Because it was so fun, I am going to steal a feature from Marko’s old blog. Should he ever come out of retirement I will gladly give him back this fun tradition.

The best caption for this picture will win a book of your choice from Simply Junior High.

AND THE WINNER IS: “Harold was the founding, and only member of “Hell’s Loungers”

Ed, please contact me at kurt@saddleback.com and let me know what book from simplyjuniorhigh.com you would like.

- Without question, today was one of the oddest days of ministry in my 22 years. Nothing bad, just odd and eventful.

- My annual Denver Broncos prediction: After what looks like will be a winless pre-season, I predict a record of 7-9 for my beloved team. I am in complete mourning and shock at what has become of the franchise. How did it go so wrong so quickly?

- Here’san out-of-the-ordinarybook recomendation: Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods. I thumbed through it today for the first time and it is really good.

- I twittered about it yesterday, but wanted to mention it here: Instead of a separate PDYM conference, we will be joining the Purpose Driven Super Conference on February 9-12. Plan now to join us as we talk about youth ministry for a a day and a half!

- Thursday marks the grand opening of a new Chick-Fil-A about 2 miles from the church. I have worked so hard to give up sweet tea but I’m not sure I will be able to stay away.Officeing out ofChick-Fil-A with free sweet tea refills is a temptation no human can overcome.

Lesson: Our 10th and final week of our Summer series! Each week we have looked at a famous Bible verse and put it under the microscope in our “lab”. We saved the most famous of them all for this week: John 3:16

Lesson Length:23 minutes

Music: Average. The quality was great and the energy of the band was fantastic. But the band was made up entirely of High School students which, in my mind, means it’s never as good as when our junior highers lead.

Attendance: Above Average….our biggest weekend of the Summer.

Volunteer Involvement: Fairly high. Since switching to “sections” and giving leaders more ownership over their section, we have seen an increase in their commitment to the weekend.

Fun Factor: Below average. Students don’t respond as well to music when it isn’t led by their peers, and the games we played were a bit slow. We played two trivia-based games which worked great individually, but coupled together as our only games made the program feel a bit dull.

This summer marked my 13th Summer at Saddleback, and in less than one week it will officially be “in the books”. A few things that have stuck out:

- Our Summer series, “The Lab”, has been one of our best in a long, long time. Because we typically teach in 3-week blocks, our 10-week summer series usually begin to feel too long around week 4! But this year seemed to work well. I think it was the combination of really good content mixed with fun programming ideas. Most of the fun programming ideas came from some of our younger, college aged leaders who really stepped up made some great stuff happen.

- Summer camp remains a mystery to me. It’s too expensive and our attendance is dropping every year. But it’s also a highlight of every summer! I’m becoming more and more convinced that we need to find a non-traditional way to give students a “camp” experience that is cost effective.

- It seems like the more activities we cram into our summer calendar, the worse the attendance is. I wonder if there is some universal law or formula at play that goes something like: there are only X number of students who will participate in events, and they will only participate in X number of events that cost somewhere between X and X amount of money. For sure, there are some students who come to just about everything, but most don’t….so why do we constantly feel the need to cram our summer calendars full of activities?

- The more we give ministry away, the better it becomes! This year we handed off larger chunks of our ministry to volunteers and summer interns than ever before and the results were tremendous. The only downside to this that I can find is that giving ministry away seems to create more activity which adds to the dilemma I mentioned above.

If you take a few minutes to reflect on your summer, share them with the rest of us.

If your church is anything like mine, the status of our economy has impacted your church’s and your junior high ministry’s financial situation. Perhaps you’ve had your budget cut (if you were lucky enough to have one to start with!), or maybe your ministry is being affected by the financial stress the families in your church are experiencing. Or maybe, like it is for us….it’s a combination of both! To be certain, ministering in these tight times provides some unique challenges. But, there are also some unique opportunities that come our way when funds begin to run dry. Here are a few things I’ve thought about as we plan for our Fall. I’d love to hear your input as well.

- Focus on quality not quantity. Doing fewer activities and outings gives our ministry the opportunity and energy to pour extra time, energy and attention into the events we offer making them of higher quality than they have been in the past.

- In tough times, attendance usually goes up and people are usually more receptive to the gospel. We’ve noticed a spike in attendance during this recession. We all know that crisis (remember what happened right after 911) causes to think about spiritual things. To be fair, most of our junior highers aren’t coming to church or thinking about God more because of the recession, but they have probably overheard their parents conversations.

