Tonight we’re trying something a little different at our high school gathering. We’re getting everyone together in the main room, having the band playing some familiar tunes as they walk in, and inviting them to grab a taco or two (yep, I did say taco), and a soda, and then relax for a little while.
The tacos weren’t my idea, and I’m a little bit scared about the food choice… but only because high school students are horribly conformable, if that’s a word. What I mean is, if one kid says, “Tacos? How lame…“, then tacos might be seen as lame. But if that same kid says, “Tacos? How unbelievably amazing!“, then tacos are unbelievably amazing.
What would Malcolm Gladwell do in this situation? I know what Ryan Guard would do… he’d eat like six of those free tacos.
Then we’re giving them two options: First, they can stay put where they are and hear me talk about the Bible being reliable and trustworthy and supported by all sorts of evidence. Sounds boring, but I get pretty hyper about it so that’ll be entertaining at least. Or second, they can leave the main room and go to a mini movie theater we’ve set up where they can watch a ridiculously good sermon by Louie Giglio titled “Indescribable“. We thought that it would be a sweet Part Two to last week’s talk. We also thought that a bunch of our kids, the “church kids”, would already know most of what I’m going to say tonight. So they can go watch the ridiculously good talk by Giglio.
ryanguard.net 
Hahaha, that actually sounds really cool man….I mean your talk. Not Louie’s. 🙂
And you send whatever students come in and say “Taco’s? How amazingly stupid.” And I will hit em in the ear with a rotten eggplant and tell them “stupid that.”
How’d it go? That’s a cool idea… Although if I tried that, I’m afraid I’d only have an empty room to talk too. But that’s what I like about you RG, you’re not all self conscious about that sorta stuff. But I guess if that we’re the case I’d get to sit in on a great talk by Louie myself right? Either way, It’d be cool. Anyway… enough rambling… back to the OG question… How’d it go?
It was awesome! I’d say 2/3 of the students chose the DVD sermon, and I heard some pretty sweet feedback from a couple students and the leaders too. I loved teaching a group of students that had chosen to be there for that specific topic. I taught for maybe 15 minutes and answered 30 minutes of impressive questions. One of them stumped me, which was nice and humbling, but also made me pretty stoked that there were some serious thinkers in the room! Thanks for asking Kerry!
Oh and Jason, the tacos were apparently amazing, because 200 of them were gone. Kudos to Del Taco for the smokin deal.