Adventure has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child I loved to explore the woods with my friends and imagine we were pirates, explorers or agents on a top secret spy mission. I’d spend countless hours in the woods both with others and by myself making forts, hiding from the enemy and exploring every ridge, valley and creek.

As I got older I was introduced to canoe tripping and loved it. There was something about heading off into the wilderness, not knowing what adventures we’d encounter on the way. The more canoe trips I experienced the more I wanted to experience them again.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a masochist who enjoys the pain that comes from paddling for 10 hours in a day or portaging a canoe by myself for more than two kilometres. There’s just something about these experiences that changed me—things happened inside of me on these trip. I grew as a person and my character began to be formed as I developed physical strength and mental endurance.

Now I’ve begun to explore how adventure is God’s idea. To prepare for a book I’m writing on this topic, I thoroughly researched the entire Bible. A series of questions served as a grid to determine if adventure examples found were appropriate to include. Each biblical example had to meet all of the four criteria:

1. A leader sets up a task or experience where
   
   
2. The outcome is unclear,
   
   
3. There’s risk for the participant and there must be thepotential for real loss, and
   
   
4. The purpose must be for positive learning in the life of the participant.

In the end, I found 114 examples in the Bible that met these criteria. These examples teach that adventure is a legitimate method of teaching truth.

This research led to a number of conclusions, including:

• Christian adventure learning takes place best in smaller groups. The majority (61 per cent) of biblical examples took place in groups of 12 or less, where multiple levels of learning can take place. Leaders often experience a different learning event along with the broader group.
  
  
• Biblical adventure often takes place over a long period of time. It took Noah many years to build the ark, followed by 150 days of flood. Or consider the 25 years Abraham waited for a son. The implication of this longer learning suggests multiple adventure experiences, happening over a longer period of time, have greater potential for long-term change.
  
  
• Key components of biblical adventure experiences include risk and choice, which are frequently used as a test of the person’s obedience and trust.
  
  
• The risks—physical, spiritual, emotional, social or financial—take us out of our comfort zones and lay a foundation that teaches trust. Christian adventure leaders use risk because it’s a building block for all relationships, but the level of risk must be appropriate to the participant. “Risks perceived to be too high by the participant can lead to high levels of anxiety and can be developmentally dysfunctional,” writes Bud Williams in Toward a Theology of Risk.
  
  
• The challenge in the adventure usually arises from the choice of the participant, which helps them in their learning process. For instance, Abraham’s challenge of moving from Ur to Canaan resulted from his choice to be obedient to God.

In the end, biblical adventure was and continues to be an effective tool to change lives or confirm the good character of people’s lives. With the Bible providing so many examples of how biblical adventure dramatically changed people’s lives, leaders should be actively looking for more opportunities to use it in their ministries today.

And this leads to a challenge for Christian adventure leaders: to continually remind themselves the fundamental goal of all adventure experiences is for changed lives. It’s easy to lose focus of this and get caught up in other issues that demand our attention. As Tim Hansel in Holy Sweat put it: we must turn our theology into biography.

Bruce Dunning is general director of Medeba Adventure Learning Centre in Haliburton, Ontario and is currently writing the tentatively titled book, Adventure is God’s Idea…Toward a Theology of Adventure. You can contact him at: bruce@medeba.com.