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I’ve been counting down the days, eagerly awaiting the first night of LSM (lower school ministry @ GBC). I didn’t know what to expect.

• We took a room and gave it a modest makeover (a couple cool rugs, mounted a few screens, put some pics on the wall, added some lamps)
• We invited a lot of 6th and 7th graders
• We enlisted leaders, including Craig to lead worship, his wife (Jessica), Tony and my wife (Kim)
• We prayed
• We waited.

The kids had a blast! There were great comments from parents about what their kids were saying in the car last night. A great night of worship, a fun game (led by my amazing wife, pic on the left), conversations about what our friends mean to us. All in all, a great night.

And we start the countdown to next Sunday!

Driving home last night, I knew that I was right where God had called me. That’s a great place to be.

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My 1st summer at Gayton is almost in the books. Really, it feels like summer is already over. We’re in the advent of Gayton Youth 2.0, and I can finally feel the excitement building around us. I’m even excited now! It took some time this summer to get past the busyness of the mission trip, and now that we’re a month past the trip, I finally feel like I’ve kicked it into gear. But before we get too far ahead, a look back at the summer (a la Kurt):

• It’s really hard to maintain the typical year-round ministries during the summer. I liked what Tim Schmoyer wrote about this at the beginning of the summer (here and here). Keeping up the rhythm, the planning, the energy, the excitement, is so hard. With so many vacations, family trips and camps during these months, keeping our regular programming up is more of a downer than a benefit. I think we need to revisit this next summer: increase relationships, decrease programs. Which leads to my second thought…and third thought…
• Our girls middle school Bible study is a classic example — with great leadership from our interns, it thrived this summer. This was my first experience leading interns, and I hope they took as much out of the summer as they put into it.
• I think our Sunday night youth group experiences could have been better served in a more relational context, but instead we tried to keep our traditional Sunday night programming going. It didn’t work.
• The justice journey to Red Springs, NC was all I had hoped it would be for our youth. With 87 youth and 27 adults, we spent a week in this small town, and it was great. There are always some hiccups with a group of that size, but from our Reflection Night last week, the youth truly experienced relationships with new people that week. During our prep/training season before the experience, we used Deep Justice Journeys from YS/FYI. This was something we’ve tried to pull off a few times, and Kara, Brad and the FYI crew pulled it off. It was a great leadership resource.

Now, it’s September 1 and the start of school is a week away. I can’t wait to see how 2.0 kicks off and gets rolling. There are a lot of growing edges, but I think we’re in a good place right now to start. As our mantra has become, it’s a process…

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June 1 brought a new day, an exciting day. It was the first permanent step toward Gayton Youth Ministry 2.0, an effort to broaden the reach of youth ministry @ GBC. I’m not “interim” anymore, and I’m not the only youth pastor on staff anymore. John Mark (check him out on the blogroll: jm skammer) is now on staff as Associate Pastor of Students with the 8th-12th graders, and I get to focus on 6th-7th graders.

Over the coming months, we’ll be implementing Gayton Youth 2.0, a move toward an intentionally relational ministry with youth. We’ll start a small group ministry in the fall and move through this new model of youth ministry at Gayton. As we work on this, I’ll blog about the highs, the lows, the trials and the tribulations. JM talked to someone who said this relational-style ministry is rare, if not non-existent. Whether it is or not, it is certainly not prevalent in our friends’ churches, so our hope is to share what we learn along the way.

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