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Members of St. Paul’s Young Adult Scuba Team during their certification training last fall. Now certified, members of the Team will travel to the island of Bonaire in February to study the current state of our oceans.
A group of young adult divers from St. Paul’s Church in Lynnfield departed on Feb. 17 for a five-day "creation care pilgrimage" to the island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, to study the current state of our oceans, with the goal of engaging in long-term service work to help keep them healthy for generations to come.
Their leader is St. Paul’s rector, the Rev. Rob Bacon, a former U.S. Navy diver who logged over 1,000 hours under water during his
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Members of St. Paul’s Young Adult Scuba Team diving off Key Largo, Fla., in November 2024.
time in the Navy, and who has remained an avid recreational, technical and wreck diver since leaving the Navy to enter ordained ministry. Also on the trip are Dr. Bob Sluka, lead scientist for A Rocha’s International Marine Conservation Program, and Avery Davis Lamb, the executive director of Creation Justice Ministries.
Together, the three leaders will invite the diving team of young adults, all in their mid-20s, to “witness God’s majestic and awe-inspiring handiwork beneath the surface of our oceans as they simultaneously discern their specific call to become stewards of our oceans,” Bacon said in a church news release.
During his recent sabbatical, Bacon said, he studied the present state of our oceans with experts from a variety of agencies and organizations around the country. Upon his return to St. Paul’s, he invited the Young Adult Ministry group to become certified in scuba so that he could take them diving and show them what he had learned.
The group’s three-stage open water diving training took place last fall and comprised an online learning component, dive sessions in a local pool, then instructed ocean dives. Their first post-certification dive trip was to Key Largo, Fla., this past November. Their trip to Bonaire will be their second trip.
“The goal is for these young adults to become the new wave of leadership in the Church’s creation care ministries as they take on specific tasks with clear goals,” Bacon said. The project has been made possible by a generous donor who is not a member of the church.