Another Video of the Week – Sue me!
This was emailed to me earlier today. Pretty cool idea. Turn your volume up before you start.
October 29, 2008Archive for October, 2008
Video of the Week
If you have patience, you will experience laughter. You’ll be mean for laughing, but you will laugh…
Thanks Justin
October 27, 2008EMT Retreat
Our EMT (Executive Ministry Team) retreated 2+ days this past week to redefine, clarify, and hash out our vision and discipleship process. We left on Sunday afternoon and returned Tuesday night. We ate together, played together, and spent hours debating, dialoguing, and challenging the process.
Here are the things I came away with:
1- our Senior Pastor is a great leader. He can hear from God. He’s not afraid or selfish to let us chew on his ideas, change them, or even reject them.
2- our team is amazing. It is a privilege to serve with this group of people. Each of us is wired differently, but (I realize this is cheesy) like the body of Christ, we work well together for the ultimate goal.
3- we have a great church. Sure, we don’t do everything perfectly, and their are definitely areas of needed improvement, but…ultimately, it really is a great church.
4- I’m excited about the future. This was not a retreat of theories and unattainable ideas. We put the practical with it, and charted a course to improve the ministries of our church, and produce simpler more concise processes to do the work we feel God has called us to as a church. More to come on this later!
It was great to get away together. Now the challenge of coming home, and fleshing it out!
October 25, 2008Wednesday Night Mind Dump
This week might have been my favorite Wednesday night ever. We did a night called “Storytellers” where we had 4 students share their story of lifechange through MPN Student Ministries. The four students we chose were suggested by our leaders.
Kady is a sophomore. She talked her experience at Summer Camp, and the challenge that she felt from God to live that out at school in an unashamed way. She shared the story of how she ended up inviting a girl on the volleyball team with her, to church. Since then Sydney (the girl she invited), has probably been 8-10 Wednesday nights and a few Sundays. Her story challenged our students to live it out at school and see that people will respond to a genuine invitation where there is relationship.
Kristi is a junior. Her mom was diagnosed with cancer earlier in 2008. Though she’s grown up in church all her life, she says that experience caused her to realize that she didn’t trust God. She was mad at him, confused, and hurting. The people around her, here at MPN and a couple different services caused a healing in her life. She came to the point where she could trust God even when, “especially when”, she didn’t understand what He was doing.
Andrew is a junior. He’s been at our church since Middle School, but struggled to get plugged in here. Billy and the efforts of our Student Music and Fine Arts efforts allowed him to pursue his love for the drums. He has participated in MPN’s Got Talent, represented us at National Teen Talent, and got in the rotation to play the drums in our Wednesday night band this fall. He also shared his struggle with depression, that God healed at Summer Camp.
Josh is a junior. He brought a stool on stage, sat down, and talked with great transparency about his “lifelong” battle with complacency, or the “Spirit of Do-Nothing”. He had what he called a Sunday/Wednesday Christianity and no relationship with God. Earlier this year he literally fell in love with Jesus, and started walking with Him. He shared the struggle for devotions, but the desire now to connect and spend time with the Father.
After they were done, I asked students to raise their hands if they identified with some or all of some of the stories we heard that night. It’s safe to say that 90% of our students and leaders raised their hands. It was affirmation to our team, that this kind of night could land. We’ll definitely do it again.
October 25, 2008I ran a 5k
Today was the culmination of several weeks of preparation. Several weeks ago I saw a sign up to run a 5K marathon. I’ve never run anything close to the 3.2 miles that would be involved. So I started increasing my endurance with plans to compete, and I set a goal of running it at or better than 30 minutes.
I woke up at 6 am, went to Wal-mart to find an iPhone holder that I could strap on my arm (they don’t sell them by the way). Then went to my local YMCA, registered, and waited.
At 8am I left the parking lot with about 400 other people in the 47 degree weather. I actually started out too fast. I was too close to their professionals, and stayed too close for the first 1/2 mile. At that point I felt like I was going pass out. I slowed a bit to catch my breath, and started to find a comfortable pace. I could feel major tension, mostly because of the weather I think at the 2 mile mark, but I kept going.
I finished in 30:38, just 38 seconds off my goal, but I was okay with it.
I hung around for the prizes and ended up coming in 3rd in the 25-29 age bracket, which was cool.
I feel confident I can improve my time, now that I know what it feels like to compete. I don’t know when I’ll try, but I’ll definitely do it again. I realize this is totally lame to say this, but it was a pretty cool event in my life.
October 18, 2008Wednesday Night Mind Dump
Last night we took a break from our “normal” activities to host a concert with Breaking Twilight. This band is full of great guys, several of whom I know pretty well. They don’t do a lot of church venues, but did a great job of mixing their original music and worship songs. Our kids connected with them pretty well, and it definitely served it’s purpose. Because I didn’t have to speak, I loved being able to hang out and just talk to students. Sometimes when I’m focused on speaking, I miss out on that.
The next few weeks are going to be a little different, and that’s good. Next week we are doing what my grandparents might call a “good ole’ fashioned testimony service.” We are calling it “storytellers”.
We put the call out several weeks ago among our leaders for students that had experienced life change or really grown in their relationship with the Lord and others through our various classes and ministries. It will serve 2 purposes.
1- it gives those students an opportunity to share the things that have been going on in their lives.
2- it promotes in a healthy way the services and opportunities within our ministry to connect and grow. We don’t have to overhype some of the things, because they are going to get a firsthand glimpse of the benefits.
That’s enough for now. I’ll keep you posted.
October 16, 2008