Category: Updates

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Thank you so much for your partnership with Kairos. I’m excited to share with you this brochure and our upcoming line up of trips and programs. Each year, the preparation of this brochure is a time of reflection on the past year, especially the past summer’s trips. And this last summer was a good one! We had three fantastic Adventure Guides with us and nearly 100 individuals on trips. From North Carolina to Wyoming, and from Tennessee to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we covered a lot of ground in our valiant white vans. We hope you enjoy the pictures throughout this brochure from these trips.

On pages 5 and 6, you can read a bit about our most recent Parents Forum, but don’t forget to listen to the recording if you weren’t able to join us live. We also have a beautiful testimony on pages 21 and 22 from Fatima Vite, who served with us as a Gapper last year. As usual, we share some thoughts about guiding your children in their post high school decisions, starting on page 23. And of course you’ll find information and interest form links for all of our programs throughout.

Once again, thank you so much for your partnership with Kairos, and for all of your work in the home and in your communities for the Kingdom of God. We’re grateful to serve alongside each of you and pray for all of you regularly.

God Bless You,
Stephen Giles
Director of Kairos

 
Our 2026 summer boys Kairos trips were excellent! This year we had 48 boys and 14 staff from Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Ontario, Washington, Kentucky, and Missouri taking part in our summer adventures!

A scripture that beautifully summarizes this summer’s trips is Hebrews 12:22, “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering.” These trips are an opportunity for the boys and staffers to encounter a ‘mountain top’ experience of community, time with God, and healthy challenge!

Virginia Beginner’s Camping – 7th Grade: Our 7th-grade trip to Virginia is all about outdoor basics—camp setup, trail prep, and learning to adapt to ever changing conditions! This year was a great challenge, with two straight days of nonstop rain! The youth were up to the challenge, pitching tents in the mud, keeping their gear dry, and keeping spirits high!

Algonquin Canoe Adventure – 8th Grade: The 8th-grade crew headed north to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, splitting into three canoeing groups to take on the wilderness. When the wind picked up, the groups set up makeshift sails on their canoes and coasted across the open water. It was the ultimate floating traverse and made for great memories!

Wyoming Hiking Trip – 9th Grade: Wyoming never disappoints, and this year’s 9th-grade trip lived up to the adventure. Surrounded by massive mountains, the youth pushed their limits on high-altitude hikes, mastered wilderness living, and soaked in some unforgettable summit views.

Kentucky Service Trip – 10th Grade: Our 10th graders headed to Beattyville, Kentucky for a week of service at Resurrection Home, an incredible organization supporting grandmothers raising their grandchildren. After putting in some hard work on community projects, the group ended the trip with an awesome day hike through Natural Bridge State Park.

This past summer, our young women embarked on two Kairos adventures: a Service Adventure Trip in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a Canoe Trip through the Sylvania Wilderness.

Serving with Joy in North Carolina

In mid-June, we packed a van with 9th and 10th-grade girls and headed south to partner with our brothers and sisters from People of Joy, a new community associated with our Sword of the Spirit network. Basecamping at Pilot Mountain State Park, we spent our first days in retreat and preparation before diving into two service projects:

Our high schoolers hosted a ‘Life in the Holy Spirit’ Day Retreat for the People of Joy junior high girls. From MCing and leading worship to sharing personal testimonies and praying over the younger girls, each Kairos girl stepped into significant leadership roles during the retreat. Watching them contribute and grow in their unique gifts was a true highlight.

Next, the team served the People of Joy community retreat by stepping up to cook, clean, and provide childcare – allowing parents and leaders to fully participate in their sessions. They prepared nourishing, scrumptious meals and cared for 11 children with endless energy (and plenty of creek-exploring!). It was a whirlwind, and our girls stretched themselves to give generously. Living up to their name, People of Joy brought immense warmth and hospitality to our time together.

Building Character in the Sylvania Wilderness

At the end of June, our 7th and 8th-grade girls headed north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A wilderness canoe trip is the ultimate test of teamwork: the girls mastered strategic packing, camp setup, paddling, and portaging. On the trail, you learn to move as a unit – sharing the load until the work is done, looking out for one another, and experiencing the true give-and-take of Christian community.

