We are definitely a work in progress, but here is a brief history of how we fell into this vision of developing outdoor leadership as mission.
 

Brett DeYoung on the history of wilderness learning...

Wilderness learning is an educational process that was rediscovered by Dr. Kurt Hahn, a German Christian educator, who implemented these principles into his schools and eventually started Outward Bound in Wales, in 1942.  This process was a discovery of the educational principles used by God to prepare men and women for leadership.  It is a process involving the acceptance of responsibilities: of focusing on reachable challenges, of spending time in contemplation and reflection, of experiencing deprivation, of examining values, of developing compassion for others, and of testing one’s faith and character.
 

David Cowles on Young Life's wilderness programs...

Young Life’s first wilderness program, LaVida, began in 1970.  It was designed to take inner-city youth into the Adirondack Mountains to learn to think and act in ways that were socially responsible and congruent with Christ’s Gospel…. Parroting the successful High Roads venture that Wheaton College started with Outward Bound, a decade earlier, Christian camps from Florida to Alaska developed ‘stress’ programs.  Marathon runs, dawn-to-dusk days of hiking, and ‘solos’ became well-used tools to teach kids how to deal with difficult situations in their lives and increase their faith.
 

Emily Cousins on Outward Bound's development of expeditionary learning...

Given fundamental levels of health, safety, and love, all people can and want to learn.  We believe Expeditionary Learning harnesses the natural passion to learn and is a powerful method for developing the curiosity, skills, knowledge, and courage needed to imagine a better world and work toward realizing it.  Learning happens best with emotion, challenge, and the requisite support.  People discover their abilities, values, ‘grand passions’, and responsibilities in situations that offer adventure and the unexpected.  They must have tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline, and significant achievement.  A primary job of the educator is to help students overcome their fear and discover they have more in them than they think…. Learning is fostered best in small groups where there is trust, sustained caring, and mutual respect among all the members of the learning community….  All students must be assured a fair measure of success in learning in order to nurture the confidence and capacity to take risks and rise to increasingly difficult challenges.  But it is also important to experience failure, to overcome negative inclinations, to prevail against adversity, and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.  --Emily Cousins


Ashley Denton on the coming of age of outdoor leadership as mission...

After having guided at Wilderness Ranch from 1991-92, my wife, Becky and I had a vision to introduce some kids in a church youth group in Colorado to the wilderness.  In the next couple years we saw amazing transformation in the lives of those kids, to the point where it really effected the ethos of the whole church.  Soon after that, we saw a need to start a backcountry ministry to serve more kids in Colorado, and that vision quickly came to life serving over 300 kids each summer; involving 24 trained guides each year.  Rocky Mountain Region Backcountry (RMR) continues today as a vibrant ministry in Colorado.  In 2000 we began to serve internationally, training leaders in India, the Philippines and Japan to help them develop wilderness ministries with their young people.  We also served as the national director of a youth ministry in New Zealand where we continued to discover vast mission opportunities among young people who do not know Jesus Christ.


We began to notice that many of the kids who went on wilderness trips with us were the ones who became catalytic leaders with a serious commitment to relational evangelism and missions. Fueled by our desire to see every kid have an opportunity to meet Jesus and grow their relationship with Him, we began to look harder at what it would take to introduce this kind of ministry to kids all over the world.  Over the course of a few years, two discoveries came to the surface. First, that most young people today whether in the developed or third world do not feel confident about engaging a world filled with poverty, religions, violence, and clashing civilizations.  Our second discovery, is that missions today is in transition.  And most missiologists agree that we need new and creative mission strategies to reach the young people of our world. 

These two realities led me to pursue a doctoral program in Missions and Cross Cultural Studies at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston, MA.  My goal was to develop a theological framework for understanding why wilderness experiences are so effective at developing character, leadership qualities, and mission-commitment in young people.  That chapter of my life culminated in a dissertation entitled:  Wilderness and Missions:  A Theology for Developing and Sustaining Young Leaders in Mission.  I was mentored by Timothy Tennent (Author of Christianity at the Religious Roundtable), Robert Coleman (author of Master Plan of Evangelism), and Peter Kuzmič (Distinguished professor of Mission and European Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts.   He is also the founding president of Evandjeoski Teoloski Fakultet in Osijek, Croatia and is widely regarded as the foremost evangelical scholar in Eastern Europe).

 
As we have led groups in the wilderness encompassing over three hundred days of living with young people in the context of community in the outdoors, we have observed that although the how, what, and why of Jesus’ teaching is vastly important, it was often the where, to whom, and when, of His teaching that fueled radical change of heart.  In other words, being aware of the setting in which Jesus taught is just as important as understanding the form of His teaching.  Timing and environment are critical elements in the learning process.  And a large majority of Jesus' apprenticeship with the Disciples occurred in outdoor settings, filled with adventure.  Yet most contemporary paradigms of teaching focus heavily on style of communication.  The emphasis is on acquiring speaking skills to be able to effectively capture people’s imagination through intelligent rhetoric.  Yet the weakness in this paradigm is that most teaching today happens in contrived settings, i.e. a church building, Sunday school class, through television or video programs, etc.

Our vision for raising up young mission-committed leaders through wilderness adventure continues to grow and expand today where we have open doors to develop this type of ministry in over 20 countries.  Who knows where the Lord will take us, but we are stoked for each set of waves He brings along.  We know we'll wipe out along the way, but that's part of the adventure, ay!  

"The mountain is not meant to teach us anything, it is meant to make us something"--Oswald Chambers

Outdoor Leadership as Mission, Coming of Age...

 
"While God’s glory is written all over His work, in the wilderness the letters are capitalized."

-John Muir

"Any error about creation also leads to an error about God."

-Thomas Aquinas