Westminster Ward Youth Conference 2009

We had a fantastic experience last week. It had taken so much planning and effort to arrange the meals, the drivers, the host homes, the activities that we were all worried about it actually coming to fruition as planned. We had 27 youths join us on Monday morning, for our first activity, a service project, at the dry pack cannery. They had taken orders from ward members for food storage items and collected the money, we filled the orders and returned to the church. Where we had a taco dinner and Family Home Evening, with two speakers. Then their favorite activity, Dodge ball!!! They are crazy kids, and with a 30 something Bishop they were in Heaven!!!

Tuesday we went to a water slide in Irvine, and got our first dose of H2O and sun.
Then a spaghetti dinner at the church and more volleyball, until 6p.m. when we headed to Angel Stadium for a baseball game.

By now we had two more join us so our number was 29 youths and about 10 leaders.

On Wednesday we had another service project at the beach, just picking up trash for about an hour then playing and lunch at the beach. Some of the kids aren't really into water sports all that much but they were pretty good sports. The kids were just loving the down time in between activities at the church gym. So back to the gym until the next activity, which was a guest speaker and bar-b-que at the Davis's house.

One of our most special guest speakers was Brother Chris Jones from Newport Beach. As a hobby he searches for and buys church historical artifacts. He has purchased two of the first 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon, which were published in 1830. He has a tremendous knowledge of church history, a great testimony of Joseph Smith and of the miraculous events that lead up to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. He brought his precious treasures to share with the kids and even let them handle them. (These books are worth at least 90 thousand dollars each)


When Brother Jones was testifying of the restoration of the gospel, of the wondrous and heroic acts of Joseph Smith and of the miraculous gift of the Book of Mormon the youth were all very attentive and reverent. As you can maybe see we were in between swimming events, first the beach all day, and before a back yard bar-b-que, and swim party. They were hot, tired and anxious to eat, but very interested. One young man said in his testimony on Sunday that this speaker and his testimony was his favorite part of the whole week, and we did some really fun stuff.

Our sweet Paige, excited to be photographed with the original copy. They all got a whole new appreciation of the Book of Mormon. As you can see it is a substantial book, in size, and only cost $1.75, the price was set by Moroni himself.

Hunter, being shown how to handle the book. All of the kids were very appreciative of Bro. Jones time. He stayed and had dinner with us and even hung out for another hour or so.

Here is a picture of the two original books and Kenny is holding a reproduction of the originals.