Tag: mission community church

Headed to Tijuana

36 of my high school students and 4 leaders are heading to Tijuana for Spring Break next week. We’re returning to Mexico Caravan Ministries, an amazing organization that builds homes for the homeless, among other things. We’re all set to build 12 shelters for 12 families over 4 days. The team at MCM leads the way, while our students pound nails, push up walls, and play with the neighborhood kids.

I hope that God does something huge in the hearts of my students. They’re already such amazing kids… I just can’t wait to see what happens when we get back.

I’ll be blogging through the trip HERE.

Mission Community Church: Grand Opening

For every person that comes to celebrate the grand opening of our campus expansion on Sunday, March 28th, Mission Community Church will give 5 years of safe, clean drinking water to a person in need. Join with thousands to make a difference just by showing up.

It breaks down like this: for every person that comes (women, men, children… all of em), we’re sending $5 to charity: water, an amazing non-profit organization that provides clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Our youth ministries did a 3-month fundraising campaign earlier this year for charity: water, and it was a great success. We raised about $5,000!  CW gives 100% of every dollar to the people in need. No overhead costs, no profits, none of that.

The video says “5 years of clean water”, which is a variation of what charity: water says, which is that $20 can give one person clean water for 20 years. They’ve told us that our efforts will go towards a specific project in Haiti!

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what just happened?

It’s been a great first month of ministry at Mission.

We had 12 volunteers in High School when I got here, and now we have 31. God pretty much opened the floodgates!

There are a couple of things that I love about the students who are coming. First, they’ve been kicking butt for years. They’re already leading the church when it comes to serving, giving, and loving. They’ve been led well, and they’re primed for even more.

We’re about a month away from the BACK TO SCHOOL madness, and I can’t wait!

You should come to Mission on Labor Day weekend… the guy who will be speaking in the main service that weekend is really smart and godly and humble and tall 😉

Lindsay and I are loving it here!

we made it

We’re here in AZ! Well, I’m here… Lindsay went to Ohio for 5 days already. She seriously needs to get a job with Southwest Airlines.

We’re staying with our friends Brian and Promise until we land somewhere permanently. We’re not moving back into our old house (it’s still for sale). There are houses here in AZ going for like 150k that were TWICE that just a year ago (just like mine that is STILLLL FOR SAAAAAAALE). We’ll be house shopping non-stop once Lindsay gets back in town.

Tonight is my welcome party with the students, and then this weekend I’m being commissioned up front in all five services. Should be fun! Then on Monday I am in the office to hit the ground running! I love driving up and seeing the construction going on!

Lindsay is going to keep her eyes open for a job- let us know if you’ve got a great one for her!

I’m so excited to plug in and start doing life with this community. I’m missing my Calvary students for sure… this new crew has some huge shoes to fill, and so do I!

youth ministry name

|| UPDATE: I ended up choosing to not give a specific name to our high school ministry. Instead, we simply go by “Mission High School Ministry”, and I couldn’t be happier. I shorten it to MissionHS for our Twitter and Facebook. MISSION is the name of the church I work at. ||

I’ve been thinking about what I should name my new youth group lately. I probably won’t make the switch until next year, but I’m sure I want to.

I loved the name “Merge” when I was at Cornerstone. The definition “to combine or unite so as to become indistinguishable from one another” was a perfect match with Galatians 2:20 “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me“. When we said “Come to Merge!” we were inviting them to a place AND inviting them to come and join their lives with Christ. I could re-name my new group “Merge”, but that would be feisty because the original Merge is ten-minutes down the road. Only kidding…

I’ve been LOVING the word “Union” after reading Brennan Manning’s “The Furious Longing of God“. Check out what he said:

“That’s one of the most explosive words in my Christian vocabulary. The daring metaphor of Jesus as bridegroom suggests that the living God seeks more than an intimate relationship with us. The reckless, raging fury of Yahweh culminates, dare we say it, in a symbiotic fusion, a union so substantive that the Apostle Paul would write: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.'”

The only thing stopping me is that I know of another ministry out there with that name… I’m torn. I like “Union”, but I’d also like to have a name that is a but more active. Something with a little more volume maybe. Or maybe I’ll just keep it lined up with the church’s name (The High School Ministry of Mission Community Church). Hmm…

If you grew up in the church, what was your youth ministry called?

What would YOU name one if you were a high school pastor?

intro video

This is a short video that was shown last weekend at SSCC introducing me and some of the other newbies!

CJ and Josh are both bloggers! Jason isn’t a blogger, but he’s a cage fighter (seriously), so I’ll never ever, ever give him a hard time about it.

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