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GREATEST HITS: Sharing Ideas For The New Year!
Salutations!
As many of us are planning or getting ready to plan and start the new ministry year, we thought it would be a great to prevail upon your varying degrees of expertise and ask all of you to share ideas and concepts that have worked well in the past. To that end, we are inviting everyone to share and exchange their favorites/ideas that have worked really well. Whether Tree Climbers, Stockade, or Battalion, we would like you to share them all! Remember, what you share from your experience here may help someone else immeasurably!
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Going first, I’ll share how our Battalion used a night where we taught our young men how to do dutch oven cooking on a campfire. It’s pretty straightforward, besides a fire and a dutch oven or two, you just need to decide what to cook. We made a pizza and a dump cake.
For the dump cake, you just add a box of cake mix and a can of pie filling (chocolate mix and cherry filling or white mix and apple filling are great options!) into the dutch oven-an egg or splash of milk are optional but not necessary-and mix it all together before putting it into the hot coals of the fire after letting it burn down for a bit. The cake cooks in about 15-20 minutes depending on how hot the fire is and the size of your dutch oven. Don’t forget to pile the coals on the top and around the sides!
The pizza was a can of Pillsbury pizza dough opened, stretched, and pressed in the bottom. Then you spread pizza sauce on the dough, add your cheese as well as other toppings, cover the dutch oven and put it in the coals the same way as the cake. Again, depending on how hot the fire is and dutch oven size, it should take 15-20 minutes.
We made two with the young men, showing them how to make them, then we pulled the cooking show trick of revealing the two we had prepared beforehand and already cooked. We then served both to everyone.
Not only could this be expanded on by having the young men or boys prepare and then cook their own, but it also serves as a jumping off point for many spiritual discussions, some being:
– How God can take the various ingredients of our lives and use them to make something new and better than the components. Sometimes that process can take time and be uncomfortable or painful, just like the heat of a fire, but in the end, it refines us into something new.
– In order for a recipe to come out the way it is supposed to, it needs to be followed in order and in proper proportions, just like God’s Word and His guidance for our lives. This can set the stage for discussions ranging from what it looks like to follow God’s plan and guidance to what things in our lives should happen in a specific order to get the desired outcome instead of jumping the gun to what happens in our lives when we don’t keep things in the proper proportions and allow some things to take up more of our time than they should.In the end the young men loved learning a new way to cook on camp-outs or at home as well as having a something tasty to eat and spiritual application.
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That’s what I have to share, and I am looking forward to hearing what you all have to contribute. We hope you all can share at least one thing and find one new thing to try yourselves this year!
Bright and Keen,
Keith
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