Tales of new life

I saw an old friend of mine at VBS today. She and I had grown up here at SPEP and done the VBS thing as teenagers. I looked at her and commented how long it had been since she and I had done VBS as teenagers. I must say I am proud of our students.

 I have been watching  them today. Watching them worship, help little children, care for the equipment, animals, etc that is needed to make VBS run, run games, and on and on. There are a bunch of teenagers at the church right now working to serve our church, our community, and our God. What a great thing.

I am looking to continue these opportunities for service. I want our students to have a well rounded concept of ministry. I want them to experience everything from manual labor to caring for younger children to feeding the homeless and anything else we could imagine our Lord calling them to do in the future. If you have ideas let me know. I would love to hear them.

One of the hardest things we face as a youth ministry(and a church for that matter) is how to communicate what is going on here to all of you out there. Events, ministry opportunities and needs, goals, hopes, dreams, my lunch order - it is just so hard to get it out there so you know what’s happening. In addition, I want to know what you are thinking. I remember one student coming up to me after the first time we did All-Night-Bowling and she said, “that was awesome! Can we do it every month??” After staying up all night and getting up the next day, I thought I was going to die so my answer to her was an emphatic “NO!!!” The point is that that was a great communcation exchange. The problem is that those exchanges are few and far between. I want to know what students are thinking, what parents are thinking. I want to know when someone is interested in ministering with and to middle and high school students. So I thought I would post a blog and see what happens. Let me give you a few methods we are currently using to accomplish our communication goals.

First of all, we are trying new high tech methods of communication all the time. This blog is one example. I am really hoping to use this space to tell stories and communicate ideas. We also have taken to facebook. Facebook is a realtionship management tool on the internet. It is a free program, similar to myspace or xanga. I know that in the church these sites can carry the equivelence to swear words or pornography, but like most things, it is really how they are used that matters. Facebook is the cleanest personal site that I have seen. Unlike myspace, the opportunities to eliminate unwanted content seems to be good. Facebook isn’t really about posting pictures of scantily clad people orunnecesary stories of things that people are doing. Facebook is really about keeping up with your friends. We have made two groups on facebook called “KZ - the facebook group” and “LQ - the facebook group”. KZ is for the senior high and LQ for the middle school. We post all our events on this page. Both students and parents can go to find out what is going on, but you will need to make a facebook page. Currently there is at least one parent and one elder that I know have facebook pages.

Other methods of communication that we are currently using are the bulletin. We always have our events in the bulletin. We also still use some mailings (although we are trying to cut back some). We also use the web page to communicate what is going on. Of course there is always the old fashioned, but always effective, meeting in person or calling on the telephone.

 I really want to hear what you have to say. Good or bad, we want to serve you well and know what is on your mind. Please talk to us about events, teaching, concerns, fears.

 I look forward to hearing from you.

I wanted to take a quick second to let you know what is going to be going on here at the Tales of New Life. This is going to be the place where I (Trip) and others will share their perspectives on life, faith, and the youth ministry here at SPEP Church. If you want to know about something going on, you will find some thoughts here. If you want to know how something went, you will find that here. If you want some thoughts on what we have been learning in the Scriptures, you will find that here too. Let me know what you think and we can make adjustments as we go along. I look forward to hearing from you.