Weekend Wrap-Up: August 22nd Services

This weekend was super different for me because I was not in our middle school services as usual. I did a skit with Ben Calmer in our North and South camus services. Here are a couple of lessons I learned while I was "gone."

• The middle school team can THRIVE without me there and it's actually good for me and them for me to be out once in a while. I'm learning that good leadership means that things are better when I'm not there. They are also high caliber people who take ministry to youth very seriously. It's a blessing to have a team like that for MIDDLE SCHOOL aged youth. 
• The Shoreline Church universe does not have lift _ jhi at the center of it. It's very easy to get tunnel vision when I'm in the jhi room from 7:30 am until 1:00 pm every Sunday. 
• I got to peak my head into the elementary service for a second to observe and I learned a lot. I can do a much better job of learning from our children's pastor, Ken King. That guy is amazing!
• My life is better/richer/fuller because of amazing leaders like Matthew Paul, Donna Bovee, Brandi Garza, Talyor Strauss, Daniel Johnson, Robby Moss, Kathryn Ball, Autumn Konopka, Lizi Strauss, Anthony Cacamissi, Jennifer Heggem, Kevin Wickham, Julissa Morgan, Valerie Niere, Sean and Crystal Rose and many others! 

Weekend Wrap-Up: August 15th Services

Lesson: Pep Rally – Anthony Caccamisi taught the lesson. He knocked it out of the park. He will teach in jhi again for sure!

Lesson Length: 15 minutes. And HUDDLES at the end! As a response, we thought of people to invite to church. Then we wrote the names on a huge piece of paper while the band played, "Tear Down The Walls." it was a great moment.

Music: We had a full band. Robby Moss gets better every time he leads! I appreciate when guys step up like he has these past 8 months. It's been a pleasure to have him at my side!    

Tech:  We’ve trained many people back there and have all the spots filled. Consistency is difficult with high school leaders. 

Attendance: Average. There was more people than usual, but that’s normal for this time of year. .

Volunteer Involvement: Average. I’ve put a lot of effort into reorganizing our team. It’s working. Brandi 1^st service and Donna 2^nd service are blowing it up for me! I’m loosing Matthew Paul to his new job, but he’s going to get even more involved in LYA as a result, so that’s great! Met with Sean and Crystal Rose again between services and they are a huge support as well! Also, Daniel Johnson was sick...feel better dude!

Fun Factor: Average. Pastor Rob's rap video helped a lot.  I’ve added a lot more structure to what an MC does. We're also trying out a service order similar to the way Group does their services at work-camps.  The MC's also received a packet today. This packet contained all the games we are playing until Jan 2011!

Games Played: Saftey Dance. From Chad Swanzy's Youth Leader Stash. Super Fun!!!

Weekend Wrap-Up: July 25th Service

Game: Above Average

Today we actually planed two games. One was a freebee from simply youth called "Race This" that we experienced at Group Work Camps last week. This game was effective for 12-14 year olds. It takes a lot to get people awake during our 8:30 AM service, and Race This did the trick.

The second was a classic youth ministry game called "Human Hearding" that we found at Chad Swanzy's blog/site called the youth leader stash.  This game was perfect at getting people to mingle around a little bit. It was a little intimidating for the 6th graders, so I will rethink when we will play this sort of game again and how we introduce it so it doesn't overwhelm and isolate anyone again.

Lesson: Above Average
We focused on the Prodigal Son Story found in Luke 15. We carried this over from the mission trip theme of God's undeserved love for humanity. We had one of our young people read the story and two more share their testimonies of seeing God's unexpected, extravagant love for them and others!

Lesson Length: Under 20 Minutes

Volunteer Involvement: Average

Fun Factor: Above Average

Overall: Above Average

Weekend Wrap-Up: July 11th Service

Lesson: When God doesn’t give you what you want.

Lesson Length: 12 minutes. And we added break out sessions that we'll call, "HUDDLES" at the end of the lesson. We're officially launching a small group type element in all of our middle school services on August 29th. We'll take the rest of the summer to train and work through the bugs until we have our grand opening for the fall. 

Music: We had a full band. Robby led for the first time and I am so proud of him. What a pure heart that comes through when he leads!  

