Good work, hand in hand

“In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion …” —Philippians 1:4–6

By noon, the linoleum tables inside McCaskey High School are crowded with a gallery of preschool palms and almost-grown hands. A hand lies flat against the paper, a radiating anchor of heat on a humid July afternoon. The pencil rounds the thumb, climbs each finger, dips through the narrow valleys between them, then closes the gray perimeter at the wrist. The hand lifts. Its outline remains: graphite evidence of four ancient words—fearfully and wonderfully made. Another hand takes its place. By the end of the activity, the tables hold outline after outline, each unmistakably its own.

They belong to local migrant, refugee, and immigrant students in Millersville University’s Migrant Education Program, which provides summer academic instruction to more than 100 children and youth, from preschool through high school. The peculiar thing about leaving a mark, though, is its indifference to direction. The hand pressed to the page is not necessarily the only thing being marked.

For the sixth summer, EMM’s Kingdom Teams partnered with Millersville University’s Migrant Education Program. Among the traced hands were those of middle and high-school students who arrived Monday for Kingdom Teams, EMM’s one-week summer mission experience hosted in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Each morning begins with discipleship and education on global missions. By lunch, participants are beside Migrant Education students; afternoons move through STEAM projects, art, sports, and group games. Elsewhere in the week, they prepare and serve meals alongside local ministries and learn the practical art of prayer walking through urban environments such as Lancaster City.

Because EMM intentionally designed this program for young people, rigorous learning is balanced with fun, food, and community building. Each week offers a hands-on invitation into missional discipleship and cross-cultural service—five days of stepping outside familiar places and into what Kingdom Teams calls God’s unfinished story.

One youth leader reflected that “traditional mission trips expose students to a single culture. Kingdom Teams opened my students’ eyes to people representing more than thirty countries”—without ever leaving the United States. Another described watching his youth step into active service and grow in real time as “one of the most significant experiences of my own faith journey”. The vast geography of global mission compressed itself to the precise width of a lunch table.

For more than a month each summer, EMM Kingdom Teams welcome new youth groups week by week. Sometimes one congregation fills the week; sometimes two smaller groups share it. This summer, two congregations separated by more than three hours of highway arrived on Monday without knowing one another.

Their youth served, played, and worshiped side by side; their leaders found one another over morning coffee and, before the week ended, were already penciling joint events into calendars for the coming year. Friday would send them home, but there was already evidence of partnership: two congregations that had arrived separately were leaving with plans that required each other.

Permanence is difficult to judge on Friday. Years later, it becomes harder to miss—particularly when it walks back into McCaskey carrying newly hatched chicks. Brandon Bixler, now a McCaskey teacher, led an interactive workshop on the life cycle of chickens. The newly hatched chicks passed carefully into waiting hands as he explained the progression from egg to bird.

Years earlier, Brandon had arrived at Kingdom Teams as a high school student himself. He credits that experience with sparking his passion for teaching at McCaskey and serving immigrant youth—a remarkable consequence of his church youth group signing up for five days with EMM’s Kingdom Teams. The children held the newest stage of his lesson in their palms. Brandon, standing before them, had brought the rest of the life cycle with him.

Brandon, however, was not the only lasting EMM imprint to surface in Kingdom Teams this summer. After her time with EMM’s Advance program, Ana moved to Lancaster to live on mission while pursuing vocational training. This summer, her path through EMM converged with Kingdom Teams, where she led worship one evening each week, gathering a roomful of young voices into a common song.

The singing continued at Habecker Mennonite Church, where EMM’s Kingdom Teams joined Habecker to pilot a new Anabaptist, missional VBS curriculum. Chris and Dawn Landes’ enthusiasm for serving across cultures proved contagious: Habecker youth led crafts and activities; Kingdom Teams led teaching and music; children from a congregation filled with refugee families supplied the chorus. “Jesus Loves Me” rose in English, Spanish, and Karen—three languages carrying one unvarnished truth: All People Need to Know Jesus Loves Them!

A week like this requires careful composition, with dozens of details Kingdom Teams coordinates so youth leaders can spend the week leading their youth rather than managing it. As one youth pastor summarized, “You handle all the logistics—from housing, to food, to the service projects, to the teaching—and I get to just BE with my youth and connect with them.” One student wanted the week to extend beyond Friday, “I want every day to feel like it did at Kingdom Teams … purposeful, meaningful, and on mission.”

As summer cools, that wish finds an unlikely shape in a photograph: a gallery of paper palms, each outline unmistakably its own—a living blueprint. What begins as an open hand traced on paper becomes, by the time it lifts from the page, a posture for mission—reaching past the familiar, getting down to work; lowered in surrender, lifted in worship, extended across difference and carrying the Good News as only these fearfully, wonderfully particular hands can.

The gray boundary of five fleeting days closes at the wrist, and the good work carries on—toward completion by the One who began it.

Another summer is already taking shape. EMM is accepting applications for Kingdom Teams 2027, with two weeks already fully reserved. There is still room for more youth groups to join in “partnership in the gospel,” placing the Great Commission in the hands of the next generation as they find their place in God’s unfinished story.

To reserve a week or learn more, visit emm.org/kteams.