rvaYM

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…