October 28 - Sr high retreat @Clearwater recap

I planed and led the Sr high retreat for the Presbytery of the Twin cities area. It was a successful and different retreat for many reasons. First it was a very small group, total size youth and adults was 34. So we all stayed in eagle Lodge and had small groups with mixed ages and mixed churches. I realize now I could have done a better job mixing genders ( three out of the four boys were in one of the four small groups). The small total group size also allowed us unique opportunities like, crawling through the tunnel between the carriage house and eagle Lodge, and playing Sardines in Eagle Lodge. Gary W. had a great idea for a Presbytery youth event, playing sardines in multiple churches in one night, a couple of rounds in each church. Somewhat unentinionally this retreat was less programed than a traditional falll retreat ( it had a snow camp laid back feel to it) I think there is a balance between too much programed time and a lot of free time, think the small group we had this retreat and all staying in Eagle made this format work better than it would with a large group. Some of my ideas for activities and small group time worked and others did not, think I did not have a good grasp of the theme myself and this was reflected in the vagueness of activities and small group time. Being that I had a small group to work with myself I was not able to get a feel for how the small groups worked as I did last year when I was able to float from group to group. While I ran some ideas by a few people before the retreat I did too much myself and vow to find a co-leader/planner and to seek out more feedback from others for future retreats. I had originally planned to work with a good friend and fellow youth leader ( we had talked about various ideas for retreats) but then she moved to Nebraska.

October 21- no church visit family obligations

I did not go to any church for worship on Oct 21, due to family obligations ( brunch celebrating my mother's birthday)/

Clearwater Middle School Retreat 07

This weekend I was up at Clearwater's fall middle school retreat. My friend Gary led it and along with Chris from Gary's church we drove up there together. It was fun to be a helper for the weekend and to be able to float amoung the groups and get to know the youth and the adults up there. There were nine churches represented with youth and adults. The adults were for the most part were old friends who knew each other from previous youth retreats. Those adults who had not been to Clearwater for a retreat before did a great job as well. The youth were a neat group who seemed to have fun and enjoyed the weekend. Gary and I have some common ideas about retreats, one is to try to shake things up a little so that it is not the same retreat everytime. I have to admit I have copied some of Gary's ideas from his retreats for retreats I have led or are going to lead. One such idea was how to do worship differently on Sun am. In the past most retreats have had each group taking a part of the worship service, preparing and leading their part. This retreat with help from Andrew, Sarah, Sally and I am sure others the worship service was created and people were asked to take an already created part. In addition Micheal who is the Associate Pastor at the Austin church did a short message ( sermon) that did a wonderful job of tying together what we talked about and learned over the weekend and challenged us to live out what we talked about. This worship service was a nice mix of scripture, liturgy and music led by the worship band from Rochester.
In addition to the great weekend, I now have a couple of addtional churches to visit and worship at including the Austin church and the Rochester church.

no church visits October 7

I did not make it to church today. I could list a number of reasons I talked myself into staying home instead of going to church ( which being world communion Sunday, I am a little bummed I did not go anywhere). Next Sunday I wll be up at Clearwater and will do a post on the middle school retreat a week from today or tommorow.

Presbyfest 07

It was a great day of connecting Presbyterians from around the Presbytery. I have really enjoyed being involved with the planning of Presbyfest 07 and would like to contribute more for the next one ( Carol O, this does not mean I am volunteering to be the registrar). I enjoyed catching up with many friends from various churches and seeing people enjoy themselves. The afternoon youth workshop while small I think went very well and hopefully gave everyone involved a number of ideas. I think the table challenge will be done at Church of the Way, First Presb. of South St. Paul and possibly Valley in the coming weeks. I also think a number of youth may be joining Sheltered Reality soon. From all I heard the event was successful and I think people who attended will give positive feedback. A Huge thanks to Lisa and the members of North Como for being such wonderful hosts and going above and beyond the expectations of a host church.

church visit #11 Church of all Nations

So once again I visited Church of All nations ( CAN) as this week my friend Moses actually gave his Triennium testimony, after it got pushed back two times before. Upon entering the church I noticed that many of the members congregate just inside of the doors by sanctuary, but there were no greeters till you get to the ushers. I wonder what needing to navagiate around church members and no greeters says to visitors in terms of being a welcoming church? While the people all seem very friendly during passing the peace and they "welcome?" visitors by having them stand and introduce themselves near the end of the service, at times it seems this is a close knit congregation that might be tough for visitors to feel welcomed. I think my shyness when I am in a new place and a large group probably means it is tougher for me to connect with new people and feel welcome but I wonder if churches could do more in welcoming visitors. For the first time in my visits to CAN during the welcoming time it was mentioned that there are cards in the pews to fill out if you are interested in memebership info.

On Saturday at Presbyfest I talked with Pastor Joo about CAN and realised they are trying not to follow some of the traditional ways of doing church that seem to be institutionalised. I wonder if greeting visitors and fellowship pads fall into this and why they do not do these things. I am all for not doing things just because all other churches do them or they have always been done, but I think you should find alterative ways to do some of these things that welcome visitors.

Again CAN seems to have a number of visitors, the question I have is what is their retention rate of visitors? Of the visitors that introduced themselves yesterday I think most will not be back often or potential new members. A large group of visitors was a small congregation that once a month visits other chruches for worship, what a neat idea, but I wonder how much many churches would want to do the same thing. A group of students in front and behind me were there to fulfill a class requirement of attending a multi-cultural church. at least two visitors where there because of thier girlfriends.

A couple of notes about worship, the praise band seems good, but too small ( two singers) to effectively lead the congregation in some unfamilar songs. the sermon ( which I will write about later in this post) seems to drasticly outweight the rest of the service in terms of time. Moses did a fine job giving his testimony which was more about his overall faith journey than his time at Triennium while he did talk about how Triennium was piviotal in refocusing his faith and involment at CAN. After Moses spoke and the welcoming, announcement time there was a young man who did a spoken word peace called "community" it was a good piece about social justice.

The sermon- Pastor Jin is a very effective speaker, he started by talking about the paradigm of sacrity and how we can never have enough. As the sermon went on it appeared to be a stewardship sermon about how greedy we are and the need to give back more which was given to us by God. it is amazing to hear that80% of the members pledged last year at CAN and that 70% of those tithe. Pastor Jin also said that the average giving in mainline churches per member is 2.3% and evagelical churches is 2.7% and that Presbyterians are per member the richest Christians. While I think the stewardship( giving part of the sermon) was powerful, I have spent a lot of timee thinking about the paradigm of scarity. I think this is something we all need to think about when do we have enough? What do we need to make us happy? I think the signs of a great sermon are that they speak to us and give us something to ponder for some time. After the sermon, a woman in front of me said, wow what a powerful sermon.

I think I probably will be back at CAN eventually, but I will not go as far as my friend Thao wanted me to and say that this was the best worship serivce I have been to in this journey.