Making a deep impact on the students and children in your church can be as simple as giving up a week of your summer to take them to a missions focused camp.

Each summer N.C. Baptists on Mission holds Deep Impact camps across North Carolina, in other states, and places like Cuba and Puerto Rico. 

The “camp” is in fact a mission trip where students and children are equipped and encouraged to serve the community where the camp is held. They are called mission weeks instead of camps so students understand they are coming to serve. Deep Impact is one of the few camps of its kind because participants get to grow in their faith while learning to show the love of Christ through their actions.

Children and students are eligible to serve at a mission week starting at first through fifth grade for Deep Impact Kids and sixth through 12th grade for Deep Impact Students.

Baptists on Mission’s Student Mobilization Coordinator Brandon Powell said Deep Impact camps “flip the script” on what summer camp can mean by putting service at the forefront.

“What we try to do is take what the students have and let them pour it out into someone else,” Powell said. “So the focus during a mission week is us serving in the community. The focus is not on us, but on what God does through us to bless other people and to meet human needs in Jesus’ name.”

There are a number of possible projects that students can participate in based on the community’s needs. Potential projects include building wheelchair ramps, backyard Bible clubs, car washes, visiting nursing home residents, working at food pantries and more.

Dollie Noa, Baptists on Mission’s consultant for children and family missions mobilization, said that the heart behind Deep Impact Kids lies in getting kids involved at a young age so they can understand how crucial it is to be the hands and feet of Jesus to everyone they meet.

“These children are going to turn into adults that are later serving in disaster relief and going on international missions, so it’s important to start them at a very young age,” Noa said.

Richard Brunson, director of Baptists on Mission, says Deep Impact camps serve as an opportunity to introduce personal involvement in missions to students and children.

“What we want to see happen is that the students for Deep Impact come and experience missions, they see that God can use them, and they learn some skills that they can replicate when they go back home,” Brunson said.

To Brunson, the best part of a Deep Impact camp is seeing the students that come back from a mission week with a calling into vocational ministry. He spoke of his own daughter who attended a Deep

Impact week in Honduras some years ago and returned with a calling that God placed on her life for missions that she is still living out to this day.

Even if Deep Impact participants don’t feel called to vocational ministry, many students return each year to discover how God wants to use them in their everyday lives.

“The biggest benefit is to show them that they have something to offer for Christ,” Powell said. “We expose them to mission opportunities that may stretch them, that may challenge them, that may make them feel a little uncomfortable, but they learn during the week that they have something valuable to offer the church and they have something valuable to offer in their communities.”

While Baptists on Mission has a small summer staff for its Deep Impact camps, they emphasize the importance of leaders who come with the participants from their local church. These camps help support the ministry of youth pastors and what they are trying to teach their students. Youth pastors get to serve alongside their students while Baptists on Mission takes care of the planning and logistics of a mission trip.

“Our staff is in the background preparing things,” Noa said. “But they do not supervise the children for the whole time, the children’s adults do that. Because we want them to go back to their church and say ‘OK the adults and children worked as a team, and we can do this in our community.’ The whole idea is to mobilize them to go back into their communities and do projects together.”

At the end of the day, Deep Impact camps exist to equip churches in serving.

“The more churches we can help equip and be prepared to do this in their local communities just helps open the doors for them to share the gospel, to be on mission for Christ, and to reach more people,” Powell said.

“We see what we do as a mobilizing tool for churches and youth groups to help them fulfill the Great Commission in their own ministry contexts.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE – This article originally appeared in the May 2023 edition of the Biblical Recorder magazine.)