It has been a while since the last edition of The Chimes—all the way back at Easter. Rather than trying to catch up on everything that has happened since then, this edition is going to focus on one particular part of our life together at Luther Memorial: our young people.
And they have been busy.
Over the past several months, our children and youth have worshiped, served, traveled, learned, played, raised money, made new friends, deepened old friendships, grown in faith, welcomed new members of our church family, and helped lead the congregation.
Some of these experiences took them away from Quincy. Others happened right here at Luther Memorial or just a few blocks away. Some were clearly “church things”—Confirmation Camp, Vacation Bible School, a mission trip, worship. Others were simply opportunities to have fun together and build relationships.
All of them are part of the larger calling we share as a congregation: helping our young people grow in faith and into lives of discipleship.
So this edition of The Chimes is a chance to look back at some of the ways that calling has taken shape over the past several months.
And what a few months they have been.
Making it possible
Support with a little fun along the way.
≈ $400Pancheros
≈ $350Inside-Out Car Wash
≈ $400Bingo Night
Roughly $1,150 together
Before the trips were packed, before camp began, and before summer activities got underway, there was another important part of the story: raising the money that helped make so much of it possible.
Our youth, families, and congregation took part in several fundraisers this spring and early summer, and each one managed to combine support for youth ministry with a little fun along the way.
At our Pancheros fundraiser, members and friends of Luther Memorial gathered for dinner—or picked up food to take home—and helped raise approximately $400 for youth activities simply by enjoying a meal together.
Then came the Inside-Out Car Wash. Instead of washing the outside of vehicles, our youth tackled the part many of us would probably rather not think about: the inside. They vacuumed, picked up trash, cleaned things out, and helped make cars a little more presentable. The March event raised approximately $350.
In June, the fun moved to the Eagles Club for Bingo Night. Our youth helped sell bingo cards and 50/50 tickets, greeted people from both the congregation and the wider community, and helped keep the evening moving. Pastor Brett and Isaac Gosteli served as bingo callers. By the end of the night, another approximately $400 had been raised for youth ministry.
Together, those three events brought in roughly $1,150. More important than the number alone, however, was what those gifts made possible. Fundraising helped offset the costs of camps, trips, and other youth activities so that many of the experiences described throughout this newsletter could happen.
Thank you to everyone who ate a burrito, brought us a messy car, bought a bingo card or 50/50 ticket, volunteered, donated, or supported our young people in any other way. You helped make this summer possible.
Confirmation & camp
Faith practiced. Community formed.
Serving close to home
Sometimes discipleship looks as ordinary as carrying a trash bag through the neighborhood.
Not every service project requires traveling far from home.
In May, confirmation students from Luther Memorial and Christ Lutheran spent time serving right here in our neighborhood by walking the streets around the church and picking up trash.
It was a simple project, but an important one. Caring for the community around us is one way our young people learn that service is not something reserved for mission trips or special events. Sometimes it looks like noticing what is right in front of us and doing what we can to make things a little better.
The project also gave the confirmands from our two congregations another opportunity to work together, strengthening the relationships they have been building through shared confirmation ministry.
Faith is not only something we learn about. It is something we practice—and sometimes discipleship looks as ordinary as carrying a trash bag through the neighborhood.
Crossways Confirmation Camp
Forgiveness & reconciliation … and Whitey’s
Abby Buettner · Abigail Gosteli · Evan Gosteli · Tucker Casley · Cooper Hamby · Isaac Gosteli, Mentor Camper · Pastor Brett, adult leader
Five Luther Memorial youth—Abby Buettner, Abigail Gosteli, Evan Gosteli, Tucker Casley, and Cooper Hamby—traveled to Augustana College this summer as campers at Crossways Confirmation Camp.
They were joined by Isaac Gosteli, who returned in a different role this year as a Mentor Camper. Mentor Campers are youth leaders rather than regular campers, taking on additional responsibility for helping support and supervise other campers throughout the week. Pastor Brett accompanied the LMC group as well.
Over five nights, campers joined young people from other congregations for worship, small-group activities, learning, service projects in the community, and plenty of time to build friendships. For many of the youth, one of the joys of camp is getting to spend time with people they might otherwise see only occasionally during the year.
Faith lived together
This year’s learning centered on forgiveness and reconciliation: what it means to seek forgiveness, to forgive others, to repair relationships, and to trust in the forgiveness God gives us.
