Awake - Weekend Recap!

Here's a little recap of Sunday night, November 7...

We kicked off a new series on Sunday night called "Friendship 101."  We are talking about friendship and what goes into making a great friend Biblically. 

Here are some of the elements that went into Sunday night:

• We kicked it off with Casting Crowns video... Until the Whole World Hears. Great video with a powerful message.
• We played a very fun and very competitive new game... called Bronco, Baby, Backpack.  (I picked it up HERE.)  It works kinda like "Rock, Paper, Scissors" only active with a partner.  We call out bronco, baby or backpack and the two have to get into that position.  Last group is out! Congrats to Jacob and Brock for winning that!  It was close!
• We had a great worship set by worship team 2.  Set list was: Nothing But the Blood, Marvelous Light, How He Loves Us and Hosanna
• A couple of short videos about friendship... Greatest Game Ever Played and Holes.
• We talked about what creates a quality friendship versus what creates an average relationship.  Quality relationships are relationships that put the other first, last over time, tell the truth and take you in a Godly direction.  Showed a fun video about friendships... sometimes that how friendships are; they blindside you!

All in all... it was a great weekend.  We seemed to have a bit of a perfect storm as far as volunteers.  Four regular members of the team ended up being out Sunday night... two planned to be away and two couldn't make it suddenly.  Thankfully a couple of great folks jumped in and helped out. 

Looking forward to Week 2 of the Friendship 101 series... Dealing with trust!

Jim

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Weekend Wrap Up

Lately I've been checking out a few blogs that recap their students' weekend service.  Sometimes I get ideas from them... sometimes not.  But I got to thinking this morning that those of you who read here regularly... and are youth workers... might be interested in some ideas and where they came from. 

So... Here's our weekend in review:

• Showed a little Switchfoot this weekend... The Sound (which is currently the highest played song in my iTunes library... maybe even if your's... at 57 total plays since May)
• Played a quick random participant game at the beginning called "Bucket Ball"... got the idea from "Game On Volume 1" HERE ... Gave away 4 boxes of movie-theater candy!
• We're advertising a couple of upcoming events...
• Xtreme... Nov 5
• Car Rally... Nov 6
• Worship Team #1 (of 2) led... Set List:  I Am Free, One Way, His Name is Love, We Will Dance
• No videos this weekend... aside from Switchfoot music video countdown.
• This weekend was an in between week for us series-wise.  From time to time we have an off-series weekend that isn't part of what we are teaching through.  We do this in case our regular series gets bumped for some reason or we have a night off (unexpectedly) for another church event.  So rather than teach, we had a de-stress your life night.  We served up grilled cheese sandwiches, chips and sodas to everyone who was there and broke out some board games.  We encouraged our students to relax and have some fun in the midst of a busy sports and school time.  (I jumped in... but lost... in a mean game of Monopoly!)
• In two weekends (no Awake next weekend because of the All Church Fall Feastival), we'll start a three weekend series called "Friendship 101."

All in all, it was a great weekend.  Attendance was great!  Saw some new faces that we hadn't seen in a while. The band was rockin'! Folks grabbed a grilled cheese and a board game and relaxed.  Plus, it gave our table leaders a chance to interact with students they don't normally talk to because they don't normally sit at their table.

It was a great weekend!

Good stuff!

Jim

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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

Weekend update... Jan 20th

We had a great weekend as we continued with our "Wisdom On" series. Tonight, we talked about the "tongue" and how we use our language. It was a good night. Here's rundown:

Lesson Topic: Wisdom On Week 3 - Taming the Tongue
'Fun Factor': Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Above Average
Music: N/A
Student Involvement in Music: N/A
Lesson Quality: Above Average
Length of Lesson: 32 minutes
Student Response: Above Average
Overall Night Rating (scale of 1(not good) to 10(awesome)): 8

We added an extra game/contest this weekend that brought some extra excitement. Fun fun!!!

Jim

Weekend Update... Jan 13th

We had a pretty good weekend this weekend in both Live Wire and High Voltage.

Here's a brief rundown of the weekend:
Lesson Topic: Wisdom On Week 2 - Lifestyle Committed to Wisdom
'Fun Factor': Average
Volunteer Involvement: Average
Music: Above Average (for middle school... music didn't pan out for high school)
Student Involvement in Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Above Average
Length of Lesson: 28 minutes
Student Response: Average
Overall Night Rating (scale of 1(not good) to 10(awesome)): 7

Overall, we had a pretty good weekend. We had several visitors for High Voltage and many students back who missed last weekend due to last minute family travels. Good weekend.

Jim

Weekend Wrap-Up

This weekend saw the return of weekend services for students at Fox Valley. We took a 3-week Christmas holiday break.

It was good to get back into the swing of things. Attendance was down for Sunday morning... middle school... but good and strong for Sunday night... high school.

We launched into a new series called "Wisdom On" working through some wisdom teaching in the book of Proverbs. All in all, it was a pretty good weekend. Attendance was good. Volunteer turn out was great. It was a good weekend.

Jim