Weekend Teaching Series: RESET: Jesus, Fresh Starts & Screaming Goats (series kickoff, week 2 of 4)

Sermon Synopsis: This week Doug Fields was back teaching about the blind man and Jesus (John 9). We thought a blindfold game would be fun, and it seemed to set up his talk well. Fields used lots of stories to illustrate God’s power over the physical world, and challenged students to understand the power of God in their lives in today’s world as well. The RESET series will be available to Gold Members next month absolutely for free so watch for that! Doug encouraged students to read the story on their own this week, and we gave away a new student Bible (CSB if you’re curious) to junior highers that didn’t have one!

Service Length: 65 minutes

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: We are having some serious fun this series in JH. This week we played the ever-popular Crowd Charades, this time the Galaxy Far, Far Away Edition. Lots of Star Wars in this service! You can get that game right here, and also grab the Star Wars countdown we used this week as well right here. We also played Put it on a Cracker, which we’ll give away here on the blog later this week completely FREE! All in all lots of fun, lots of energy, and a great way to continue the momentum of the New Year. Oh, and we played Star Wars Poser at the very end after we dismissed the 8th graders [see below] just to let them have some extra fun. And a donut!

Music Playlist: Endless Praise, Lion and the Lamb

Takeaway: This week we continued to emphasize the parent/home connection on the bottom of the program. Last week we had 10% of our students talk to their parents about the lesson (the parent is asked to text in a keyword after the discussion) and honestly, we felt that 10% was REALLY strong for our first stab at something like this. Hopefully we can build it over the course of this series and create a culture.

Volunteer Involvement: This week our volunteers were WAY up, which was great after last week’s initial showing. We used them in one of the games and they greeted students, hung out before the service and sat with them in the crowd.

Favorite Moment: This week we wanted to begin to build the bridge for 8th graders to move up to our awesome High School Ministry so we had Alex Beaverson pop into the service and run a game then we dismissed students early to go to a little reception in the HS room to be invited to Youth Culture Weekend, a event for 8th graders & up. It normally costs $99, but know this is crucial effort to get 8th graders handed off well, so they can sign up for just $10. Also, Youth Culture Weekend is pretty new to me as well, so if you’re curious and want more details you can find that right here. Love it!

Up next: RESET (week 3 of 4), also our JH Winter Camp wkd!