Archives for August 2009

Then this stuff might help you.  We had our student ministries small group leader training last night and because I love you, I’m giving you pretty much everything we pass out in a single booklet PDF for free. We had it color printed and then we spiral bound it and our leaders loved it.  Most of it is original material from my team and I.  

It was a great night of bonding and I’m praying a great start to a year of ministry together.

Here’s our agenda:

• 6-9pm.
• Dinner.
• Update people’s technical data and take pictures during dinner. 
• Get to know you activity.
• Interactive teaching and response to the data in this PDF.  (it’s 22 MB, so be patient.  Might take a while if you’re on a slow connection but it’ll be worth the wait 🙂

Saturday launched the first day of soccer for Becky and Billy. They play with Jake in a league that is essentially all about skill development and 2 or 3 basics. Jake keeps asking me when I’m going to coach for him, but I told him not until he shows me he wants to play and actually works. I might be in trouble soon.

They play for an hour in a 3 v 3 pickup game on small fields in one place that they are assigned to each saturday morning and Jake is on the field with the most prepared kids. All 3 kids are on separate fields, so that means no sitting for the berrytribe cheer leaders. We just wander around yelling “go go go go to goal” to the tribe. At one point, Billy had a teammate who decided soccer was too much for him to play, so Becky jumped in and played with the boys. And scored.

Anyway.. it’s fun. Here’s some pics of the troops:

And here’s Becky and Billy fighting for the ball. Sibling rivalry is allowed on the field.

And one of my pretty little girl schooling all the boys… just for show. And yes, she scored 🙂

Ministry can be all about the tyranny of the urgent. When 
it is, the result is limited creativity, high stress, and usually
 low volunteer involvement due to the immediacy of needs
 and short-term demands. This lab is all about changing that 
by helping you develop a teaching and events calendar that
 lets you get ahead and get others involved. We’ll show you 
how to create a visual calendar you can use to stay ahead, discuss ways to develop group ownership, as well as talk 
about practical ways to make a calendar year that creates
 momentum instead of a constant drain on you, your ministry, 
and families.

Another will be new for me at the NYWC on student leadership and it’s called, “Creating a teenage owned ministry“. Here’s that content description:

Adolescent leadership is one thing. Adolescent ownership 
is something different. This lab will discuss some practical
 ways to move from merely getting teenagers involved to getting them owning a ministry. We’ll talk about the structural,
 philosophical, and practical systems that must be in place
 to move teens to a high level of ownership. Whether you’re
 trying to get a leadership team started or looking to revamp
 the one you already have, this lab will be a great place to do
 some thinking and dreaming of what could and should be.

FIRST A MINOR VEHICLE RANT:

I don’t think you should own a really fast car if you don’t drive it really fast.  REALLY fast….  Like if you own a ferrari and you just take it to the grocery store nice and slow lookin’ for looks… you’re are a poser!  At least park it like this kid does:

and for what it’s worth…. if you have a stupid fast car and you’d like me to take it somewhere and drive it REALLY fast, I’d be happy to oblige you and have done so with a ’65 shelby GT 500, a really fast Jaguar, a BMW 700i, and a Dodge Viper.  The Shelby was the best.

I also don’t think you should own a truck if all you do is carpet the bed of it and go get 2 liter bottles of soda with it.  A truck should be used to haul stuff.  Dirty stuff.  Stuff you don’t want in your car.  Big Stuff.  Stuff you can’t fit in your trunk.

NOW ONTO MY PHOTOSHOP GIG:

Ok…  that said.  I think I have committed a similar sin however with my computer.  I have Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 and I use them weekly, if not daily in ministry.   But I intuitively know that I’m a poser.  It can do amazing things…. and I use it to tweak stuff.  I wish I was done with seminary so I could go take a class on these programs at the community college.  Truth is,  I use them to do wimpy stuff that I could have done in keynote or something.

So, last Sunday we needed a slide for a stressful game of “hot potato”.   I searched the web, hoping to cheat and find one someone else made and borrow it.  Well, instead I found this lovely photoshop tutorial website that showed me exactly how, step by step, to set my own choice of words on FIRE.

HAAAA!

5 minutes later I had turned this slide I made with a lovely kid drawing of a potato on fire that I found:

Into this:

I think I might have actually taken my Ferrari for it’s first real test drive this weekend!