Your support makes these landmark adventures possible – spaces where Jesus is Lord, lifelong friendships in Christ are built, virtue is forged, and God is worshiped as our Creator and Giver of all good things! We are so grateful to be on mission with you!

For the past five years, Kairos has been hosting an online Parents Forum addressing challenges posed by the modern cultural environment we live in. This year, our topic was Raising Free Sons and Daughters. In an age of personal media devices and cultural individualism, both parents and youth struggle to live a life that is free and generous amidst our modern culture. As Christians, we know that freedom is the capacity and ability to choose for what is truly good, and true freedom is ordered toward truth, goodness, and human flourishing.

Our culture, however, often presents a thinner version of freedom – equating happiness with unlimited choice and self-expression. Passive media consumption erodes our ability to create and freely use our time. Digital AI, when overused, can diminish our capacity for critical thinking and pull us away from what is real and human. A growing trend of safety-first consciousness is removing our children’s ability to grow resilience. Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) talks about the dangers of this over-emphasis:

“Children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance.”

Scripture reminds us that perseverance and maturity are forged through trials, not avoidance of them – “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4. Freedom and safety are not mutually exclusive, but the conditions you have to create to guarantee safety are at odds with the opportunities needed to develop freedom.

And yet, we have great hope! Enriching friend groups and family life can provide a place to counteract these challenges. Here
are some ideas you could try:

• Ask the question – ‘What are the inputs forming my child’s understanding of themselves, the world, and God?’. Find stories that point toward virtue and truth, and surround them with real-life models of mature, faithful people.

 

• Look for fun opportunities to build freedom. Aim for age-appropriate opportunities, involving some level of risk, responsibility and/or boredom. This allows youth to practice choosing the good, even when it involves struggle or failure.

 

• Find time for more relaxed, open conversation. Youth should not feel the need to guard everything they say or be defensive, they should be open handed and free in conversation.

We hope these simple yet profound steps can draw our youth closer to a life that is truly free, joyful and courageous in serving the Lord! As always, thank you for your support!

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am pleased to share with you this year’s annual programs brochure. As usual, the main goal here is simply to communicate the details of our upcoming lineup of trips and retreats, but there are a few other things inside that we think you’ll enjoy.

On pages 5 and 6 you can read about what Kairos has been up to in the “non-trip” space, specifically our parent and youth worker offerings. On page 21 we share an extended testimony from a former Gapper about how her Gap year helped to bring her deeper into the “glorious freedom of the children of God.” Finally, beginning on page 23 we present a write-up on “bridging after high school,” which can be a very helpful kickstarter for that season of decisions.

On behalf of the Kairos team, thank you so much for all that you do to serve the young people of the Sword of the Spirit. Whether you are a parent, a community leader, or a youth worker, we are blessed to work alongside you. We pray every week for all of you and for the young people in your care, specifically that they would grow into radical, lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ.

God Bless You,
Stephen Giles
Director of Kairos

Our summer girl’s trips this year were filled with beauty, challenge and sisterhood!

Our ninth and tenth grade girls canoed and camped in the beautiful Boundary Waters Canoe Area at the Minnesota-Canada border. Part of the beauty of this trip is that each girl is able to see that their own strength, infused with God’s grace, is able to accomplish more than they thought they could, all while serving one another and having fun!

The seventh and eighth grade girls went glamping and hiking in Upstate New York! The campsite at Stony Brook State Park was surrounded by gorges and waterfalls, and we hiked at ‘the Grand Canyon of the East’ at Letchworth State Park.

Our boys summer trips were full of adventure and brotherhood! A key Bible passage was Luke 6:45 “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart.”

Virginia Backpacking (7th grade): We “lived in a cloud” all week, but it never rained heavily! Our group time was great, including some excellent Bible study.

Algonquin Canada Canoeing (8th grade): We have a new “lava cake” recipe (brownie mix with oil but no eggs). Weather was calm until the last day, allowing us to jump off cliffs twice.

Wyoming Backpacking (9th grade): The Wyoming trip is one-half road trip and one-half backpacking.

