Welcome back

After months of not blogging I am making an attempt to get back into blogging. I look out my window and cannot believe that it already August. I have spent 4 weeks away from home this summer; mission trip, middle school camp at camp LRCA, CIY, and I got the chance to be a guest speaker for a week of middle school camp at Little Galilee. I have a few thoughts as I look back at the summer that has passed. First it is a miracle that I still have grass, I have completely neglected my yard. Second, I am really grateful to have Jason Davison on our team. He has been the glue that has held Student Life Worship together this summer. Thanks for the hard work!

I still have some exciting things on the horizon. We have a trip to Great America on Monday. I am 27 years old and I know the purpose of the trip is ministry. However, I still get excited about going to the park and riding all the cool rides. This will be the 4th time I have take students to Great America at Suncrest and I am vowing that this year I will actually check out the water park portion of the park. Then on Thursday and Friday of next week we have Student Life University. It is a 2 day class to teach students on a variety of topics; from worship and baptism to budgets and retirement planning. I am amazing at how many students have no idea how to balance a check book. It should be a good experience for all the students that have registered for SLU.

I am also getting excited about the return of re-Mix August 26th. We will advertise that as the date approaches. However, I am in the planning stages and brainstorming for the fall. I think we are going to make some small changes this year that will radically improve the experience. I will talk about that more in the future.

Leader's Edge

Last night Suncrest had it's quarterly leaders meeting, called Leader's Edge. It is probably one of my favorite meeting that I have through out the year. I think it is because it is a meeting for all the leaders at Suncrest, and I am not in charge. So, I get to act lilke the rebellious youth minister, and watch other leaders look at our tables of leaders with fear of how crazy we are and at the same time pity(because they are afraid to what we do) . It doesn't hurt that there is food at the beginning, being a fat guy that helps my opinion of a meeting. Greg talked a lot about reproducing leaders, the concept of all leaders, identifying and personally training new leaders to do what they are already doing. Then we had our monthly youth leaders meeting.

Youth leader meetings are great; typically I create a pathetic agenda and we spend a lot of time making fun of each other. We would never make fun of students, that would just cross the line. Unless the student did something really funny or they are a student leader, then we might. But if they were there we would be laughing with them and not at them... I promise(who am I trying to foul if you are reading this you know me). We had some great conversations about upcoming event, and even looked to planning the spring events. After the meeting was over Chris Salata and I ended up chatting in my office. We had a moment of genius; we produce creative solutions to problems I have been wrestling with for months. My only fear is that they were great ideas at 10:00 PM on a Thursday night, hope they are half as good when I start presenting them to people. We will find out. I wish I used this blog to talk about cool things and deep thoughts, oh well I guess I will use it to talk about me and my boring life, I am such a student ministry nerd.

The Three Amigo's

Today I had lunch with two of my best friends in the whole world; Dave Palmer and Kevin Baker. I meet these guys a little over 2 years ago when I moved to Suncrest. I was suspicious of them at first, but they turned out to be great guys that are a huge encouragement to me. We ate at Moe's; which if you have not had Moe's you are missing out big time. We sat and talked about life, and laughed. I put a chip in Kevin's drink when he wasn't looking and Dave put a month back waxing in my calendar on my phone. This might sound juvenile to you, but to me it was edifying. We had a lot to talk about; Kevin got married a couple weeks ago and Dave is planning a wedding in April...ok his fiance is planning a wedding.

We haven't been able to do lunch together in months and it was great. Everyone needs friends like that.

Youth Ministry Audible

Tuesday night at Collision, I had to call an audible. Maybe I am over glamorizing the life of a youth minister, but I felt for a few short seconds like Payton Manning. As I walked into the Annex to teach about 20 high school students about the importance of "caring about people far from God" I realized that of the 20 students that were there only about 10 of them I had any knowledge of them having a relationship with Jesus. I have found that at times it is hard to get students to be convinced of the importance of sharing Jesus with friends, but I have to believe it is much more difficult to get students who don't have a relationship with Jesus to share Jesus with their friends. Call me crazy, but I don't think I am that good of a teacher.

So as I was walking into the Annex I called an audible, I called a play that I had run before that had the potential to be effective. Like a strong off-tackle run behind a good offensive line(keeping with football audible theme). I had student think of questions they would like to ask God and then have them write those questions of small pieces of paper. Then Jason Davison and I attempted to answer the questions as accurately as we could.

A crazy thing happened, God showed up. The typical lesson at Collision will last anywhere from 15-35 minutes, Tuesday we went for over an hour. At the end of the hour students were still engaged and eager to learn. It was a dream come true for a youth minister, and that was before God put the icing on the cake. After the Q & A ended a student who has started coming in the last couple weeks came up to Jason and I and asked what he had to do to get baptized.

It was an amazing night to be a youth minister at Suncrest.

Puzzled Series

This Sunday we are starting a new series called Puzzled, that is all about creating clarity in your faith. It will provide some real ways for students to judge their spiritual journey and provide simple steps for them to grow in areas of weakness. I am excited about this, and think the term 4C Christ Follower will change the way students look at themselves as Christ Follower.I know that for a long time I wrestled with how would I judge my own spiritual growth and how do I know if I am growing or not. This series is designed to help you see how spiritually mature you are and find ways to increase your own level of maturity. It is easy to tell if corn is growing, it is a lot harder to tell if a person is growing in their faith

Pretending to be a reader

I have an older brother, Dave that has been in youth ministry for close to 15 years. When I went to college back in the fall of '99 he started preaching at me to starting reading books about ministry. I hate reading books, always have. I think it is because I am scared from horrifying memories of grade school and having to read in front of the class and I can’t figure out how to pronounce "slide". Simple word, yeah I know, but one day it stumped me in front of the whole class. I also think that I am permanently scared by the stupid reading competitions they did back in the day, were they had goals for reading so many books during the year and the student that read the most books gets $100. I would get excited and start reading books at home with all my free time and finish 2 books in 2 weeks, and some stupid smart girl would read 30 in the same time period. Those made me hate reading also. I probably should forgive that girl, but I’ll save that for another day.

So all that aside, my brother told me that I need to read books to be a good youth minister, and since I like to please people I try to read books. However, for the most part I get 50 pages into a book and if it doesn’t grab me I am going to put it on my shelf and I will never pick it up again. There are probably 15 books that I have read in the last 2 ½ years that I have actually read all the way through and enjoyed them. There are more that I have forced myself to read, so I can say that I read that book.

I am reading a book now and it is awesome, “Communicating for a Change” by Andy Stanley. It is a book about preaching, I know exciting right! It is a cool book that is told in the format of a parable of a preacher that sucks and knows it. And how he gets help from this trucker is teaching on how to be a better preacher. It is a cool book and hopefully it will help me be a better preacher.

New Wheels on the block

I have been told many times that I have a twisted sense of humor. This video is another great example of what is wrong with me. I hope you enjoy it. I know I broke the rule that you are not supposed to make 2 posts in the same day, but I am trying to be like my role model Doug Gamble.

The begining

I am not much of a witter, but everyone under the sun has a blog now days and I feel that I have to have one. I hope this becomes a place where students come to chat with me and ask me follow up questions to what we are talking about at Student Life Worship or Collision or re-Mix, but I doubt that will happen.

I am also going to talk about random things in my life that I love; my family, college football, baseball, and some other random thoughts that I have.