Cov Doings highlights snapshots of life across the Covenant—stories of ministry, creativity, and connection that demonstrate how God is at work among us.
Students Hungry for Worship
Last spring, Tre’ Crume received an email from some local high school students with an unusual request. They were not part of any programming at Newport Covenant Church in Bellevue, Washington, where Crume serves as pastor of youth and families. They attended the high school across the street and led a Christian club there. They wrote saying they wanted to create a space for youth to worship. “We’re thinking of having it at your church, and we’ve already reached out to four other high schools to participate,” Crume recalls. “Can we use your space?”
Crume invited them over and showed them the youth room, which has couches and Ping-Pong tables. Then he turned on the lights in the sanctuary. “They loved the wooden pews,” he said. “They really enjoyed the older, traditional space of our sanctuary.” That’s where they wanted to worship.
A few weeks later, between sixty and eighty students from several high schools filled those pews. Most were unchurched or connected through campus Christian clubs. One student from Newport Covenant’s youth group attended—a new believer with whom Crume had shared the gospel with on a Sunday morning walk.
The event was scheduled to last two hours, but the students didn’t want to leave. “We were just making up songs because they wanted to keep singing,” Crume says. “They wanted to linger.” A student shared a testimony, and adults around the room prayed over the group.
“There’s hunger for real, authentic faith from students here,” Crume says. “I was really shocked, because there’s a stereotype of what the Pacific Northwest is—super secular. But they were the ones that initiated it.”
That night changed how Crume leads and thinks about his ministry. “Maybe they’re not rejecting everything. They just want to be included and put their flavor to it.” Crume has since connected with the club’s adult sponsor and is working with them to plan future gatherings.
Summer Service and Formation
For more than twenty-five years, Thornapple Covenant Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has paid students to serve in the city every summer.
“The coolest thing about this is that our church pays for these kids to work,” says Laurie Guikema, who coordinates the LMDJ Summer Serve program with her friend Sharon Willis. College students, along with rising high school juniors and seniors, work all summer at one of several nonprofit ministry partners in Grand Rapids with the church covering their stipend.
The program began in 2000 in honor of Dr. Glenn Van Noord, a Thornapple member and family physician who regularly brought high school students downtown to a ministry that served people experiencing homelessness and poverty. He believed it was important for young people to encounter lifestyles and experiences that were different from their own. After he died at the age of fifty-one, the church wanted to continue his legacy. For several years, the program was named after him. In 2025, it was renamed.
“Because they’re serving in their hometown, it’s just different,” Guikema says. “You’re serving with people you might see at the grocery store, and you’re doing something purposeful.” For many students, it’s their first real job. “They have to be the adult that communicates with their boss and calls them if they’re not feeling well that morning,” she says, “and they’re interacting with people who are very different from them.”
Guikema’s own children have gone through the program. “All of my kids are like, ‘I had no idea that there was a housing shortage in Grand Rapids,’” she says. “Someone could be one crisis away from being homeless.”
Each summer ends with a book club and short reflection papers, which the church posts online. “Caring about the housing crisis in Grand Rapids isn’t worth much if it stays a feeling. It has to turn into floors getting redone and paint getting rolled,” wrote Drew Shripka, who worked on house rehab projects for an affordable housing provider. Miles DeBaets, who worked at Exalta Health, wrote, “It was such a blessing to be able to see the look on someone’s face when they tried on prescription glasses for the first time and realized they could see so much better.” Nora Herrington learned the power of listening: “Being surrounded by people who lit up when someone remembered their name is something I don’t think I will be able to forget.”
Guikema says she hopes other Covenant churches will borrow the idea. Her advice: “Find organizations in your own city that you are involved with or that you know are doing really good work, and partner with them.” Then take a hard look at the budget. “It’s very doable.”
Forty Years of MUUUCE
MUUUCE, the Northwest Conference’s weekend gathering for middle school and junior high students, turned forty this year. It began in 1985 when Tony Deach, then a youth pastor at Faith Covenant Church in Burnsville, Minnesota, gathered fifty kids from his own church. The next year he and John Skelly, another youth pastor at the church, began collaborating with the Northwest Conference to plan the event. By 1997 it had grown to 700 students from forty-seven churches, and the conference says it is the largest middle school event in the Covenant.
In August, 519 students and leaders from thirty churches gathered at Crossroads Covenant Church in Woodbury, Minnesota, under the theme “Found.” When speaker Eric Samuel Timm invited students to follow Jesus, more than a third of the group stood up. “Watching our students worship, open their Bibles, and respond to the gospel reminded me why experiences like this matter so much,” said Chris Kelly of Linwood Covenant Church in Wyoming, Minnesota. The students also donated $1,261 to Adventurous Christians, a Northwest Conference camp hit hard by this summer’s fires in the Boundary Waters.
Don’t Despise Our Youth Wins Top Honor
Congratulations to David A. Washington, founder and senior pastor of Kingdom Covenant Church on Chicago’s South Side, whose book Don’t Despise Our Youth: Renewing Hope for Urban Youth Ministry (InterVarsity Press) tied for first place in Rooted Ministry’s Best New Books for Youth Ministers category. Washington came to faith out of gang life through youth ministry in inner-city Chicago, and he has spent more than three decades in youth, gang-intervention, and prison ministry. His book calls on churches to raise up young people as ministers in their own right. Rooted’s reviewers called the book “a timely, courageous, and gospel-centered resource.”
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