“…Bring down your *warriors, Lord!” (Joel 3:11 (NIV); *heroes Russian translation).
Starting from June 14 to 20, we had the Christian camp “Not the Last Hero” in Zalissya. 60 children and 18 leaders were gathered together.
Every day children studied the life story of one of the Bible heroes. In the morning, they had Bible lesson, and in the evening, leaders read them the Bible story about the hero they were introduced to during the day. God was leading us throughout the whole camp. We began from the story of Daniel, hence teaching kids how to pray and have personal fellowship with God. In such a way, every evening our little disciples could practice in prayer.
There were many children from non-Christian families; there were also couple of kids, whose fathers are Muslims.
We could continuously experience spiritual battle as despite good weather conditions kids got sick. However, it gave us an opportunity to spend more time in prayer not only within our team, but also with campers.
At the end of the camp, the girls shared that among all Bible heroes they studied, they liked Esther most of all, while boys liked Samson. It was amazing how many questions on Bible stories they asked; they also were interested in the Second Coming of Christ. In fact, the older children asked their leaders to read from Book of Revelation in the evenings.
At the end of the camp we had the camp game “Life for 60 minutes”. The idea was to show that we can live through our entire life (the kids could “graduate from school and college”, “find the job and spend money”, “get married” and “go to church”, where they could stay till the end of the game, or leave it and hectically waste their time on other activities), but where would we be after the life ends? Throughout the whole game, there was the Evangelist, whose task was to reach out to the kids, invite them to church and call them to turn their lives to God, thus saving their souls. The game was over on the 45th minute and not on the 60th as it often happens in real life: no one knows when it ends. Those children who at the moment of the final whistle were in the “church”, got to “Heaven”, others got to “hell”. 15 out of 60 kids got to “Heaven”, others were very disappointed… We believe that at this moment, the Holy Spirit showed children that the most important thing is to save their souls and that they will need nothing they gather on Earth when they get to Heaven. Later in the evening, several kids showed their desire to receive Christ in their hearts! Praise the Lord for them!!!
The camp was blessed indeed! We are grateful to God for finances, dedicated people and the children’s hearts, with which he entrusted us! Glory to Jesus Christ!
Artem Antonyuk,
“Salvation” church, Rivne
P.S.: Last Hero is the Russian version of Survivor show.
