Timberline Lodge  - Annual Report 2009

U.S.A.
Timberline Lodge (Winter Park, Colorado)
Dan Thomas, Director

Timberline LodgeStudents on outreachTimberline students
Nearly half of our staff departed for various reasons in the spring of 2008. I think that the biggest encouragement for Timberline has been the creation of a new staff team. Along with this new team, the TL leadership has been slowly working to listen and create the ministry’s vision statement. We believe that the Lord has led us to this: “Letting Christ live His life, through His people, in His world.”

It has been a very difficult 2007-2008 fiscal year. We have had 31 students from 8 countries, 2 staff marriages and more children! 

We have been challenged by living daily in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are all so prone to seek to control our own lives and others by putting our trust in knowledge about God or in our own righteous attempts to please Him. Romans 1:17 says that “the righteous shall live by faith.” How subtly we can twist this truth by putting faith in our own efforts rather than in Jesus alone, trying to perfect by the flesh what began in the Spirit (Galatians 3:3).

In this subtle twisting, we focus on external behaviors rather than the heart and tragically lose sight of the true goal: “that I may know Christ” (Phil. 3:10). We desire that Timberline would grow to be an environment in which young people will be bathed in this Gospel, giving staff and students alike the freedom and encouragement to grow in an intimate and life-transforming relationship with Jesus. 

We are praying that the GOSPEL of Jesus Christ becomes central to the Timberline community. The great danger is that Christian ministry can often prove to be a great distraction from achieving this goal. Jesus’ simple call to “come unto Me” can easily go unheard, drowned out by the noise of serving Christ, attending classes and living life in Christian community.

So, while we do serve. provide stimulating classes and offer a variety of community experiences for our students, please pray that we can provide the students with ample time to simply listen to Christ’s call in their own lives and then have the space to respond to it so that the Gospel would be central in our hearts.