Kentucky Mission Trip (10th grade): The project was to re-floor an entire house in Pikeville, KY, and we enjoyed the surrounding mountains.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Thank you so much for your partnership with Kairos in our mission to bring young people into a life of deep and radical discipleship. I am pleased to present this brochure to you once again and excited for everything that we have in store.

Most of the pictures in this brochure were taken on Kairos trips from this past summer. Sorting through all the pictures filled me with gratitude as I considered all the ways God is using Kairos in the lives of our young people. We have spoken regularly about our desire to foster a love for the real through everything that we do. It was clear as I looked through the pictures from last summer that we are indeed providing simple, but powerful opportunities to love the real on all of our trips. In a world that continues to forget the real, these simple opportunities will continue to grow all the more powerful.

While our summer trips do not constitute everything that we do in Kairos, they are a major piece, and I’m pleased to say that last summer was our fullest summer yet. We are excited to share with you in the following pages all that we have planned for the coming year. It is our prayer that each of our trips and programs will continue to bear rich fruit for our young people and their families

God Bless You,
Stephen Giles
Director of Kairos

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am very excited to be able to share this brochure with you, and it is my hope that you find it to be a helpful resource. Inside, you will find information on almost everything Kairos has to offer, including parent and youth worker resources, the YES Retreat, Adventure Trips, Gap, and more.

One of our growing convictions as an organization is that we want to foster a love for the real, as opposed to the virtual and the artificial. This is one of the reasons we love our Adventure Trips and the opportunities for challenge they present. They help us love the real and embrace the challenges we face along the way.

In addition to our Adventure Trips, we’ve also begun to add some mission trips back into the mix. Our mission trips will be the 10th grade boys trip, and the 9th-10th grade girls trip (on alternating years). Mission trips are powerful opportunities that can produce real transformation and we’re excited to be offering them once again.

Our mission in Kairos is to awaken youth to a venturesome faith and to help them sell all to follow Jesus Christ. It is a joy to do this work and we are so grateful to do it alongside all of you.

God Bless You,
Stephen Giles
Director of Kairos

At Kairos, our mission is to awaken young people to a venturesome faith, and we believe that high-adventure outdoor experiences are an excellent starting point to achieve this aim. That’s why we’ve been expanding our girls’ programs by offering a growing suite of adventure trips. However, to make these trips possible, we need your help!

We’re raising $3,000 to expand our store of camping gear, including tents, sleeping bags, cookware, and backpacks. With your contribution, you can directly support our efforts to provide these essential supplies to our girls’ camping trips.

Thank you for your generosity!

Donate

As a token of our appreciation, we’re offering a cool bumper sticker to anyone who makes a gift to our camping gear fundraiser. And for those who donate $500 or more, we’ll send you a Yeti Thermos with the Kairos logo.

Dear Friends:

Greetings in the beautiful month of July! We are very much in the midst of our summer trips. We just finished a 9th grade girls trip to New York state. They spent several days hiking in the beautiful mountains and did a exciting rafting excursion together. The second half of the trip was spent doing service with a charitable organization in New York City. We will report on that in a subsequent issue.

For the boys’ trips, we have two intrepid guys serving as Kairos Adventure Guides this summer. Thomas (Tommy) Bielejeski, from Minnesota, and John (Johny) Touhill, from New Jersey, are serving as staff for all four trips. See the back side of this page for a copy of their very busy summer—they only have six free days (probably spent doing laundry and sleeping)!

Adventure Guides program director Stephen Giles recruited and set up the schedule for this year’s Guides. He led a training week with them when they arrived in Lansing mid June, which included a hike along the Lake Michigan shoreline (see pictures). I was able to go with them on the hike—great time.

Brian LaLonde and Stan Mathay—our seasoned trip leaders—are heading the 7th, 8th, and 9th grade trips. Stephen is heading the 10th grade trip, where they will take nine young men to New Hampshire to do trail building work in the White Mountains. This will be a challenging trip, and will be a great opportunity for the young men to grow in brotherhood as they learn to embrace discomfort alongside one another (yup, we got nine boys to sign on!).

Thank you so much for your support of our mission of calling young people to Christ and helping them become life-long disciples. We very much appreciate your prayers and financial support!

Yours in Christ,

James Munk
Kairos Director