Fresh Powder

We had a meeting today at the MET for all the adult volunteers about our wednesday night service. The service, or rather the building filled with gadgets and gizmos, attracts a lot of students from the surrounding community. Coming from low income families, typically apartment housing, we usually refer to these students as "community kids." The distinction comes because most of our regular attenders or "church kids" are from middle class, white families.

The majority of the adult volunteers at the MET are parents of "church kids" and so they have the natural aversion to the community kids because they are so different. Most of our community kids are highly unchurched so they have no idea of the unspoken rules church people have about cursing, fighting, talking in service, etc. So this afternoon we had a meeting about rules and guidelines so that we can maintain order at the church, but then also spent a great deal of time talking about how to connect with the students.

It was exciting and encouraging to see some of the parents really get what we were talking about because some of our volunteers had no idea the extent to which their help was needed. To hear from the volunteers the concept:

God loves us and that's why we're here...because God loves us. As volunteers, we should be the people sharing that love with the kids who are here. They might not get that anywhere else, so we should be Jesus to them.

I was happy to hear that as opposed to: "We've tried but these kids are just difficult and we can't do it. They should just learn to shut up during service."

But to hear from the hearts of the volunteers was great. Afterwards, Jon and I really wanted to take some of the ideas and put them in the hearts of our student leaders. Our students leaders haven't really been reaching out to the community kids. It seems the segregation between the two groups that society has put in their minds has really gotten to them. But I always remember about what Paul said about in Christ there being no slave or free, Jew or Gentile, male or female. One body.

Anyways, so Andy really agreed but we both recognized the groundwork that would have to be laid beforehand. Namely, creating a leadership team. But before that, educating our students who want to be leaders what leadership is and how it will function at the MET. Andy really wanted me to bring up some of my old binders from the TSM from back in the day and my Pit Crew stuff. He wanted me to work with him on developing some cirriculum. Which completely excites me. Takes me back to high school working on Pit Crew. Actually, I got so nostalgic today just looking back at my old Pit Crew binder.

If there is one thing I love, it's training a group of students to be leaders and then building a ministry from the ground up based upon that leadership. Just like Pit Crew. So the idea of helping Andy train these kids for leadership and then get them out there absolutely excites me to no end. I love it. Which is why I am blogging, I was so excited about that I just wanted to blog. Tonight I'm going to bring a box of old binders and notebooks to Andy's and hopefully go through some of it. This next week I would really like to work on some cirriculum. Right now I'm just in a flurry of ideas and have an incredible movement of the Spirit. I just love this stuff, ministry is what I love to do. So it's like being a snowboarder and hearing there's fresh powder on the mountain. I'm just excited to hop back on the board.