SpiL Trips
During spring and summer breaks, the Office for Spiritual Life offers students annual opportunities to immerse themselves in others' contexts to learn and serve alongside global ministry partners. These have come to be known as Spiritual Life ("SpiL") Trips.
In a way, SpiL Trips are like low-key "pilgrimages": We are traveling to both encounter Christ, to learn from and to serve Christ in everyone we meet on the journey. The aim is encouraging reconciled relationships with God, Self, Others and the rest of Creation. Students are challenged to grow through listening, exploring, discovering, learning and serving alongside partner organizations who model Christ-centered community through mutuality, empowerment, and peacemaking within their cultural milieu.
Anyone up for the adventure is invited to join us in extending 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. Applications, references and sometime interviews are required for SpiL Trip eligibility. Teams are selected from the application/interview process and must attend (between 3-6) required trip preparation classes before the departure date.
Application deadline: December 1, 2026 first deposit ($90) due;
Second deposit ($200) due Jan. 8, 2026;
Remaining balance due two weeks before trip departure.
Team members chosen are those who display a collaborative attitude, strong commitment to being a team-player and following-up on all requirements, demonstrated humility, flexibility, self-discipline and an openness and desire to learn through service.
Trips List
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Yakama Nation/Indian Reservation, WA: Spring Break (2026) with Mending Wings
Trip Dates: March 22-29, 2025
Food, lodging, program & admin costs - $450/person (all covered by SpiL/ASC funds)
Travel & admin Cost to student : $190 (out-of-pocket &/or fundraised)Preparation Classes: t.b.d.
Click here to learn more about Mending Wings Ministries and their "Students Learning About Missions" (SLAM) Trips program.
Fill out the Pre-Application for this SpiL Trip
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Puerto Rico (2026) with The Happy Givers
Trip Dates: Spring 2026 (t.b.d.)
Food, lodging & program costs $740/person (all covered by SpiL/ASC funds)
Travel (air & ground) & admin Cost to student : $1090 (out-of-pocket &/or fundraised)Preparation Classes: t.b.d.
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Philadelphia & NYC: t.b.d.
Trip Dates: t.b.d
Cost/Person: $790/each student (cost of airfare+ground transportation & admin). All other food, lodging and program costs covered by ASC and SpiL fundraising)Preparation Classes: t.b.d.
Fill out the Pre-Application for this SpiL Trip
Students 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: t.b.d.
Trip Dates: t.b.d.
Mandatory Preparation dates: t.b.d.
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.
