalls attempting to shop at the neighborhood Wal-Mart in Juarez, Mexico.

“We had 40 some odd people on the team, and me and a couple of adult leaders went to the Wal-Mart in Mexico to buy food for the team, like a week’s worth of food, and we walked in, and we had forgotten that like everything was in Spanish. They had no pictures or anything like that, nobody spoke any English, so we walked around and just put stuff in the carts. When we got to the cash register, we didn’t know how we would pay, because we didn’t know if our credit cards would work. I guess they worked. And then I tipped the kids like 30 bucks, and so I’ve never left a tip that big in my entire life since.”

These summer trips are part of a broader concept called “Reach Out” which involves having BCBC youth take their own time and money and at least once a month going into the community to reach out and show the love of Jesus to people.

“We love God,” Brad says, “so we go where He wants and we love people enough to tell them about Jesus.”

Aside from this mission trip, over the past school year the BCBC youth ministry has “sent money over to Haiti, bought 17 beds for orphans in Uganda… done yard work for widows, donated a lot to the Pregnancy Care Center in Niles and made blankets for migrant workers. We even went to Wal-Mart and all the surrounding stores and handed out gift cards for free, just saying ‘Hey, this is on us.’ ”

So whether it be a mission trip to an exotic location such as Jamaica, one closer to home in Chicago or simply loving people across Berrien County, it’s clear that the students of the Berrien Center Bible Church Youth Group are really into loving God and loving people.
And as Brad says, that’s what love is all about: “It’s students and the community: Faith in action.”

To learn more about the Berrien Center summer trips, and Berrien Center Bible Church in general, you can go to www.berriencenterbiblechurch.org <http://www.berriencenterbiblechurch.org> , check out their Facebook page at “BCBC Student Ministry” or (if you’re into tweeting) “BCBC Student Ministry,” which doesn’t get a whole lot of activity, “but when we do, it’s really awesome!” Brad says.

Jacob Prahlow is a sophomore at Southwestern Michigan College this summer semester.
As part of an English class taught by Sarah Smith, students write feature stories on events or places in the surrounding area.