Surprise Me God - Day 11 - Thursday

Youth and Education Staff Retreat

Today was crazy, nonstop and very intense. The day began with a retreat to a favorite pizza place for a staff retreat with myself and 7 other youth and education staff at out church. This has been a long time coming and with more and more staff we need to communicate more. Also, we have growing numbers and to put it Biblically, we are putting new wine into old wine skins. In other words...we need to change some things.

I was a little worried about how people would take a bomb shell like changing the ages of confirmation or requiring more of them, or changing the requirements. You see confirmation is a strange thing. I am not sure where it lands in the grand scheme of things. We have education staff and they deal with the little ones and there is youth staff that deal with the big ones. And then we have the medium ones who are the middle schoolers. Kids who are going through the biggest changes in their lives both physically and mentally and we are teaching them everything they should know about the Bible, Faith and God in three years and hope and pray that they stick around.

So my worry was that education would balk against the ideas I had, or they would throw out their own and we who hit the breaks. Neither happened. We discussed, talked, thought, questioned, and figured out a little more about where we need to go with the youth programming of this church. It was an encouraging day. When we all left at 3pm I realized that one day was not going to be enough for all of this to flush itself out. This is good, more talking and then doing comes after that.

I left encouraged and a little behind schedule. I was meeting with some of the junior guys for coffee and showed up a tad late. Not a lot but a tad. I had a great conversation with them about life and what is going on in their lives right now. No agenda other that getting to know them better. I met with three abut two others showed up in passing and one was working at the coffee shop. 6 birds, one stone. I need to do this more often. Get out of my office and just sit and talk with the youth. It brings me joy and I think they might get something out of it too.

I have another appointment with a youth for coffee on monday, I could get used to this.

Night,

dain