Youth rallies, trips and outreach can be considerably easier in cities with multiple churches of the same denomination. However, Junior Jacob Norwood said cities with only one church have a harder time reaching out and ministering to the youth and college-aged members.
Norwood said he realized this after spending time with the “Adventures in Missions” program in Salt Lake City, Utah. In order to help others who are trying to reach out to college students in the west, Norwood and Salt Lake City-based architect Trent Smith decided to put their ideas in black and white.
Norwood worked as a missionary’s apprentice there after high school, but the church did not have a college program at the time. Within his first three months there, Norwood and Smith (who was studying at the University of Utah) organized the church’s first college group.
“We had very specific ideas of what a youth group looked like and what a college group looked like and what a church looked like, and none of those worked in Salt Lake City, Utah,” Norwood said. “So we kind of had to make things up as we went along, and Trent just said one day, ‘You know it might be a good idea to keep some kind of record of this stuff.”‘
Norwood and Smith eventually published their record as a book through Amazon’s independent publishing company, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
“The experiences that led up to (the book) took about a year or more, but the actual writing of the book (took) three months,” Norwood said.
Miscommunications with the publisher delayed publication for almost two months, but it finally went to press around the time Norwood left Utah. The book, “College Ministry Out West,” costs $18.19 on Amazon, though Norwood said he thinks that may be too much.
Amazon’s printing services allow authors to pay a small fee to publish their works at cost, so the author receives no profit. Even so, independent publishing is continuously on the rise. According to a 2012 Bowker report, annual self-publication of print and e-books has risen 287 per cent since 2006.
In any case, Norwood said the lack of profit does not bother him.
“The idea is that this is supposed to be a personal account of what we did and what worked and what didn’t,” Norwood said. “It was really more of a tool that people we knew who were doing this kind of thing might find helpful and useful.”
While Smith did most of the writing, Norwood contributed a few essays and all of the book’s photography.
“It gave me a chance to reflect on things,” Norwood said. “It wasn’t hard because I wasn’t trying to present this as an academic thing or a well-researched, well-articulated (essay). It was pretty much just writing thoughts down.”
Norwood said he would like the chance to contribute to another book one day.
“Because I can say I have a book on Amazon now, it makes me want to write something I contributed more to than just a few of the essays and some photography,” he said. “I liked the photography just because it was what I was already doing and what I enjoyed doing. I like the writing because it would be a challenge to do that again.”
With a published book comes many memories.
“Every time I look at the book because it’s all the pictures of places I used to go, I really miss it. It makes me miss it,” Norwood said. “The plan is to end up back there at some point, and maybe another book will come out of it.”