Attendance: Average. As always, things that are healthy are not always big. jhi is growing in health every single week, from leadership team, youth, and their families too! We had a big first service, which was an anomaly for this time of year.

Volunteer Involvement: Average. We've put a lot of effort into reorganizing our team because we lots some key leaders. These amazing leaders transitioned out of our ministry for different reasons.. some t to pursue carriers in other states etc etc.  All the reorganization is working. New leaders are stepping up in the empty spots! More kids lives are getting touched, communication with parents and  our ability to serve new students is improving! The love of volunteer leaders is defiantly spread out to many of them.

Fun Factor: Above Average for WHOLE SERVICE. 

Games Played: Ninja Feet provided by Chad Swanzee's website!

Weekend Wrap-Up: Middle School Service

Lesson: We had a guest speaker named Mark Crow speak to the adults. Our tech crew made it possible to pipe his sermon into the chapel where jhi meets. A number of parents were grateful that they had the same lesson as their kids. It was tricky to sync up, but we'll do it again for sure..

Lesson Length: 30 min. plus.

Music: It was great. Skip was there.

Attendance:  Below Average. July 4th

Volunteer Involvement: Below Average.

Fun Factor: Average.

Games Played: Summer Rerun – minute to win it game.

jhi weekend wrap-up

Lesson Length: 25 min. Topic was Ecclesiastes 12:1 "Remember your creator in the days of your youth.." We've not taught on that scripture since I've been at Shoreline. It was well received. We concentrated on the Hebrew concept of Remembering.

Music: Above Average. Kathryn Ball had her band ready to go. We've had a full band for a few consecutive months and it's really helped us to accomplish a lot with our services in the area of making the young people feel comfortable in our environment. Great job volunteers.

Tech: Sunday was the last day for two of our precious volunteers Israel and Barbara Galaviz. They have anchored our tech crew for the past 3+ years. They built a team that will continue to serve long after they are gone, to their credit. They will be deeply missed.

Attendance: Just Below Average. We used a new seating arrangement in the chapel. I stand in the middle of the room and the kids sit around me. This accomplishes a few things. There are only three rows deep on any side, so no one can go under the radar. Games and worship are facilitated better because there is more space in the room.

Volunteer Involvement: Below Average.  I guess summer is here and people are vacationing and such. The lower attendance offset this a little bit so we were ok. Its a good reminder to take care of the jhi team. All that being said, I've been the only paid staff at jhi Sunday mornings for quite some time now (several months) and its going better than ever. Yay team! 

Fun Factor: Above Average. We’re doing “Summer ReRuns” just like the TV networks. We’re playing the best games from 09-10 school year. They LOVED it today.

Games Played: Ameba tag as a crowd breaker. 2nd service we played a variation where only the people who were "it" could have their eyes open. Pure genius! My sermon opener was a really cool game where you look at a picture for 15 seconds, I took the pic down, and then asked everyone a question about it. 

When things go better withouth you: Weekend Service Review

This weekend we launched Life Hurts God Heals during our first service North Campus gathering. I hung out for the launch to make sure everything went ok and Had Chris Gorham teach. He preached spectacularly of course, what I wasn't expecting however, was the overwhelming participation from the youth in the service. 

Pierre broke some of our normal "lift rules" to start out our worship set. It was not a peppy, rah-rah, let's hop up and down feel. He shared from his heart and played an acoustic set reinforced with video clips from "The Passion of the Christ" movie. Usually teens need something super engaging to capture their attention for a service like that, but Pierre's authenticity and creativity broke down the usual funk we have to get past in order to get through to the young people.To me, this proves that teenagers respond first and foremost to authenticity instead of a cool light show, smooth transitions, and edgy video elements. That speaks to a deeper yearning to connect with the person of Jesus Christ.

Chris seamlessly wove in stories from Halloween experiences with his message on fear. It was full of great concreate examples of abstract concepts so that it was perfectly suited to young teenagers. The content of the message was actually suitable for any age group though, this guy has the right stuff!

