ATF Youth Pastor Session
ATF is always a fun experience for me. I enjoy the student sessions, but I always felt like the Leader sessions were more of a sales pitch, like "come enjoy a great fun weekend, but you need to listen to our time share sales presentation ..." sorta deal. I'm sure the resources are great. In fact I almost bought some of the resources this year, but only because they kinda tossed it out as an aside, not as a big part of what they were talking about. Normally it's like "this is what we've done to help youth groups grow so let me give you a few tips, and you can buys these books with the full … [Read more...]
ATF Worship
One of the best parts of Acquire the Fire is the worship. Over 4000 teens entering God's presence in a single place is an experience that should be had at least once before Heaven. I figure that is what Heaven will be like only exponentially more. People think it is going to be "boring" but the energy and excitement of this kind of worship proves to me that Heaven will be far from boring, even if all we do is have an eternal worship set. Enough generalizations, I want to talk about this event. We start each event with a Youth Pastor break out. It is to get us any special rules, and share … [Read more...]
Just some student messing around before the sessions as the arena was filled up. I had to cut and crop the video to keep one student off screen, not that we are embarrassed, but she needs to be more incognito for safety reasons. That is why some of the shots are kinda short of end quickly. The students had a great time waiting for things to get started and ended up on the big screen a LOT. More than the other groups that were much larger. Yeah the insanity wears off on them. I wish I could have got some footage during worship, they went all out for that too, but the lighting made it impossible.
Rebuilding old junk
This past weekend was Acquire the Fire, and it was one of the best I've been to. I'm working on getting some of our video and photos together, the biggest problem is that one of the students can't be in anything we put online, so I have to do some editing before I can add any of the stuff the student appears in. I can, however, add my personal notes on the event. Friday night Ron Luce spoke. This is the first time I've heard him speak. He related our relationship to God to an experience he had with his son rebuilding an old wreck. The car was in really bad shape, barely a frame to speak … [Read more...]
So they didn’t have a t-shirt cannon, monkey butts, or fluffy bunnies, but they did have hammer time.
Yesterday I made it through the end of lunch. After lunch they had more worship and then launched into "The Trouble with Parents." This was a great session where students were encouraged to honor their parents and given 3 very easy things they could do to accomplish that. 1 Stop joining their friends when they are complaining about parents. If you don't complain you won't feel as irritable. 2 Respectfully do what you are told when you are told to do it3 Go the extra mile by doing things you don't have to do.If the students do this their parents will naturally be more likely to let them … [Read more...]