World Changers

By Paulo Tenorio

Paulo Tenorio, former Texas Conference Youth & Club Ministries director, took a call to the Guam-Micronesia Mission of Seventh-day Adventists in February 2023. Below is his report for 2019-2022.

When schools began to shut down in early 2020, Texas Conference Youth & Club Ministries kept going and created the first online camporee, called iCamporee. More than 12,000 people representing 60-plus countries registered for the event, which went right along with our motto of World Changers.

One year before we organized the first-ever Pathfinder Camporee in Egypt, we sent Gisele Aguilar there as a missionary. She helped us plan for and arrange the 2022 event with volunteers from Texas. Around 250 people attended, and the 24 resulting baptisms prompted a big celebration in Egypt and Sudan.

During two of the past four years, our department coordinated Empower training events. The last one in 2022 drew 1,300 people, and for the first time we offered an Adventist Youth (AY) track. An attendee who shared appreciation for the AY track told us that leaders in the past have often lacked the resources to be effective and have felt alone and not heard.

Before the pandemic, we created small, tract-size promotional booklets that answer the question “Who are we?” for Adventurers and Pathfinders. The small size allows churches to easily share them with families in the community whenever they invite youth to join a club.

We also created an instruction notebook for prospective Master Guides, to help them complete the leadership training process.

For Global Youth Day, we prepared a booklet to suggest activities, share hashtags and provide information necessary for hosting a successful event.

Because so much is happening, the department maintains four Youth & Club Ministries websites to share important information and events throughout the year.

For small-group Bible studies, we were able to give churches the booklet called Life. It contains Bible studies on addiction, sex before marriage, immigration and more. After one of the small groups doubled in size, the mother of a participant wrote me a thank-you note and shared how this booklet has helped the young people.

We’ve organized three team leadership conventions where youth leaders are trained to mentor. We’ve also held two Engaged conferences, one in Austin and the other in Dallas, with attendance of 500 and 1,000 people, respectively. Both were successful, with volleyball tournaments and a variety of workshops that appealed to young people.

Two youth pastor retreats gave pastors timely information on how to give their young people tools for dealing with specific challenges. For example, after the pandemic, we invited a psychologist who was able to give pointers to our youth pastors so that they could better help the young people in their churches who struggle with mental health issues.

Last but not least, I must share about the Bible challenge in which thousands of our young people participated. We gave a wristband with the words “Bible Challenge” to all young people willing to commit to reading one chapter in the morning and one chapter in the evening. Some even pledged to abstain from social media to connect with God more powerfully and directly. One person who sent me a message of thanks for the challenge shared, “It helped me to have peace of mind. It’s helped me in my relationships with my family and with my boyfriend. This challenge has been so helpful, because now I have created the habit of reading my Bible every day and not depending on anybody else, but just going to the source directly myself. I now have peace like never before, and that’s the beauty of the Word.”

The main focus of Youth & Club Ministries is to teach our young people to have a relationship with God. The pandemic helped our young people learn that if they go to Jesus directly, many good things can happen.