Attendance: Above Average
Lesson Topic: Week one a two week series on the Bible called ‘Check It Out!
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Below Average
Music: Average
Lesson Quality: Above Average
Length of Lesson: 14.5 minutes
Student Response: Above Average

A crazy weekend! Some of us were at Y.S. and some of us were helping run the High School program because they were at Y.S. We also had to set up and man a whole bunch of little student atmospheres around the campus as part of our student zone building campaign.
Attendence was huge, our junior high worship team led worship in the adult services, and a few youth pastors from Y.S. dropped by to observe our ministry in action. John, one of our interns, did a GREAT job teaching a really tough topic. He was given the task of giving a fairly detailed overview of the ‘facts and figures’ of the Bible in about a 15 minute window!
A crazy weekend…..but a good one.

I’m heading out this afternoon to the Youth Specialties convention in Anaheim. Since this one is only 30 minutes up the road, my family is going to come along and hang out for most of the weekend. My daughter is on the junior high worship team and they have been asked to sing in all six adult worship services this weekend, so she’ll head home a bit early.

For the past 20 years I’ve watched junior high kids live extremely busy lives from a distance but now I’m experiencing it first-hand. It’s actually been somewhat fun because the vast majority of her business comes from youth group stuff, so it’s kinda hard to complain!

I got a new car recently (not new, but new to me) and I’m already having car trouble. I’ve decided that I am the undisputed king of car trouble. I think it’s just in need of a new battery which won’t be too expensive or tough to replace.

Day two of our ‘nobody has an office’ experiment is in full swing. So far, so good. I’m posting this from my cubicle but will likely head over to the ‘surf room’ in a couple of minutes to get some real work done.

My dislike for it is growing every day. Not for politics or politicians or for our American system…just for the current climate. The John Kerry fiasco of the last 48 hours has been the final straw.
Was it a botched joke? Did he mean what he said? Did he apologize soon enough? Was his apology sincere? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m sick of ‘em. I’m sick of liberals, I’m sick of conservatives, I’m sick of news correspondents, I’m sick of talk show hosts..I’m sick of the whole thing.

The second fun junior high ministry story of the weekend is actually the setting of Jaime’s golf cart story….our small group frisbee golf tournament.

Each year we host a big frisbee golf tournament for our small groups. We actually have several permanent ‘baskets’ on our property and have bought a few more portable ones so we have a nine hole course for this event.

My responsibility for the event was to sit at the Tee Box of one hole all day long. When teams came to my hole, I would give them a proposition: Before they saw my throw, they could agree to let me throw my disc on behalf of everybody on their team. After my throw, they would all run to that spot and then each person would throw their second shot, third shot etc. Every team took me up on my offer because most teams were made up of kids who really couldn’t throw a frisbee too far, so getting some extra distance on one hole was a good thing.

The second-to-last group to come my way was an 8th grade girls group that was TERRIBLE! They were having fun, but frisbee golf just wasn’t their spiritual gift. They quickly took me up on my offer and I lined up for my throw. The basket for this hole was about 100 yards straight ahead but protected by a few trees lining the left side. Up to that point I hadn’t really gotten a shot very close to the hole and, actually, had tossed a couple pretty bad shots that may have done more harm than good for the kids on those teams (remember, if you said ‘yes’ to my proposition, you HAD to take my shot no matter where it landed). The girls were chearing for me as I threw the disc. It took off looking really good. About half-way there, somebody said ‘that could go in!’ As it passed the trees, my disc took a gentle turn left and dropped right into the basket. It was amazing….the girls were running around screaming, I was running around screaming. Every girl on the team got to record a hole-in-one for that hole. Very fun.

The funniest part of the story is that I’m really pretty poor at frisbee golf….but those girls will never know it!

On Sunday, two things happened in our ministry that instantly rank towards the top of my many, many junior high ministry stories. I’ll share one today one tomorrow.

GOLF CART
Jaime is a brand new, full-time minister on our junior high team. Jaime can’t drive golf carts.
On Sunday, I was in our junior high tent getting ready for our 4:30 afternoon program when Jaime came hustling up to me. He was visibly rattled, but not overly so. He had been driving a flat bed golf cart/utility cart around the campus cleaning up from our frisbee golf tournament (which I will tell about in tomorrow’s story…)
I will write the account exactly the way Jaime shared it with me.

