A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

at I Owe, by C. E. Fast. Most of the youth work was done, however, on a district conference level. The Central District Conference was the first to establish a district youth committee. This was in 1941. The Southern District followed shortly after, although a youth meeting for the whole district had been held as early as 1939 at the Ebenfeld M.B. Church (near Hillsboro). The Pacific District Conference was last to recognize youth work as a part of its responsibility. In 1948 the conference on the West Coast established a standing youth committee. This is not the earliest date, however, for organized young people's work in local congregations. The young people of the Bakersfield M.B. Church, for instance, had organized into a "Christian Youth Fellowship" as early as 1938. sl On the local church level youth work usually includes all or some of the following aspects, depending on the size and special needs of the group. A local Christian Fellowship organization conducts a regular program of services for young people at various age levels. In many churches these are held as an adjunct to the regular Sunday evening services. In midweek services there is usually a Bible study class for young people. All youth organizations sponsor a program of social and recreational activities adapted to the seasons. In addition, many youth groups are actively involved in a community-outreach program. The district youth committees are primarily involved in the planning and supervising of the annual youth camps in their respective districts. This phase is perhaps developed most fully in the Pacific District Conference. In both the Southern and Central districts the youth committees have also sponsored youth rallies which are held in conjunction with the annual district conferences. These rallies were designed to integrate the young people's interests more fully with the work of the larger brotherhood, and thus played a significant role in making youth and its work an integral part of the conference. When youth work became an "area" responsibility in 1954 the United States Conference at its second session in 1958 established a conference youth committee which in 1963 was renamed the Board of Youth Services. This board moved forward with vision and energy to implement the projections accepted two years earlier. First on the list was the hiring of a full-time executive secretary. This had been a major concern of the General Conference Youth Committee almost twenty years earlier. " In 1964 the Board of Youth Services was finally in a position to announce that Alan Peters had been appointed as the first Director of Youth Services. When Peters terminated his ministry at the end of 1965, the board was unable to find a replacement. During the ensuing interim (1965-68) the board sponsored "youth 232 HISTORY OF THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH caravans" which received widespread popular acceptance. The "youth caravan" cons