Tomorrow morning I’m heading off to Cincinnati for the Group/SYM National Youth Ministry Conference. This is only the second year of this conference and things are looking pretty good. I’m slotted to keep myself pretty busy catching up with old friends, leading an 8 hour middle school ministry track etc. but I’m really looking forward to the weekend.

Perhaps what I like best about being part of this conference is the written expectation that the speakers and trainers will make themselves available to spend significant time with people attending the event. Eating meals together, hanging out during free time, attending late night options etc. are part of the role of every speaker. This really makes the whole event feel much more like a conversation than a conference, which is nice.

What I like least is being away from the family. The original plan was to take the kids out of school and make it a fun family trip (to Ohio?), but it turns out my daughter leaves for her 8th grade Washington D.C. trip on Friday so plans had to change.

I gotta admit, I wasn’t convinced that we’re on the front end of a recession until I saw how tough some churches have it.

(yes, the tongue is in the cheek)

Lesson Topic: Week Two of our Series ‘I <3 Technology'
Attendance: Average
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Above Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Above Average
Length of Lesson: 20 mins
Student Response: Way Above Average

One of our better weekends in quite a while for lots of reasons.
Our worship band was entirely student led…not even an adult on stage to help out which was really fun. Our lesson was ‘Life is a like a video game’ and we did some pretty creative stuff to add the atmosphere. We set part of our stage up to look like a living room and a few minutes into my message on of our volunteers came out, turned on the t.v. and started playing guitar hero. He played guitar hero on stage during my entire talk which was both distracting and really fun at the same time. The lesson was fun, we had a great video and we had a lot of our volunteer team in attendance which always makes for a strong weekend.

Sure, the cost of living is quite high, but…
….beautiful weather
….close to the coast
….I never have to worry about this!

Every 6 weeks or so, I am the official overnight M.O.D.(Minister of the day). Tonight is my night. From 5:30 p.m until 8:30 a.m I am the pastor who will respond to any emergency calls placed at our church office. I’m sure many of you have similar responsibilities, so I’m really not trying to whine. But of pastoral roles we play, the role of crisis intervention is the one I’m least comfortable playing. This is only my second time on duty since we started this new rotation (believe it or not, until recently the same pastor was on call EVERY night!) and the first time around I didn’t have any calls!
I’m praying that the people who call our church their home will have a peaceful, crisis-free night!

Lesson Topic: Week One of our Series ‘I <3 Technology'
Attendance: Above Average
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Below Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Above Average, but below average (no, that doesn’t make it average!)
Length of Lesson: 24 mins
Student Response: Average

This weekend we kicked off what I hope will be a really fun and different series. Our ‘I <3 Technology' series will use various aspects of technology as a backdrop (read object lesson) each week. We kicked it off with the internet and used it as a backdrop for a lesson on the subject of how do you know what's true, how do you 'filter' all the information you are exposed to etc.
I think the idea was excellent, my creativity was high, my delivery strong, but my content was fairly week….even for an entry level junior high program.
But games were fun, music was wonderful, there were tons of students in attendance and we did a great job programming the whole event around our theme.

- I participated in some personal conflict resolution recently with a gentleman I barely know, but hope to have a relationship with in the future. I was reminded of two things:
1) Humility goes a long, long way in resolving conflict.
2) There really are two sides to every story and it’s wise to recognize that.

- I would really like to see an African-American or female president. What a great step forward for our country. BUT, not sure either of the present candidates is the right African-American or female candidate. I so wish Obama had more to offer than fantastic oratory skills.

- I recently downloaded a few old Rush songs onto my iPod. Haven’t heard them in a long time. Good stuff!

- A week later, and I’m still thinking about the Super bowl. Best game I’ve ever seen.

- I’m really excited about our fun, new series we’re starting this week called ‘I <3 Technology’ (I heart technology). We are taking three major technological advances and using them as the backdrop for an object lesson each week. This week we are using the internet as a backdrop for a lesson on God’s word as best source for truth and knowledge. We’ve got lots of fun stuff planned.

The new book “Kurt and Scott’s Junior High Adventure” was just released and is available at Grouppublishing.com and Amazon.com. Simply Junior High should have it ready to ship in a day or two.

The title and cover obviously set Scott and me up to take some shots from our friends so I’m putting it on this post as a pre-emptive strike.

There are very few jokes and stones our friends can lob our direction that we haven’t already thought of ourselves!

But please, don’t let the incredibly good looking images on the cover keep you from purchasing this resource.