Parenting Workshops
Much of June has been spent preparing for a six-week series of workshops for parents that are the Sunday night program at our local church for June and the first half of July. The attendance surprised us - between 30 and 50 people weekly - as did the amount of prep time it took.

We don't usually accept projects unless they have to do directly with training youth leaders, but we decided to do this to support the youth ministry of our local church. We don't yet have a good sense of how much of what we have taught has actually made a difference in lives of the families represented, but we have seen enough fruit to make us think that the investment of time has been worthwhile.

We have been able to help the family situation of one of the volunteer youth leaders in our church; we have helped involve an unchurched family in the community; and we now have lots of resources for parents in Spanish that we can make available online.

The BIG project
A year and a half of work, hundreds of hours by five people spread out over 3 countries, on 13 (of 20) animated classes on the foundations of youth ministry is being wrapped up, as those classes have been thoroughly polished (checked and double checked for grammatical errors, layout inconsistencies, etc.) and are being programmed.

The text for the 14th class is ready for the storyboarding and animation process. We hope to have it finished and programmed my mid-July in time for the RAICES youth leader training conference in Lima, Peru. And we hope to make the extension course available starting in August.

In a different but related project we have been working with a graphic designer on a new layout for the 500 page manual that is the textbook for the course.

Ongoing training for Mexican youth leaders

Last year wesponsored a month long stay in Argentina for Veronica Dominguez, a long-term writer for theParaLideres.org web site and the paid youth leader in our local church. During that time she studied the youth ministry model in the church pastored by our colleague, Gerardo Muniello, and she attended a youth retreat called "EJE." She was greatly impacted by her time there and in June she returned with seven college students and singles from Mexico so they could also experience the youth ministry there and the retreat, as part of a plan to implement the retreat here in Mexico. We trust that it will end up being significant both in the lives of the individuals who went and in the landscape of youth ministry here in Mexico.

Networking
We were able to introduce to each other some of the only people we know who are teaching youth ministry at a seminary level here in Mexico: Edison, a Mexican who is spearheading a youth ministry track at a non-denominational seminary in Northern Baja California, and Dennis, an American missionary in charge of the first every youth ministry "major" at the Baptist seminary in Mexico City. We have been in touch with both of them regularly and were pleased that it worked out for them to be able to spend time getting to know each other.