Wilderness race builds interest in missions

By Frank Stirk  |  Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Participants compete in one of the previous winter competitions. PHOTO: WYCLIFFE CANADA

CALGARY, AB—For years, Derryl Friesen, the national coordinator of NextGen Ministries, has been wrestling with how to attract young adults—men in particular—to become career pioneer missionaries with NextGen's parent organization, Wycliffe Canada.

The answer came to him in 2007 during a trip to the Rockies: an adventure race. Watching young adults hooked on wilderness adventure, Friesen realized this was just the demographic he had been trying to reach.

"I wondered if there would be some way of building a bridge between the adventure of an adrenaline sport and the true adventure to which Christ calls His Church," he explains.
The result is the twice-annual Race to 2025, named after Wycliffe's vision of seeing a Bible-translation work started in every language group that still needs it by 2025.

NextGen hosts races in both winter and summer. This year's winter race takes place at Frontier Lodge, a Christian wilderness adventure camp near Nordegg, Alberta.

Competitors must climb a frozen waterfall, rappel down cliffs, snowshoe over frozen creeks and sleep in a snow shelter before finding a "Bibleless village" that represents the cultural community Wycliffe is focusing on this year. Once they find these people, competitors have to complete tasks that simulate learning the local language and sharing God's Word before heading for the finish line.

Last year the "villagers" were acted by members of a Punjabi church. The ethnicity of this year's village is a closely guarded secret.

So many people signed up for the first race in 2007 that organizers expanded it to two back-to-back races on weekends in February. Seven co-ed teams of four have signed up for the first weekend and nine for the second.

Most participants are students between 18 and 28 years old. Most are male.

One of their goals is to raise at least $2,000 per team for a particular Bible-translation project somewhere in the world. This year's project targets a country in South Asia that can't be named for security reasons.

When possible, the remote mountain "village" the teams encounter is comprised of local Christian members of that ethnic community.

"At the closing ceremony, we have them share the worship songs in their own mother tongue," Friesen says. "That's one of the most powerful moments of the weekend—when people go, 'Oh, that's why we're doing this!'"

Last year's race saw 12 teams raise a total of $50,000 toward a project in India.

Winners can use the prizes donated by the race's corporate sponsors to pay down student loans—one of the main obstacles to their entering the mission field—or for a short-term missions trip. Several students have also been able to spend a summer at the Canada Institute of Linguistics at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C.

But the ultimate goal remains finding new recruits for Wycliffe's various ministries. "We would like to see dozens of young people hearing for the first time about the kinds of opportunities to serve, not only in Bible-translation and literacy, but also in all sorts of trades and support services in the Bible-translation movement," says Friesen.

At the very least, Friesen says the 200 or so race participants to date have become powerful advocates of the need for Bible-translation.

"They're making presentations to their chapels, to their mission boards, to friends. They have Facebook groups," he says. "We figure at least 5,000 people across the country have heard about Wycliffe and about Bibleless peoples through these young people."

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