by Shelley Byrnes and the youth pilgrimage cohort
Dovra Dosli! (Welcome! in Croatian)
Pilgrimage is different than traveling as a tourist. Pilgrimage is about waking up and paying attention to our lives. It involves focused awareness and desire to be present in our search for God.
We have six youth group students committed to going on a spiritual pilgrimage over June 24 – July 2, 2025. They are: Edgar, Eli, Atticus, Henrik, Sven, and Jude. As this will likely be a life-changing experience for our pilgrims, we would like to share the details with the rest of St John’s and ask not only for their financial support but also prayer support as we work toward the trip itself.
Choosing a Destination
As students, we narrowed the location to three possibilities and then negotiated among ourselves to settle on Croatia as our final destination. Some reasons we chose Croatia are:
- A pilgrimage to Croatia will be an exceptional and potentially life changing spiritual experience in nature
- It will give us ample unstructured time where we can find God in our own ways
- It is more cost-effective than to other sites
- Safe, clean
- English-speaking
Planning an Itinerary
Our full itinerary will be solidified in August but here are some possible sites for us to see:
In the year 295 AD, the Roman emperor Diocletian began building his retirement palace on the main harbor in what is now the city of Split, Croatia.
The ancient Roman city of Salona was modeled after Rome herself, and still bears the traces of early Christianity and the work of Titus and the Apostle Paul.
It will be a journey of a lifetime to travel to the central Dalmatian region and absorb the impact of the earliest days of the Christian faith. We will engage the culture as pioneers, and learn new and illuminating things about the history of the church. We will mingle with the local inhabitants as we seek to see the face of Christ in their faces.
Preparing for the Pilgrimage
These pilgrims are preparing by:
- learning about pilgrimages in the Bible and their purposes
- deciding together where they want to go to meet God in a new way and creating a group covenant for the pilgrimage
- and fundraising as a group and individually to cover the cost of the trip
Raising Funds for the Journey
Obviously, one of the big questions is, “how much will this cost?” Traditionally, the cost is split three ways: 1/3 covered by St. John’s, 1/3 covered by the pilgrims’ families, and the final 1/3 fundraised by the students. Here is our breakdown:
Total for Wonder Voyage pilgrimage: $25,800
Total for flights: $17,800
Total trip cost: $43,600
Total fundraising goal: $14,533
How Can I Help the Pilgrims?
Tentatively, we have the following fundraisers planned. Please consider attending as many of these events as you can!
- Coffee hour with Croatian Food (August 25 Blessing of the Backpacks)
- Envelopes fundraiser (September 25 Gathering Sunday)
- This starts out with 100 envelopes. The numbers on the Envelope start at 100 and decrease by one (100, 99, 98, 97, 96…)
- Each envelope corresponds with an amount of money in dollars.
- Supporters can pick envelopes and donate the corresponding amount to the pilgrimage (i.e., pick 80 and 20 and donate $100!)
- Beowulf and silent auction (October 23, 2024)
- Poinsettias/greens sales (October 2024)
- Pancake Supper (March 4, 2025)
- Fish Fry (Lent 2025)
Another way to help us reach our goals is for you to donate to our silent auction (October 23, 2024) If you have a favorite restaurant, theater, rock-climbing gym, or cabin that you visit, please consider asking them to donate to our silent auction. We will advertise for them and offer tax deduction forms for any vendors who donate. If you have a creative talent you can share, please make something to be auctioned. Contact [email protected] to get on our silent auction list or with any questions about the pilgrimage.
In the meantime, keep our pilgrims in your prayers as they prepare for this spiritual journey:
O God,
you called the whole world into being with a word;
you called Abraham to leave his home, Ur of the Chaldeans, to follow you to an unseen place;
you called Ruth out of her homeland to seek you in a place of strangers;
you call us out of ourselves, to new places we have not foreseen.We take comfort that those who have gone before us in pilgrimages, both chosen and unchosen, have found that everywhere they go, you are already there.
O God,
May new places help us see you in new light;
may unfamiliar sights free us to see ourselves in new perspective;
may the journey together teach us to see in one another your presence.Amen.
Hvala! (Thank you!)