Those are not always easy topics. Forgiveness can be difficult, relationships can be messy, and reconciliation takes work. Camp gave our youth space to explore those questions together—not only as ideas, but as part of their own relationships with one another and with God.
“Following Jesus is not something they have to do alone.”
Camp becomes community
Of course, Confirmation Camp is never only serious conversation.
There was plenty of fun mixed in, too: Wacky Olympics, bowling, pizza at Happy Joe’s, and a stop at Whitey’s for ice cream, along with all the laughter and downtime that turn a group of campers into a community.
More than anything, Confirmation Camp is one of the places where faith becomes something lived together. Our young people learn, ask questions, serve, make friends, worship with the wider church, and discover that following Jesus is not something they have to do alone.
And with Isaac serving as a Mentor Camper, this year also offered a glimpse of something we hope happens as our young people grow: those who have been formed and encouraged by these experiences beginning to take responsibility for helping guide those who come after them.
Learning to lead
Leadership Lab
For Olivia Snider, Connor Casley, Addie Gosteli, Isaac Gosteli, and Mekhi Yu, another stop on this summer’s journey was Leadership Lab, held at Augustana College.
Leadership Lab is a little different from a traditional church camp. Its purpose is right there in the name: it is a place for young people to actually practice leadership while growing in faith and experiencing Christian community.
Throughout the week, participants worship together, spend time in small groups, build relationships, and develop skills they can carry back into their churches, schools, and communities. Depending on their age and experience, Lab participants explore everything from teamwork and planning Bible studies and youth activities to prayer, spiritual gifts, sharing their own faith stories, service, and communication.
Part of Christ’s church now
But ask someone who loves Leadership Lab what makes it special, and the answer is likely to be about more than the curriculum.
For returning participants, Lab means seeing friends they may have met in previous years and welcoming newcomers into a community that quickly becomes something special. Our youth described it as an inviting and joyful place—a chance to reconnect with friends while also going deeper in their faith and their relationship with God.
That combination matters.
The church needs young people who know that they are not simply the church of some distant future. They are part of Christ’s church now. Experiences like Leadership Lab give them room to discover their gifts, practice using them, learn from others, and imagine the ways God might be calling them to lead.
And, as we would see again before the summer was over, they would have opportunities to put some of that leadership into practice right here at Luther Memorial.
Young people are not simply the church of some distant future. They are part of Christ’s church now.
Vacation Bible School 2026
Road Trip!
≈ 20Children
≈ 20Adult volunteers
This summer, approximately 20 children joined us for our Road Trip! Vacation Bible School, traveling through a week filled with Bible stories, science, crafts, recreation, conversation, and plenty of fun.
That number was smaller than some recent years, when more than 40 children have filled the building. But something wonderful happened because of it.
Instead of feeling as though we were simply trying to keep a large crowd moving from one station to the next, our volunteers had more opportunities to actually get to know the children. There was time for conversations, time to listen, and time to build relationships—not only with visitors and guests, but even among children and adults who are already part of Luther Memorial.
In other words, smaller did not mean less.
Youth helped lead, too: Evan Gosteli served as an assistant with the red group.
Smaller did not mean less
Nearly 20 adults helped make the week possible, serving as station leaders and crew leaders, preparing snacks, handling registration, planning and administration, managing technology, and taking care of the countless details that make VBS work.
Our youth were part of that leadership, too. Evan Gosteli served as an assistant with the red group and saw firsthand that the children could be having fun while also learning about God. Along the way there were science experiments, crafts, recreation, conversations with Scout and Navigator Emily about parks, squirrels, God—and plenty of “God sightings” as participants learned to recognize ways God was present around them.
Vacation Bible School is easy to measure by attendance numbers. But numbers only tell part of the story.
This year gave us a reminder that one of the most important things the church can offer children is something that cannot be counted quite so easily: relationships with adults and young people who know them, care about them, share faith with them, and help them discover that they have a place in the family of God.
For that, we are tremendously grateful to every person who helped make Road Trip! possible.
