Urban Promise is a powerful ministry with youth which involves a music program (multiple choirs), a STEP team, WORK GROUPS for inner city projects, and an outdoor TREKKERS group. These programs are complemented by engaging speakers, excellent workshop leaders, and skilled musicians.  Urban Promise will be featured in our large group plenary sessions as well as offering several workshops at MA-RYE.

Jerry Leggett, best known as the Peace Bubble Guy, traveled nearly 100,000 miles on his two-year, 240-stop, Peace Bubble mission. His Peace Bubble Cafe, a mobil, multimedia entertainment venue, was featured in 150 news stories and on youtube.com "What does peace look like to you?" His knack as a storyteller is informed by his many travels in diverse settings. As a musician, through the years he has maintained that essential quality of a guitar strumming, street-singing balladeer even as his musical presentation has become a more eclectic mix of pulsating rock and jazz formats. Jerry currently resides in Hilo, Hawaii (the "Big Island") with his spouse. Leggett will be traveling to the U.S. mainland in 2010 for several dozen performances including our Regional Youth Event.

Josh Tinley is Associate Editor of Youth Resources at the United Methodist Publishing House; freelance writer and speaker. He recently published “Kneeling in the End Zone” which takes the often overlapping worlds of sports and religion and turns them upside down. Athletes, coaches, fans and broadcasters often bring faith into the world of sports, whether through on-field prayers, post-game interviews, biblical bleacher signs or using faith language or scriptural metaphors to describe an incredible play or performance. “Kneeling in the End Zone” aims to do the exact opposite, using sports as a lens through which to look at the Christian faith. It uses sports as a metaphor, drawing parallels between scriptural stories and memorable tales from the field or court, and looks at those transcendent moments in sports history that reveal larger truths about life.