JAIME:

“Uh, Kurt. While I was driving the golf cart, I may or may not have lost control. When I lost control, I may or may not have plowed the cart right through one of those really expensive, concrete light fixtures. After I did that, I may or may not have panicked and tried to slam on the break. Of course, I may or may not have accidently slamed on the accelerator instead. This may or may not have resulted in me and the cart flying down the hill. At the bottom of the hill I may or may not have rammed the cart up a tree. The cart may or may not have actually been stuck up the trunk of the tree which may or may not have forced me to ask some people walking to the worship center for help removing it.”

In review: Jaime lost control of one of the church golf carts and plowed clean through a concrete light fixture, down a hill and literally up a tree!

He went to the doctor yesterday to have his shoulder checked out and I haven’t heard the results. I’ve posted picutres of the light (you can see where it cracked at the base…we picked it back up and balanced it upright and then placed the caution tape around it) and the damaged tree.

Attendance: Average
Lesson Topic: Week two of MAKE YOUR MARK
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Average
Length of Lesson: 13 minutes
Student Response: Average

The week heading into our weekend programs was a wild one. We found out on Wednesday afternoon that the church has decided to put a three-week emphasis on our student ministries and on raising awarness of our Student Zone construction. This is all great news, but threw a wrench in our weekend plans as we decided to change and shorten our program so students could head up to the adult patio area and be a visible presence. To aid this we created a big student lounge on the patio with arcade games, basket ball hoops, couches, movies playing on big screens etc. The funny part was that we shortened our lesson and postponed our junior high ministry fair so that we could be done early enough to get our students up to the patio, BUT the adult service ran about 20-30 minutes longer than usual so in hindsight we really didn’t need to shorten our service at all!

My buddy, Scott Rubin, just sent me this fun link. I’m sure the bigger fan you are of Lost and/or Survivor, the funnier this will be.

I’m heading out for a 30 hour getaway with my wife so probably no post tomorrow.

I’m of the opinnion that most people are more creative than they think they are. My only real evidence of this is the fact that all of us used to be 5 years old and I’ve never seen a non-creative 5 year old. Somewhere along the line, many of us ‘grow up’ and outgrow our creativity because it isn’t as well accepted in a grown up world. Over time, we forget how to be creative and begin to believe the myth that we aren’t.

I stumbled across this website the other day and thought it had some pretty good reminders about creativity and some exercises to get the juices flowing.

Recently we’ve added a few, small twists to our junior high ministry that I’m really excited about. None of this is groundbreaking or revolutionary but it just feels like good ol’ fashioned junior high ministry and I’m lovin’ it! Here are a few of my favorite things happening in our ministry right now:

- Wildside On Location. We have an old Suburban with our logo painted on it that somebody donated a few years back. One Friday a month we announce that we are going to be ‘on location’ at a certain campus after school. We load the Suburban up with cokes, snacks and beach chairs and park ourselves near the campus in an easily seen place. We encourage our students to come by for a coke and to bring a friend or two. It’s been surprisingly well received.

- Campus Kindness. As part of our student leadership program, students break up by campus to pray for their school and brainstorm ideas to creatively minister to their schools. To help the process, we gave them a list of suggested ideas they can implement. This is brand new and they are just now getting around to actually planning their first campus ‘act of kindness’, so we’ll see how it all goes, but there seems to be a ton of excitement around the idea.

- ‘Thinking Small’. A temptation that most youth workers fall into is the idea that bigger is better. We plan bigger events to attract bigger crowds. We work hard to grow our camp attendance. We dream of the day we will have our own youth building….or at least our own room! I feel like I’m at a place in my ministry career that I may finally be over all that stuff (I’m not saying I don’t struggle with it, but it’s not nearly as important as it used to be). I’m now really trying to force myself to ‘think small’. It just seems like there are so many really good things about smaller youth ministries that get overlooked and forgotten in our quest for bigness. Our ministry is making a conscious decision to think small by trying to excel at the stuff small youth ministry does well. I’m not against healthy growth; I’m just done being consumed by it.

And on a completely random note….I’m sitting in Tullys and a guy just walked in who looks EXACTLY like Locke from Lost.

Our student ministry team worked like crazy last week to get ready to move our offices only to find out that while we had to be out of our workspace by Friday morning, we didn’t have the proper permits to allow us to occupy our new space. This means that for the next week or two…or three we will be nomads; moving from space to space. We’ll sit in an open cube, we’ll borrow an office, we’ll work from Starbucks (nothing new there for me…) but we won’t have access to most of our ‘stuff’ because it’s all boxed up and waiting for us in our new work space. I actually think it may be kinda fun for a week, but if we are displaced for much longer I can see things starting to get ugly.

In anticipation of my grumbling, I’ve already begun to work on a list of reasons I’m thankful I get to minister where I do.