5.15.2006

12 Feet of Welcome



Yesterday, as part of our festivities for the last day of regular Church School, we welcomed our fifth grade class, who will be moving up until the youth ministry program this fall.

I met a lot of neat kids and their parents , heard some interesting opinions about church school classes, and most importantly, we made and shared a 12-foot banana split with the whole youth group.

I'm a firm believer in food ministry. Jesus' first miracle, his biggest (numbers-wise) and his most important (the Eucharist) all had to do with food and wine, so who am I to doubt that system?

One difficulty I'm finding, as the brand-new youth minister, is that my high school class is always "too cool for this" and has a really hard time mixing (and believing me when I tell them they should mix) with the middle schoolers. This year and next that will continue to be a problem, but after that the middle school students we're growing will start to be high school students and will be used to the things I ask of them. They will also have the example of a carefully trained group of adult leaders (who are also learning not to hang back, but get in there with the kids) to model it for them. And, of course, 12 feet of ice cream to seal the deal!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

why is the girl in the middle in the green Jesus?

also, have you heard the Eddie Izzard riff on the last supper scene?

"‘All right, lads, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting the picture, so everyone get your positions, here we go…’

‘Jesus, why are you doing the big arms thing?’

‘Well, I don’t know… I just thought I’d do a big arms thing. I don’t know.’

‘Well, I’m going to do a big arms thing as well.’

‘Yeah, me too! I’ll call that the big arms…’

‘Look, we can’t all do big arms! We’ll look like a squadron of Spitfires, for $@&*$)#'s sake! I’ll do big arms and you just look at me and go, “Ooh, he’s doing big arms.”’"

-karl

Esther said...

Ah, the afflictions of being cool. It's funny how those differences stop mattering after highschool.

Being an example is always the best way to show others that it's okay to be un-cool and hang out with kids in -- eek -- junior high. I applaud your efforts.

Isaac, The Rookie said...

Practicing for the summer Christmas pageant one year at FLLC, the staffers with parts in each scene would act out their parts and the other staffers would act like campers. When we came to the first scene, where the whole bit started, the director shouted out, "okay, now act like campers" and my friend Julie skipped up to the front and said, "I'm a Venturer, and I'm too cool for this!"

If we could just show them how silly it looks...