Woot and eww

So for the third week in a row we had new kids. I’m pretty excited about the new teens this week because one of the visitors from last week brought friends and family this week. Generally things went well tonight. There was some minor drama but overall it was calm compared to the first night when we had so many extra in a single night. I finished our “love, lust, and sex” series tonight by talking about our relationship with God.

I really love preaching for Youth. I have learned that the attention span of Youth is roughly 2 minutes longer than mine. I try to keep my sermons between 10 and 20 minutes. When I speak to the adults I usually run 45-60 minutes. In other words I basically do about 1/3 of the time. Now I typically take a given sermon and split it into three parts and then I had a nice three part series. The great part is that I can memorize the sermons because they are in my attention span. I typically have a very basic outline for my sermons and at the end of each point I have to go back to my notes or else I’m off topic.

It is awesome not having to preach off my notes. I feel much freer to engage the students when I’m not working from my notes. Very liberating.

Anyways, I preached the first night on how we tend to look at sin like a line that we cross and we ask the question, “What is crossing the line?” I put a duct tape line on the floor to illustrate this. Then I talked about how this is the wrong question. If we focus on how close we can get to God rather than how close we can get to the line then we will never have to worry about the line. There was a bit more to it but that gives you a good idea. So last week I talked about why we don’t want to cross the line because of the consequences, physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences. I was specifically talking about sex of course but I did give some examples of other kinds of sin. Finally tonight I brought it back around to how God relates to us after we cross the line. I focused on how God wants to have a relationship with us. I related the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 to them and how Jesus isn’t interested in tearing us down but rather lifting us up.

Well that is the short version at least.

Tonight we did have a small bit of eww. There was certainly the typical teen drama. One guy that came reeked of pot so bad I was about to get a contact high while I was preaching. I’m not complaining though. I mean other than not having any Oreos to scarf but that’s fine. These are the people I really want to get to know so I think it’s cool that they are coming to the church. Of course I’m waiting for some of the uptight people in church to complain about it. I’ve already had one say something to me. I figure he’ll have to get over it though. The issue was pretty bland compared to the other things that he didn’t see.

Well that was last night. Any thoughts?