Weekend wrap-up...

We had a really great weekend this weekend at both Live Wire and High Voltage. I'm sitting on the couch doing my usual Sunday night ritual (watching Sunday night football (in this case, the Pats losing at the Chargers and wishing that I had some different players in my fantasy line-up). But I'm also thinking about the weekend.

• This was the second weekend of having a student band. This has been a great return our weekend line-up that we've been missing. Justin, our weekend worship guy, is doing a great job with these few students... Will D., Will P., Amanda K., Sarah R., and Andrew M. and they are actually beginning to work well together. Plus, the students who are present at the weekend service are taking well to it.
  
• We did a couple of fun things this weekend. First, we made THIS video into a countdown timer (with the first part trimmed out). Our current series, YHWH TXT, has a text message over theme, so it made a fun start. Second, we incorporated in a texting poll vote from polleverywhere.com. They have a simple to use texting service where anyone can text in a vote on a specific question and their most basic package is free! Very cool. Finally, we set up our student text messaging system from Simply Youth Ministry to send the final portion of our outline to our students about 3 minutes after church was over... so they got up, walked out and got in their cars and boom, they got a text.
  
• We also started a new series this weekend called "YHWH TXT." We're dealing with the 7 letters to the churches in Asia Minor from Revelation and Jesus' call to endure. It should be a fun series. I don't think that in almost 10 years of youth ministry, that I have done a series on the weekend dealing with Revelation exclusively. So we'll see how it goes. But since it's about some of these churches, there will be some cross pollination between other books (i.e. Acts, Ephesians, etc).
  
• But finally... we had good crowds this weekend. And it's not about numbers and I know that... but it's just so much more encouraging when we put extra time and energy in (which we did with the band... the texting stuff... etc) to see a good student turnout.
  

All in all it was an encouraging weekend.

Jim