- When funds go down, creativity goes up! When your ministry budget is cut and when families are trying to cut back, it forces a leader to think outside the box and come up with creative ways to minister. If you embrace this, it can be a wonderful opportunity to do something new.

- Tight times provide you the opportunity to “kill” something you otherwise couldn’t. Sacred cows, the expensive retreat, etc. Very few people will argue with the “We are ending XXXXXXX to help be better stewards during these tight times.”

- It’s been one of those crazy, weird, busy weeks and I just haven’t had/wanted to find the time to post which hasn’t happened very often.

- Last weekend’s update: 8th week of our 10-week “Lab” series. We took an up-close look at Romans 12:2.

- Tomorrow we are taking a crew of students to harvest oranges for needy families through an organization called “Second Harvest”. Should be super fun.

- If you are a movie fan you must see District 9….one of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. If you are a movie fan you must not see The Goods….one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long long time. In fact I walked out early in the film.

- If you are a reader let me recommend three books you need to read. I’m in a lazy mood today so I’m not even going to link totheir amazon page: “Middle School Ministry” by Mark Oestreicher and Scott Rubin, “The Tale Of Two Youth Workers” by Eric Venable, “The Unlikely Disciple” by Kevin Roose and “The Year Of LivingBiblically” by A.J. Jacobs.

- Brett Favre…I’m a fan and I’ll be cheering for him but I honestly don’t see this whole scenario ending well.

Below is a super short little article I wrote for a newsletter a few months back. Since I don’t think very many people actually read the newsletter in which it was published,I thought I’d re-post it here:

Part of being a Christian, or a Christ-follower, is striving to become a little more like Jesus, right? I want to lead more like Jesus, I want to love people more like Jesus, I want to make choices more like Jesus would etc. But if I’m totally honest with myself, it’s shocking how the way I live my life, the way I lead, the way I treat others etc. is often nothing like the way Jesus would! In fact, most of the time, I am embarrassingly un-like Jesus. Of course the fact that I’m a wretched sinner and he was God incarnate probably makes for an unfair comparison, but you get the drift.

I recently started a little routine that you may want to try, too. I bought myself an old-school bible that has Jesus’ words in red. I’m a bit lazy, and I want his words easy to find! Whenever I find myself having a particularly “un Jesus-like” day, I take some extra time to read the red stuff in God’s word. When I read the words that Jesus himself spoke, I am quickly reminded of who I serve and the model he set for how I am to pursue life. In Christ’s words I find encouragement, hope, conviction and challenge. In his words I see how I ought to live and am reminded of my need for a savior because of how I actually live.

Paying a little extra attention to the red stuff has been good for my soul.

Below is a video an 8th grade guy made to promote our small group ministry. When you place a value on letting students use their gifts in your ministry, it’s really fun to see what happens!

Click To Play

Lesson: Week7 of our Summer Series, “The Lab”. Each weekend during the Summer we are taking an up-close look at some of the more famous passages of scripture. This weekend we looked at Joshua 1:9

Lesson Length:16 minutes. While at Summer Camp, I filmed this lesson on location. We used various aspects of camp as examples of good fear (fear that protects) and bad fear (fear that prevents). It turned out great and students seemed to really enjoy it. Plus, it kept me from speaking four times the weekend right after camp!

Music: Way above average. We had a super strong band and they played songs from camp so our students were highly engaged.

Attendance: Below average.

Volunteer Involvement: Below average.

Fun Factor:High. We planned a fun weekend and the students who attended camp added extra energy.We had an unbelievableclay-mation video thatwas made by one of our students to promote small groups, acamp highlight video and our summer theme video (each week we are making a video in our”Lab” in which Egor isinterviewing potential new masters….thinkYoung Frankenstein meets cheesy junior high video making skills!).

Games Played:“Wiilay Race”Simple, but so fun. We created four teams of three and picked a three-lap race on Mario Cart (on the Wii, which is why the game was a Wiilay race). Each time a team matecompleted a lap, they passed the steering wheel off to the next person on their team. We also played “Sit Down If”, which is one of our classic games whenever we have something crazy like camp the week before church. “

A slow blogging week due to the fact that I’m away at Summer camp. With only one full day remaining, here are a few highlights:

- Because camp is a little smaller than normal, it has been easier to “make the rounds” and have some brief conversations with virtually every student.

- Our speaker has been incredibly “junior high friendly”.

- Our band has been incredibly “junior high friendly”.

- We have our youngest group of leaders ever (about 80% just graduated from high school or areheading into their Sr. Year), but they have been one of the best crews we’ve ever had.

- As always, the Thousand Pines staff has treated us like kings.

- Several students have made decisions to follow Christ!