The Baltic Pastoral Institute has a program called DRAFT where they take 14-20 year-old young men and spend a week with them at camp teaching them the gospel and what it means to be a godly man. There are three levels of camp that help returning students grow in leadership skills and the ultimate goal is that some of these young men will go on to study with the BPI, plant churches, and lead in their local church.

This summer, I was invited to help out with one of the camps. I had heard stories about these camps and it was hard to discern what was fact, myth, or legend. Even though I have been back for a little over the week, I am still not sure I know quite how to describe it.

It begins with the students arriving at a local church and then running a few kilometers before arriving at the local riverbank. There they are given raw materials for a raft: rope, random boards, and some jugs or barrels. Then they have to work together within a time limit to build a raft to float down the river to the camp. They have an hour to paddle their craft the 2km down to the camp. They have to arrive together, with all their materials, and if they do not arrive within the hour, they don’t get lunch.

My team was the most successful out of the group and the only group to arrive together and with all of their materials. I had to supervise them from the rowboat. Most of the rafts fell apart within the first 400m, but ours lasted half of the trip. It might sound like a rather easy task, but the river is cold. The average high was around 68-70F and the water will take the breath out of you when you jump in. Now imagine swimming a kilometer in a lifejacket while trying to keep all of your building materials flowing down the river. No one got lunch that day…

The next day we had a fun team-building activity of a 5-hour journey through the forest and along the beach. It was pretty exhausting 😉

One of the other larger activities during the week was a 2AM muster for a hike. The boys were woken up to sirens and run out of the cabins to the quad. They were then told that they had 5 minutes to get dressed and grab everything they needed for a hike and camping outside. They were then blindfolded and marched a couple of miles to the ocean. Near the ocean was a cemetery, where the camp leader (and our pastor, Kaspars), presented the gospel and talked about the importance of truly living. We then set up camp for the rest of the night.

Each day begins with exercises, followed by breakfast, and then group devotion times. Also during the week we had several lectures on what it means to be a man. Most of the boys were not Christians, but were part of a soccer team, so the gospel was presented several times. At the beginning of the week, many of the boys seemed shocked and unsure about the camp, but by the end of the week, many of the boys were excited about what we had done and were interested about how to grow as men of God. Here are a few more pictures from the week.