While many students spend their Easter break in choice vacation destinations or relaxing at home, some chose to spend their week a different way. Committing their Easter vacation to serving their community, students from all over Fresno County gathered at the Peoples Church campus for the sixth annual BreakAway Spring Outreach, April 13-17.

The event hosted over 300 junior high and high school students of four different churches from all over California, including: Peoples Church (PC), Hope Lutheran Church of Fresno, Immanuel Lutheran Church from Easton and Christ Community Church, located in the northern Californian city of Carmichael.

PC Connections Pastor Matt Markarian has headed up the event since it began in 2009. He hopes that, through the event, students will be able to invest their vacation in worthwhile activities that will impact the world around them.

“I’ve always had a calling to serve our city,” Markarian said. “Knowing some dumb things I did during Spring Break, we thought this would be a perfect opportunity for students to go out and serve and still have a great time. I love all of the connections and friendships that are made, where students go out all day and work side by side, because it’s a shared experience with friends you wouldn’t normally rub elbows with.”

Markarian realizes that it is easy for anyone to be critical toward those who have less or are different than them, but hopes the students gain a different perspective.

“When you serve other people it’s hard to be judgmental and prejudiced against those you’re serving,” Markarian said. “Service brings down barriers, shows that we’re all uniquely and wonderfully made in Christ and helps us bond and stay focused. We have a saying around here, that ‘it’s important that we keep the main thing the main thing,’ and BreakAway helps us do that.”

Having attended the event in previous years, PC sophomore Alexis Kalugin decided again to give up part of her vacation to serve the people in her community.

“Ultimately our lives should be lived as if it is just you and Jesus in the world,” Kalugin said. “I came to draw closer to God and serve the community. I would say that giving up my Easter break is worth it because I would much rather draw closer to God and help others than sit around my house.”

Although students were rudely awakened each morning by honking car horns and shouting leaders, they were rewarded by a hot breakfast prepared by volunteers. After a short morning chapel to prepare them for a day of service, students headed out to their worksites, armed with shovels, Vacation Bible School (VBS) supplies, sports equipment and sack lunches.

Spreading out all over Fresno County, the churches covered nine total sites. Christ Community headed out to the farming town of Orange Cove to complete various construction and repair jobs, Hope Lutheran held a VBS at Whispering Woods, an apartment complex down the street from their church and Immanuel Lutheran hosted a community lunch and VBS at their campus.

PC reached out to six locations and organizations, holding Vacation Bible Schools and lunches at Selma’s Salazar Community Center, Biola Elementary and Heaton Elementary. Students also worked to complete construction projects and yard work in the Field of Dreams, a site in progress that will have a house for missionaries and a sports complex hosting leagues and camps for low income families, all with the ultimate goal of sharing the gospel. Finally, with the Fresno Fire Department (FFD), a group helped to fix up a training and practice facility in downtown Fresno, cleaned a couple of fire engines and installed smoke detectors in a mobile home park.

When students arrived back at base camp, they were greeted with a shower, dinner and a time of worship led by a Peoples Church student ministries band and a message from BreakAway’s 2014 speaker, Pastor Brent Deffenbacher. Deffenbacher spoke throughout the week about the calling, or “kaleo,” that God has placed on the lives of believers to love and serve those around them, just as Christ did.

“Christ’s ‘kaleo,’ His calling on our lives is to follow in his steps even in the hard times, and to stand by what we believe, regardless of the opposition and push back that we will experience,” Deffenbacher said. “As his called-out, relabeled disciples, we have an opportunity to carry our cross, and that becomes our purpose.”

As the week progressed, Deffenbacher was pleased to see the students applying what they had learned in chapel to their work at each of their sites.

“This week, students have been living out the call of Jesus to be his disciples,” Deffenbacher said. “In John, Jesus says that people will know you’re his disciples by your love for each other, and it’s been really encouraging to see students practically and tangibly loving each other, serving each other, encouraging each other, praying for each other and helping each other out.”

FFD firefighter Jay Tracy greatly appreciated the help of the students, as many of the projects they worked are not usually possible with the amount of people they have on staff, yet are necessary to complete because of the high risk of fire in urban communities.

“It means a lot to the Fire Department that students are out here helping, especially because of budget cuts,” Tracy said. “We don’t always have enough man power to do some of these jobs, so when we can get bodies and send just a few out to supervise, we can achieve a lot more with a lot less. Fire percentages are huge; there are 978 structure fires per year, 2.5 per day, so anything we can do to prevent fire from happening is a benefit to us.”

Tracy says that, although the work the fire department does is crucial to the preservation of many lives for the time being, the FFD is not what will ultimately what will save their lives for eternity.

“When we go out on calls, people call us lifesavers,” Tracy said. “We don’t really do that; we just give them another chance to be saved by the one who can save. It’s a unique position, a perfect opportunity to make a life-altering change. Smoke alarms are a valuable tool to save their lives for now, but they’re also a valuable tool to save their lives forever.”

Helping the FFD team for the week, eighth grader Cayla Rivas was moved by the need she saw in her project area. Through her time serving, she became excited to be able to work alongside her friends and grow in her relationship with God in the process.

“I love serving and coming closer to God while being able to spend time with friends,” Rivas said. “There’s so much pain and need in our community that we don’t even see. We should take the time to help people because we have no clue what they’re going through.”

Josue Guevara, pastor of Iglesia PC’s church plant in Selma, was elated to receive the help of over 40 students and leaders in the annual Easter Break VBS put on for the kids in the surrounding neighborhoods.

“This week has been a huge encouragement and the students rally our kids around here,” Guevara said. “The kids are so excited. The sad part is when they ask me, ‘How long are they going to stay?'”

Although at times, the kids can appear unaffected by the time the students have spent investing in their lives, and the students often do not get to see the results of their work, Guevara says that, over time, the change in the kids’ hearts, although gradual, is evident.

“Sometimes they show a little street background and have kind of a rough, tough appearance but they are so happy inside,” Guevara said. “They have changed so much over the years. The time you guys spend is so important, and I get to reap a lot of what you guys sow. The same kids who were vandalizing my car are now coming up to me and talking.”

Deffenbacher believes that students play a crucial role in the world around them, not just for the future, but even for the present. Through BreakAway, they are able to follow God’s calling on their lives and be an example of Christ to the world around them.

“Students aren’t leaders of tomorrow, they’re leaders of today,” Deffenbacher said. “They have been called to be like Christ, to be His disciples and to follow in His steps. Jesus said He did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many, and these students are following Him and leading by serving.”

This writer can be reached on Twitter at @JennaWeimer42. Follow The Feather Online via Twitter at @thefeather.

For more information on BreakAway, see last year’s article on BreakAway 2013.

For more features, see the April 10 article, Kopi visits FC, speaks to third grade classes.