Group Mission Trip · Wheaton, Illinois
Illuminate
Connor Casley · Tucker Casley · Olivia Snider · Evan Gosteli · Abigail Gosteli · Isabella Trapini · Amber Casley · Mark Snider · Jason Washington
For six Luther Memorial youth, one of the biggest adventures of the summer came in July, when Connor and Tucker Casley, Olivia Snider, Evan and Abigail Gosteli, and Isabella Trapini traveled to Wheaton, Illinois, for a weeklong Group Mission Trip.
They were accompanied by Amber Casley, Mark Snider, and Jason Washington.
The theme for the week was Illuminate—a fitting word for a week centered on discovering how the light of Christ can be reflected through service, relationships, worship, and life together.
Service becomes encounter
Throughout the week, the group served in several different settings around the Wheaton area. They worked in food pantries, nursing homes, and a center serving adults with disabilities, meeting people whose lives and experiences were different from their own and lending their hands wherever they were needed.
Mission trips are often remembered for the work that gets accomplished, but the deeper impact usually comes through the people encountered along the way. Service becomes more than finishing a task. It becomes a chance to listen, to learn, to recognize the dignity of another person, and to discover that God is already at work in places we might never otherwise have visited.
And the week was not only about going out to serve.
The group also ate meals together, worshiped together, spent time with youth and adults from other places, made new friends, and built stronger relationships with one another.
A temporary Christian community
Those ordinary moments of life together are an important part of the experience. A mission trip creates a kind of temporary Christian community in which young people serve side by side, reflect on what they are experiencing, worship at the end of a long day, laugh together, and learn what it means to depend on one another.
They came home with new friends and plenty of great memories.
Some of those memories had very little to do with the work sites.
Among the group favorites were a night at Medieval Times and a stop at Wally’s—reminders that sometimes the conversations and laughter that happen between the “important” parts of a trip become important parts themselves.
Light carried—and discovered
That balance of service, worship, friendship, fun, and faith is one of the things that makes experiences like this so valuable. Our young people were not simply sent somewhere to complete volunteer hours. They were given an opportunity to step outside their normal routines, encounter people and communities they might not otherwise know, serve alongside one another, and think more deeply about what it means to follow Jesus.
The theme Illuminate reminds us that Christ calls us to carry light into the world—but mission trips also teach us that we do not take God into places where God is absent.
Again and again, we discover that Christ is already there: in the people we meet, in the people we serve beside, in acts of kindness and hospitality, and sometimes in the people we thought we were going there to help.
Our young people went to Wheaton to serve.
They also came home having been served, challenged, encouraged, and changed by the people and experiences they encountered along the way.
And that is what mission is supposed to do.
July 30 · Fellowship and fun
A night at the ballpark
≈ 50friends · two churches · one summer night
Not every youth event needs a lesson plan, a service project, or a packed schedule.
Sometimes it is enough simply to be together.
On July 30, members and friends of Luther Memorial headed to the ballpark for a night of baseball, food, conversation, and summer fun. By happy coincidence, Christ Lutheran Church had planned its own outing for the same night, so the two congregations ended up sitting together—about 25 people from each church, roughly 50 in all.
The evening also included a familiar face on the field. Lola Washington’s dance troupe from the Kroc Center performed between innings, giving the LMC crowd one more reason to cheer.
There was no larger agenda for the evening. No one was raising money. No one was completing a service project. No one was studying a Bible passage.
We were simply enjoying one another’s company.
And that matters, too.
Church community is built not only in classrooms and worship services, but also in the conversations that happen in the stands, in shared laughter, and in the ordinary experience of spending time together.
Sometimes ministry looks like service. Sometimes it looks like worship. And sometimes it looks like a summer evening at the ballpark.
A new school year
Blessed as they go
Students and educators came forward on August 9 to receive a blessing.
As summer began to wind down and another school year approached, Luther Memorial took time during worship on August 9 to pray for the students and educators in our congregation.
Students, teachers, and others preparing to return to classrooms came forward with backpacks, book bags, and work bags to receive a blessing. Each received an LMC bag tag as a small reminder that wherever the school year takes them, their church family is praying for them.
The blessing recognizes something important: faith does not stay inside the church building on Sunday morning.
Our young people carry it with them into classrooms, hallways, practice fields, cafeterias, workplaces, dorm rooms, and all the places where they will spend their days. Our teachers and school staff carry their vocations into those same spaces as they care for, challenge, encourage, and guide the young people entrusted to them.
