My wife and I lead a group of 22 youth to the Dare 2 Share conference in Phoenix this weekend and I want to share a little about it.
Highlights:
22 youth from the Vineyard Community Church spent the weekend in downtown Phoenix worshiping our God and learning about ministry and evangelism along side more than 3000 youth throughout the state of Arizona.
God was moving in the hearts of many of our youth!
Many of our youth have already called friends and started sharing the Gospel with them.
All of us have been encouraged to memorize more scripture!
We are all making a list of those we will be praying for.
Fee lead worship and it was amazing! No concert here... Just Spirit filled worship.
The door has been opened for future conversations with our youth.
Lowlights:
Zach got sick on Saturday evening and had to go home. We love you Zach and hope you are feeling better!
We have to wait a whole year for D2S to come back to Phoenix.
My Thoughts:
My desire for unity has been fueled even more by attending Dare2Share. Our youth were encouraged to actively pursue opportunities to share their faith with their friends and if they do this by inviting their friends to attend our youth group, I think their friends would be stuck by the obvious divisions that exist. I think we really need to work on our own unity and work on being "Inviters and Includers", so that we can make visitors feel welcome when they do come. We actually had a couple of new kids today and I put them on the spot and asked them how welcome they felt when they came into our youth meeting... both shared that they were not made to feel welcome and one mentioned that when he walked in, "everyone just stared at me". I am continuing to pray about how to help us improve and I am committing to do my part to help new folks fit in.
It was great to have time to hang out with the kids! I had some great conversations and I think we had a lot of fun. I love these kids and seeing them be encouraged to go deeper means a lot to me.
I'm excited about going next year!!! It was a ton of fun and now that I know what to expect... next year will be even better!!!!
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1 comment:
In all of my years that I worked with youth, this was the number one problem that I saw. When new kids came, they did not feel welcomed. I don't know what the answer is, but I will pray that whatver you share with them, encourages them and that they start welcoming anyone that walks through the door.
I am not sure if this is just something that happens at this age or what. Like I said, I certainly do not have all the answers. Teens tend to be cliquish, and I am not sure how we can break that cycle. But we certainly know who can.
Peace!
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