By Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
One of the strongest programs in our church these days is the teen youth work of the Swedenborgian Church Youth League (SCYL), led by our Youth Director Kurt Fekete, who has also been the vice president of the denomination for many years. This is the national group that spans coast to coast, and they gather for retreats and trips that have become, by their own testimony, deeply formative for their lives, and of course for their spiritual life. There is an annual gathering on Memorial Day weekend at the Almont New Church Assembly in rural Michigan, which also typically features a mid-winter retreat as well. And routinely they meet in places such as the Cedar Hill Retreat Center in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and even in Europe when they joined teen groups from the UK, Germany, and the Czech Republic for an International Summer Camp that met at the rural Swedenborgian Purley Chase Retreat Centre in England (see “International Summer Camp 2025: Fun, Faith, and Friendship” by Kurt Fekete in The Messenger).
This past summer, the youth league led a special service for the whole convention that involved tremendous creativity, but one feature that stood out for me was the testimonies of several youth about the centrality of SCYL in their lives and how they knew very few peers who had something like this group and formation place in their lives. A distinctive feature of our denomination, in fact, is our annual summer intergenerational camps. All denominations have summer camps and retreats, but the vast majority are for specific age groups: they are either youth retreats, adult retreats, or multigenerational retreats, but not intergenerational in programming. Our current three (Fryeburg, Almont, and Paulhaven) have been going for more than a century and two of them represent a profound space of intergenerational activity that offers a special place for exploring the big questions of meaning together through the weekly themes.
The youth retreats are always centered around spiritual formation in creative, fun, and serious ways. We have special Swedenborgian insights about the spiritual issues of development in these years that have been shaped through the curriculum of the multi-year, six-volume Bible Study Notes by Anita Dole, along with many other resources. These provide an understanding of spiritual formation issues appropriate to the various ages from young childhood to adulthood. They are all Bible-based, but they emphasize personal engagement and creative conversation.
I want to give some voice and vision to the long and deep structural programming that the church maintains to ensure that our teen youth, whose relatively small numbers are flung across far-apart spaces, have regular ways of gathering in special places to develop relationships, have tremendous fun together, and especially spend time on the truly important questions of life together with such skilled and responsible leadership as our Youth Director, Kurt Fekete, and his helpers provide.
—Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
Read the full October 2026 issue.
Meet Jim Lawrence
Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence is the president of the Swedenborgian Church of North America. He was the dean of the Center for Swedenborgian Studies for 21 years prior to being elected President in 2022.
