Report for Period: September 2014- October 2015

It has been a year since the new executive of the Caribbean Baptist Fellowship Youth Department has been installed and during this year I've witnessed our Caribbean youth involve themselves in some tremendous youth work in their regions. From the Baptist Convention of Guyana’s youths hosting the leadership retreat and conference to my very own Baptist Union Youth Ministry youth in Trinidad, continuing to make “Agents of Healing”, not to mention the youths of Grenada who successfully hosted their annual camp under the theme, “Arise and Fight: The battle is raging”.

Throughout the region we see the need for consistent effective leaders in youth ministry. I believe that as we continue to develop innovative ways to accomplish our goals and objectives as a youth ministry, we can achieve the building up of effective leaders.

We saw the devastation to our sister island of Dominica. Our vice-President, Brother Peter Panthier and Rev. Dave Serrant, along with the other members of their church have made it their prerogative to start rebuilding Dominica. The executive team has also made a commitment to help in whatever way we can. Through our regular updates with Bro. Peter and Pastor Dave, we will seek to mobilize the youth of the CBF to contribute the rebuilding efforts.

We are still building our community through our Facebook page and we continue to bridge the gap of communication and keeping Caribbean Baptist youth more connected by linking through Whatsapp groups on our mobile phones. We’ve also taken up the offer presented by CBF to now have our very own CBF Youth page on the new and improved CBF web site. Many have visited the site and many have approved. We are now encouraging everyone who attended the festival in Dominica, to send us photos to update our page.

As stated in the last report, we’ve inherited a challenge of establishing contacts with Baptist representatives in all the member countries. We are still seeking representatives from Anguilla, Antigua, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Martinique, Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao in order to expand our network. We have now made this challenge into one of our objectives and we are committed, as an executive, to have this list of representatives complete before our tenure is over.

After much deliberation, we have agreed on the goals we plan on executing in our three (3) year term inclusive of some goals from the previous term. Each is discussed below, including the measures taken to achieve the goal.

By: Jody McKenna, Youth President