Youth Story

So with the new job at the Franklin Nazarene Church, I have a new youth room. My best friend Drew also was just given a new youth room as his group outgrew their meeting area. Both of us have a TON of work to do on our rooms. The difference is that my youth room is like 40x15 feet and his youth building is like 6000x23923 feet. I actually don't know the size of his, but it is huge. We worked on both rooms today, my buddy Jason whom I used to work with at Brentwood came over and gave me some ideas on what to do with my new room. I have also been doing some research on the internet trying to find a style that I like. I think that my new churches youth room is coming along great. I have decided to split one room as the "game room" with the air-hockey tables/Foosball and whatever. Then I would have the main/larger room as a purely worship centered atmosphere. By the way, what are worship colors and what are game colors? I need to know that. We are planning a pretty decent lau...

Covert Chief This Game is best suited for ten to thirty participants.   How it works: Gather everyone in a circle Ask someone to step outside the room Appoint one person the be the "Chief" Everyone else is to do exactly what the Chief does (mimic the Chief's body motions) The person comes back in and tries to identify the "chief" If they guess correctly then the "chief" takes their spot and leaves the room, and the group appoints a new "Chief" The group must try their hardest not to look at the "chief" to make it difficult for the outsider. The outsider gets two or three guesses depending on the number of participants.

Stair Sledding! Ok so you have your more conventional types of stair sledding and then you have those type like the next video that just don't make any sense at all...... I'm pretty sure the car one had to be fake. But lets admit that it was pretty awesome either way.... This is obviously a great thing to do if there happens to be no snow outside nothing on tv and a large staircase in your immediate area. Amazingly it seems the only way to refrain from being injured in the process is to be a 3 year old girl dressed in pink.

The past four years have honestly been the best and most unforgettable years of my life. I have spent them as a college student, a brother, a son, and a youth worker. This week I am accepting a job at a new church. Although this is a great thing, it also comes as a bittersweet moment. It means that I have to leave Brentwood Student Ministries. I have spent four years working with youth at Brentwood, where I trademarked the phrase "Intern Jon". I wanted to write this blog so that I could document some of the greatest memories that I have made here at Brentwood. I have met so many great teenagers in the last four years, and seen many of them give their lives to Christ. So without further a due, here is the story of Intern Jon at BCN. A few months after I started at Brentwood, we took our first group of kids to camp. We had five teens and four adult sponsors, which is a typical ratio at BCN. We love our teens! As you can see by the shirts we made that night, we decided then a...

PROPS TO THE CHAPLAIN! Today we had a great chapel at good ole TNU. Dr. Tim Green got up and performed a Paul Washer esk sermon that seemed to be geared more towards the faculty than the students. He really hit on some good youth ministry subjects that I will cover in this blog post today. His entire sermon seemed to stem from a book called "The God-Hungry Imagination" by Sarah Arthur. He uses her term which she takes from other authors: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe what modern/postmodern/pop-Christianity has become. The idea was as follows: Christians today view God/Religion as God helps me be a better person, God/Religion makes me feel good about myself and God/Religion is there for me when I need it. The critique of our culture's understanding is this: Yes God is all of these things, but if that is where our religion/faith stops we are missing out on the purpose of life. Tim used the analogy of a golf player trying to play soccer with his golf equipment. ...

I wrote this as a journal entry about a month ago. This was for a missional class I was in. I had always intended to put it here but never got around to it. Quick side note: Big Announcement Coming Wednesday .   Today I set out to get outside of my bubble. It could be called the Trevecca bubble or my comfort zone. When it came to choosing a place to go to accomplish this, my thought process went something like this. I thought who are the people that are nearby that I am not comfortable spending time around normally? Two thoughts came to mind, there was the community down the hill which most people in Nashville refer to as “the projects” and then there was the community down the hill in which most people refer to as the homeless. Of these two I figured that I would be less comfortable spending time with “the homeless”. I decided this as I was sitting in my warm bed watching my cable TV underneath my blankets with my laptop. I realized it was snowing outside. I thought to myself th...

I remember the flood as if it were yesterday. I was on the Trevecca hilltop as the rain began to pour. Soon enough I found myself out in the neighborhood behind the school watching as a raging river birthed through granting no pardon to homes, cars or people in it's path of destruction. It were as if I was watching history develop in front of my eyes but instead of a historical time line unfolding, I was in the middle of one of those disaster movies where nature was fighting back against man. I stood there watching as a home was slowly swept away brick by brick, the residents looked on from across the street helplessly. They gazed at what was left of their home as their life's possessions floated down a stream that had taken the place of where their home stood just hours before. I wondered what would the story be? Does this go down as an awful tragedy something like a small scale Katrina? Does this moment define Nashville? What really happened in May of 2010 in Nashville Tennes...

Praise the lord! Tons of stuff has happened since last writing. It is almost too much to write about...... ALMOST. So when I left off I was looking for a job, getting ready for a huge lock-in, looking for a place to live and trying to figure out how to pay for school. Now a week later: I think I have found a church to serve in, the lock-in was better than we could have imagined, I found a place to live, and my prayers have been answered and someone gave me three thousand dollars for school. I could just end the blog there and not give any details but then everyone would be so mad at me and probably throw virtual tomatoes at me :( soooo if you want the long version just read the story under the video. This video I feel, embodies how I am/was feeling through all of these things. So the Lock-in: We had planned on having about 250 kids come in and have a worship service, games, a pizza party, a concert, and then head off to do bowling, laser tag, ice skating,broom hockey, dodgeball a...