SpiL Trips
During fall, winter, spring and summer breaks, the Office for 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 milieu.
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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Yakama Indian Reservation, WA: Spring Break (2025) with Mending Wings
Trip Dates: March 22-29, 2024
Cost/Person: $390
Application deadline: November 15, 2024 first deposit ($90) due Nov. 15; second deposit ($200) due Jan. 8, 2025; remaining balance due before departure (March 22)Preparation Classes: some Mondays evenings during the 2025 spring semester
Click here to learn more about Mending Wings Ministries and their "Students Learning About Missions" (SLAM) Trips program.
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Philadelphia, PA: May 2025 (TBD)
Trip Dates: May 8-13, 2025
Cost/Person: $790/each student (cost of airfare; all other costs covered by ASC and SpiL fundraising)
Application & Deposit deadlines: Nov. 15, 2024; first deposit ($90) due Nov. 15; second deposit ($300) due Jan. 8, 2025
Preparation Classes: some Mondays evenings during the 2025 spring semesterStudents register for ARTD 485 B Faith and Design Class to earn academic credit for their participation in this Service-Learning opportunity.
Alongside the School of Communication and Design, we are delighted to engage in an immersion and 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, and kid and foster care outreaches.
In particular, students and faculty from the university's School of Communication and Design will be traveling to immerse and serve in two 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 and Design are particularly looking to recruit two graphic design majors, one illustration major, one photographer, and one 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.
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ROMANIA & MOLDOVA: May 2025, Juniors Abroad Trip option
Trip Dates: April 29 - May 20, 2025
For all Costs & Application deadline: See Junior's Abroad program
Mandatory Preparation dates: Mondays evening classes in spring 2025 semester.Three weeks spent on travel, culture immersion, group classes, tours, host-homes & meals with Word Made Flesh staff & families, and excursions in Bucharest, Galati, and Brasov in Romania and Chisinau in Moldova.
This is a three-week Discovery Trip to immerse, learn and serve alongside longtime GFU 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.
It is an integration trip meant to inspire students to integrate their Christian faith & mission with academic & experiential learning, service opportunities, host-homes stays and reflection while traveling abroad, being hosted and led by global ministry partners, and being immersed in a foreign context.
Embedded throughout this Discovery 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, culture & geopolitical context of the region, the individual and societal impacts of other disparities, and ecumenical Christian worship experiences and approaches to community development approaches.
