Cascading Community

I love SpringHill in May because our summer staff begin arriving in cascading waves for training. One of the most important lessons they’ll learns the importance of small communities in creating SpringHill Experiences.

Small communities, such as families, are powerful places for life transformation. They’re transformational because they’re relational. And it’s within the context of relationships that the important stuff that God uses to transform people takes place.

We build SpringHill summer camps on this reality. We begin with hiring people that can both thrive and create transformational communities. Then we follow with training that shows staff how to create small communities in a SpringHill way.

For the training to stick we don’t just tell our staff how to create transformational communities we also have them experience it by doing our training within small communities. Our staff learn it by living it for the weeks they’re in training.

To accomplish training in this way requires an enormous amount of coordination, investment in leadership development, trust, and empowerment.

So we start with our summer professional (resident) staff. They’re trained in small communities with the goal of having an integral part in the training of the next staff (summer leadership) to arrive. Summer leadership staff then’s trained to be involved in training the final wave of arriving staff.

This cascading of training in small communities allows us to multiple our trainers which then allows us to multiple our small communities as each new wave of staff arrive. In this way all our staff not only hear but also experience being a part of and leading a small community.

So when the 1000’s of campers arrive this summer our staff’s prepared to create 100’s more small communities where young people can know and grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ and thus be transformed.