2013 Presbyterian Youth Triennium

I graduated high school in 1982 and that summer went to the Presbyterian Youth Celebration, an event of the Synod of the Covenant that was held at Muskingum College.  It was a grand and glorious time and is often the case with grand and glorious times as soon as it was over you begin to wonder where you can ever find an experience that will approximate that ever again.  I thought I knew.  My roommate at the Youth Celebration was Bill Robinson and he had been to a higher mountain top and returned to tell the tale.  He had been to the Presbyterian Youth Triennium at Indiana University in 1980.  It was the Synod event on a national scale and the next one would roll around the following summer, the summer of 1983, at Purdue.  So off I went to the 1983 Presbyterian Youth Triennium with the delegation from Miami Presbytery.

It was all that and a box of whatever good thing you would like in a box.

I missed 1986 - I was college age and really at an age where I was too old to be there as a youth, but not old enough to be there as an adult.  But in 1989 I was back as an adult advisor and have missed only a couple more in the process, attending as small group leader and most recently as a Dorm Dean.    One of the joys of the event is having youth from the churches I serve attend - knowing what they are going to experience and knowing that it will be memorable in one way or another for them in a very unique way in their experience in the Presbyterian church.  Like Brigadoon, it disappears into the mist after it has run its course only to mysteriously reappear three years later back at Purdue, the campus still flat and big and hot and the event still a spiritual livewire.   Last time in 2010 my son Cameron was in the window of Triennium youth age and was able to attend.  The 2013 version begins on Tuesday and my daughter Eliza will be in attendance with the Presbytery of Mid-Kentucky group.  And I will be there making sure that people are in their dorms by the appointed hours and that the folks in our dorm are accounted for and safe.  

I am one of those people who believes that Triennium is probably the best thing going in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  And that's not to say that there aren't a variety of good things going on - it is to say tha Triennium is a mind bogglingly awesome thing.  The energizers.  The worship.  The 5000 (give or take, more or less) young people.  The expectation of knowing that something awesome will happen, but not having any idea what it will be until there it is, happening.

My all time favorite Triennium moment:  One year we had, over the course of the week, heard a song from the Triennium choir called "Freedom Is Coming".  It's one of those songs that once set in motion could very well go on forever and no one would complain.  It is joyous and rollicking and exhilarating.  The time had come for the final worship.  The Music Hall went completely dark.  And then there was the sound of the choir singing "Freedom Is Coming".  You couldn't see them, you could only hear them.  And then slowly they appeared, the stage has a section that can be lowered and  so here came the choir in full voice out of the darkness, out of the recesses of the stage singing this song that would go on forever and it was pretty sweet.

Looking forward to what happens this time.