SpiL Trips
During Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer breaks, the Office of Spiritual Life offers students annual experiential opportunities to immerse themselves in others' contexts to learn and serve alongside global ministry partners. These have come to be known as Spiritual Life (or "SpiL") Trips.
In a way SpiL Trips are like "pilgrimages" if you will: traveling both to encounter Christ, and to serve Christ. The aim is reconciled relationships with God, Self, Others and the rest of Creation. With these trips students are challenged to grow through listening, exploring, discovering, learning and serving alongside partner organizations who model Christ's love through mutual empowerment, community development and peacemaking within their cultural miliue.
Students are invited to join us in sharing the university’s Be Known promise beyond our own campus, culture and borders!
Why Do We Do These Trips?
Our reasons for organizing immersion and service trips are grounded in the university’s mission:
- To help students think with clarity by prayerfully immersing and serving in closer proximity to people and resources with perspectives and experiences outside of our own
- To help students act with integrity by partnering with others in mutually benefiting, asset-based and empowering approaches to connecting across differences (rather than perpetuating need-based approaches)
- To help students serve with passion by sacrificially working to make sure our impact matches intentions as we attempt to share the Be Known promise with people beyond our campus and borders who are so often labeled or only seen as statistics
Trips Timeline
Information about all SpiL Trips are announced during fall semester in chapel, around campus and online. (Follow us on socials @GFUSpiL). Applications, references and sometime interviews are required for SpiL Trip eligibility.
Teams are selected from the Applicaiton/interview process and meet for 3-5 required trip preparation meetings before departure date. Team members chosen are those who display a strong commitment to Christ, demonstrated humility, flexibility, self-discipline and an openness and desire to learn while serving.
Trips List
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PORTLAND: Fall Break (OCT 2-5, 2024), CCDA (Christian Community Development Association)
Trip Dates: OCT 2-5, 2024
Cost/Person: The $69 volunteer registration cost & Van transportation to and from the conference can be covered for undergrad students by the SpiL Office
Application deadline: September 16, 2024
The Christian Community Develpment Association - 2024 Portland Conference
Click here to see Conference Schedule
The CCDA Conference in Portland is a once-in-a-long-while opportunity for college students to volunteer, discover, worship and learn together with long-time practicioners of Christian Community Development who have committed their lives to a legacy of God's mission in urban and rural community develpment across cultures and socio-economic disparities. Throughout this immersive conference, our students will get the chance to volunteer to help the conference succeed in leading attendees in worship, education. Students will benefit by receiving practical knowledge in workshops, exploring future opportunities for after college, and learning more about where they fit into God's local mission in the neighborhoods in which we live at home and not just abroad.
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PHILADELPHIA: May 2025 (tbd)
Trip Dates: May 2025 (t.b.d.)
Cost/Person: $750/each student (cost of airfare; All other costs covered by ASC & SpiL fundraising).
Application & Deposit deadlines: Oct 11, 2024; first deposit ($50) due November 15; second deposit ($200) due JAN.8th, 2024.
Preparation Classes: Mondays 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM during the 2025 Spring SemesterAlongside the School of Communication and Design, we are delighted to engage in an immersion & service trip opportunity with the Philadelphia Dream Center (click here to learn more). Trip participants will get the opportunity to stay on the Dream Center campus in Philly, and experience teaming-up with the work of the staff on their outreach programs such as Adopt-A-Block, Food Truck, Kid and Foster Care Outreaches.
In particular, students and faculty from GFU's School of Communication and Design will be traveling to immerse and serve in 2 ways:
Part 1: Creative services to help the Philadelphia Dream Center reimagine their facilities for a communication art center for afterschool programs. This project would involve architectural and interior design renderings and graphic design services for artwork and print collateral, photography, video and fine art illustration mural work.
Part 2:. Similarly to Serve Day and regular Saturday Service, students will also get the chance to engage in physically present and proximate volunteer work alongside the outreach programs listed above.
While students of any major are invited to consider participation in this particular SpiL Trip, The School of Communication & Design are particularly looking to recruit:
2 Graphic Design Majors, 1 Illustration Major, 1 Photographer, and 1 videographer.
This Creative team will be meeting twice a month* in February to prepare for the skilled service-learning portions of this particular SpiL Trip. These students will receive ARTD 475 internship credit for their participation.
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PUERTO RICO: t.b.d.
Trip Dates: t.b.d.
Cost/Person: $750 ($50 deposit due Nov. 15, 2024)
Application deadline:. October 11, 2024
Mandatory Preparation dates: 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM on Mondays during the 2025 Spring SemesterThis one-week, Spring Break SpiL "work-camp" for George Fox University undergrads in partnership with The Happy Givers &/or World Renew Disaster Relief services (also as seen on Video above). The group will consist of approximately 8-12 volunteers & SpiL Trip lead-mentor, and will engage students in a combination and rhythm of inward, communal and outward spiritual disciplines throughout the week, designed to be a catalyst for personal growth, community development and empowering service!
COST: Total individual cost is $495
REGISTRATION AND BACKGROUND CHECK PROCESS: All group members must fill out registration forms, and volunteers aged 18 and over must have a background check on file prior to serving on a disaster recovery site.
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ROMANIA & MOLDOVA: May 2025 (tbd: Junior's Abroad service-learning option)
Trip Dates: April 29 - May 20, 2025
Cost/Person: $1950* ($50 first deposit due Nov. 1, 2023; $200 second deposit due Dec.1, 2023)
Application deadline: Oct 11, 2024
Mandatory Preparation dates: Monday's 4:30-5:30pm, Spring 2025 Semester.*Trip actual cost = $4750; However, accepted & selected students will only be required to cover/fundraise $1950 (approximate cost of airfare) to participate! Remaining costs (approx $2800 covered through Juniors Abroad + SpiL depts) for 3 weeks spent traveling and staying with hosts in Bucharest, Galati, Chisinau, and Brasov.
This is 3 week Discovery Trip to immerse & serve alongside long-time global partners at WordMadeFlesh in Romania & in Moldova. (Please click on the links to learn more!). WordMadeFlesh in Romania & Moldova serve Jesus among children vulnerable to running away from home, vulnerable to dropping out of school, vulnerable to being trafficked, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and vulnerable to social marginalization and ethnic discrimination. Also, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 450,000 Ukrainian refugees have entered Moldova and approximately 100,000 have stayed in the country. Statistics show that currently 1 out of 8 children now in Moldova are Ukrainian.
This SpiL/Discovery Trip with WordMadeFlesh is a 3 week, international trip of immersion and service-learning in partnership with this global ministry we've partnered with for over 10 years now! They intentionally live and work to develop Christ-centered community in various ways in some of the most "fogotten" places of the world. It is an integration trip meant to inspire students to integrate their Christian faith with experiential learning, service opportunities and reflection while traveling abroad, being hosted and led by global ministry partners, and being immersed in a foreign context. Embedded throughout this SpiL Trip will be intentional time spent framing, debriefing, reflecting and processing brief, immersive experiences to give students the opportunity to take inventory on their relationships to self, God, others and the rest of creation, with particular focus on their gifts and personality, their faith and vocations, their own inherited privilege in relation to the majority world experience, as well as the culture and specific neighborhoods and communities in which they will be immersed. In Spring semester preparation, students will study the history and culture of the region, as well as the individual and societal impacts of other disparities as well as the different Christian community development approaches of our various global ministry partners.
