ALLIANCE YOUTH FELLOWSHIP

Vernon Alliance Church - 1963

When we arrived in Vernon in the fall of 1963, two single nurses were the youth sponsors leading the Alliance Youth Fellowship.  I learned that first winter that these sponsors were very discouraged.  I sought to encourage them by attending the youth meetings.  What I witnessed was a duplicate of a Sunday morning service with one young person leading the music, using hymnals and someone else reading scripture, prayer, etc.  Sometimes they had a special musical number and sometimes they had a guest speaker. Attendance dipped as low as six young people showing up. This did not strike me as a young peoples meeting.  I did the unthinkable.  Some might think it was the unpardonable sin.  In the spring of 1964 I said to these two youth sponsors, "Let's just cancel having young peoples."  In my mind was the idea that we would let it die and start afresh at a later date.  It was cancelled.

In the summer, July or August, I approached Bob and Dora Davison asking if we could have a young peoples meeting in their home.  Twelve young people showed up.  It was an enjoyable and relaxed evening with food. We met in another home the next week.  The second week eighteen young people came.  As I recall we met in a few more homes and it was not long before the attendance was too big for homes and we moved to the church.  I was very much encouraged when shortly after Bob agreed to be the youth sponsor.

A couple of years or so later the AYF had grown to the size where we needed to divide it into a junior group and a senior group.  I approached Dan & Irene Krestinski, recent graduates of Prairie Bible Institute and newly married, asking if they would be the youth sponsors for a junior high group.  They agreed.  The Alliance Youth Fellowship and Alliance Young Teens continued to grow numerically to the place where we had the largest young peoples group in the city of Vernon.  Bible quizzing was popular in those years and both groups had their own quiz team.  I remember a Sunday evening when we featured the young people and the two teams competed with each other in that service.

AYF zone rallies, as they were called, were held in the different Alliance churches in the area.  There were six churches in our area: Kamloops, Revelstoke, Vernon, Kelowna, Penticton and Oliver.  The churches would take turns hosting the same.  They usually met on a holiday, either Good Friday or Thanksgiving making the return trip the same day. Some times they met twice in the same year. I met with the Vernon youth sponsors and we planned something drastically different.

We hosted a weekend youth retreat in Vernon.  We invited the youth from the other Alliance churches in the area to bring their sleeping bags and come for an inspiring fun filled weekend. The weekend began with a service Friday night concluding with the Sunday morning service.  Saturday we rented the Vernon Recreation Centre swimming pool for an early morning dip, followed by a fabulous breakfast back at the church. All meals were served at the church and all were fabulous.  We spared nothing in making the weekend the best that we could.

The Saturday schedule was full with a variety of activities including a Bible message, panel discussion, lots of music etc.  I remember that one year we had one hundred and twenty-five youth, teenagers as we called them, at a retreat with seventy of them from the other churches.  The youth from out of town were bedded down by our church families, who graciously opened their homes, many of the young people sleeping on floors.  We had at lest two retreats before I left Vernon.  Two speakers that I remember having were Dr. Mark Lee, a professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, WA and Rev. Henry Unrau, a faculty member at Briercrest Bible College, Caronport, SK.

As a point of interest, seeing that those youth retreats were about a half century ago, one of our Vernon teenagers, who regularly attended, is now a retired pastor living in Abbotsford and a member of Sevenoaks Alliance Church.  Lyle Magnus, one of the young people that attended, coming from the Oliver Alliance Church became a pastor and was the pastor that took my place as Pastor to Seniors, when I retired from Sevenoaks Alliance Church in 2000.  He, too, has since retired.

Well Zachary, since you're the spark plug behind this blog, I wanted to be sure to include a few words about the VAC youth some fifty years ago, seeing that you've been a big part of the youth at Vernon Alliance Church in the last several years and you're aspiring to be a youth pastor.