I love that the service was run for the most part by guys younger than me. I realize that my value to shoreline and ultimatly the kingdom of G-d is directly related to my ability to let the Lord use me to reproduce other disciples, pastors, poets, prophets, and preachers! It was both humbling and exciting to catch a glimpse of that process because reproducing myself in others is beyond my capacity as a leader.

weekend wrap-up

Volunteers: This was a bit of a wild weekend because of some volunteer absences. We still don't have enough team members to cover more than one or two people being gone in a weekend. We get more youth workers each weekend, so that trend is changing, but it all hit at once first service. One of our guys was gone, another transitioned to second service only, and a third had to go away this weekend at the last minute. This weekend I tried on a new behavior. I asked for help from other staff members and they sent over some young adults to help out and they knocked it out of the ball park! We also have a new service coordinator, Jessica who is on fire. She's doing so well pouring into our volunteers and keeping us in the right places doing the right things so we can focus on unvieling God's love to the young people He's trusted us with.

Lesson: First week of our series called "Big." We're going to go over the big stories in the Bible for the next few weeks. The lesson time was around 20 minutes. I will ask someone to time it next week, so I can be in that sweet spot of 20-25 minutes. We had a ministry time after the lesson and the teens showed a high level of participation. It's great to see youth engage in worship music, especially young teenagers. So sweet.

Songs: We tried a new song and our kids jumped right in. We also added Alyssa into the band mix on acoustic guitar. I love it when we have guys and girls in the band. It's such a good statement that music and playing an instrument isn't just a guy thing. Girls can certainly do more than sing and play the keyboard.

Health: Right now I would say that our services are on the road to health. Lately we've been focused on raising up leaders and creating a thriving small group culture. Discipleship and small groups are more important than services in my opinion, but that doesn't mean our services should be unhealthy. The good news is that G-d showed up despite a few bumps in the road. We have the best kids and the best leaders in the world and I can't wait to see what God does with them this fall!

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weekend wrap-up

Involvement: Our volunteer team is growing each week thanks to our new team organization and the Efforts of Jessica Collins. More volunteers and youth workers help to build momentum in many ways. More details are taken care of, more youth are greeted, and there is more life in our lobby and chapel. This week required all hands on deck because of the large amount of teenagers we had and the task we had them do. We had a large assembly line of youth and they made sack lunches for later distribution. Altogether, they made over 175 lunches! Way to go team!

Worship: We decided to make offering less of its own segment and more a part of our worship set. We're feeling like it's good to teach young people that worship is more than merely singing songs. Our whole life is an act of worship, including giving.

Lesson: I haven't seen how long it was yet, but we wanted it shorter than usual since we were taking a large portion of the service to make lunches.

Overall: It was fun to see their reaction when we announced that they helped to feed over 150 people!

Lift the City Fall Kickoff: Weekend Review

Fall Kick-off, Super Sunday, Back to School Weekend, whatever you call it that's what we had this weekend at Shoreline. We planned to rearticulate our senior pastor's vision to unveil God's love to our world. We did that by raising money for an orphanage and making cards for patience at Dell Children's hospital.

Feel: We had Alex, one of our Young Adult members of our tech team come in and DJ for us during hangtime and it was so great. Feel is so important to middle school aged youth and Alex made the room feel great with his music. I noticed our teens talking to one another more than usual and there was an overall easiness to the room that made people receptive to the message and to our cause.

Volunteer Involvement: It was fairly good. We have a lot of opportunity to help out in a hands on way during first service on Sunday. We've added some amazing new helpers in both services though. Chris, Donna, Christella, and Latonya have been key players in getting things going in the right direction first and second service. Thanks guys!

Music: We started out our meeting with the band on stage playing live music as our group came in. That felt pretty good too. There was a creative element planned that combined video with live music, but it never synced up quite right. If we do that again I think we'll need to practice it a few times. We didn't have the full band that we are used to, but the youth responded really well to a post worship set altar call.

Overall: I think the most important things that needed to happen did happen. Young people were challenged to look beyond themselves and live for something bigger. They met new friends and were connected with caring adults. We raised a ton of money for the orphanage and the cards our kids made were super cool!

Next Week: Lift the City part 2 - We will talk more about being the church and getting into community. After the teaching we are all making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to give away to Austin's homeless populations through a local shelter. The youth are bringing the supplies to make them with too.

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