That morning also marked a particularly important transition for Addie Gosteli, as Luther Memorial prepared to send her off to Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Addie shared one more gift with the congregation before leaving, singing and playing a solo during the offering.
Sending a young person away to college is both exciting and bittersweet. We celebrate the new opportunities ahead while remembering that the faith community that helped nurture them does not disappear when they leave home.
We continue to pray for them, encourage them, welcome them home—and remind them that wherever they go, they remain part of this community of faith.
Our very youngest youth
Welcome, Cooper and Thomas
Aug. 23 · Cooper’s Baptism
Our summer youth story would not be complete without remembering two of its newest—and smallest—participants.
On August 23, Cooper Thomas Hugunin was baptized at Luther Memorial, surrounded by his family and the congregation that promised to help nurture him in the Christian faith.
That same day, Cooper’s parents, Grady and Alexis Hugunin, affirmed their own baptisms and were welcomed as members of Luther Memorial.
Baptism is not simply a beautiful moment for one family. It is also a moment when the church remembers who we are together.
Parents make promises to nurture their children in faith. And the congregation promises to walk with them.
Aug. 24 · Thomas arrives
One day later, on August 24, another new member of our extended church family arrived. Thomas James Moon, son of Chandler and Kara Moon, was born, joining big sister Charlotte “Charlie” and big brother Lane.
Thomas and Cooper may be a few years away from Confirmation Camp, Leadership Lab, mission trips, or youth-led worship.
But their stories belong in this issue all the same.
Because youth ministry does not begin when a child enters middle school.
It begins when the church first surrounds a child and family with love, prayer, welcome, and a promise:
We will walk with you as you grow in faith.
August 30 · Worship Our Way
From being led to leading
The young people we have been leading begin to lead us.
On August 30, many of the young people whose stories fill these pages helped lead Luther Memorial in worship.
They served as assistant minister, lectors, presenters, ushers, and acolytes. They shared stories from Confirmation Camp, Leadership Lab, Vacation Bible School, the mission trip, and the fundraisers that helped make those experiences possible. Worship leaned more heavily into contemporary and praise music than a typical Sunday, giving the service a feel that reflected many of the songs and experiences our youth had encountered throughout the summer.
It would be easy to look at a service like that and simply say, “Look what our kids can do.”
But there is something much more important happening.
Throughout this issue, we have seen young people being taught, encouraged, challenged, welcomed, prayed for, sent out, and invited into experiences where faith could become something more than words on a page.
That is not accidental.
It is part of what we promise to one another in baptism.
When parents bring an infant to the font, they promise to nurture that child in the Christian faith. When older children or adults are baptized, they take up those promises for themselves. In affirmation of baptism—including confirmation—young people claim those promises as their own.
And every time someone is baptized, the congregation makes promises, too.
We promise to support them. To pray for them. To help them grow in faith. To surround them with a community in which they can hear the story of Jesus, learn what it means to follow him, discover their gifts, ask questions, struggle, serve, worship, and gradually grow into lives of discipleship.
That means youth ministry is not something the congregation hires a pastor or a few volunteers to do on its behalf.
It belongs to all of us.
It happens when someone contributes to a fundraiser so a young person can afford to go to camp.
It happens when an adult gives up a week to accompany youth on a mission trip.
It happens when 20 volunteers show up to make Vacation Bible School possible.
It happens when someone teaches, drives, cooks, cleans, plans, listens, prays, encourages, or simply takes the time to learn a young person’s name and know something about their life.
And eventually, something wonderful begins to happen.
They read Scripture.
They lead prayer.
They serve at the altar.
They welcome people through the doors.
They share their stories.
They sing.
They speak about their faith.
They help the rest of us see God at work through their eyes.
That is not the end of youth ministry.
It is one of its fruits.
Our goal is not simply to keep young people involved until they graduate. It is to help them grow into disciples of Jesus Christ—people who know they are loved by God, understand that they have gifts to offer, recognize that they are part of something larger than themselves, and are learning to live their faith in the world.
The youth who led worship on August 30 are still learning.
So are the adults who sat in the pews.
That may be one of the most important things we can remember.
The promises we make at baptism are not promises that one generation has all the answers and passes them down to the next. They are promises that we will walk together in faith, helping one another follow Jesus.
This summer, Luther Memorial’s young people gave us a beautiful glimpse of what that can look like.
Now our responsibility is to keep walking with them.
