Football and First Corinthians

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to probe the minds of some of my students for new ideas about how to encourage fellowship and just to kind of give our youth group kind of a shot in the arm and shake things up a bit to rekindle interest and passion in the students. They gave me some really good ideas, and one of them was to have a football (or soccer) match with the kids of the youth group forming their teams. Well, we did it yesterday afternoon. There are a lot of things I need to change the next time I do one of these matches with our youth group, but over all it went really well. The kids played so hard and I was amazed to see the talent of the boys an girls alike. It was really cool getting to have them do something different and do what they love at the same time coming together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

After the soccer game, we had our normal youth group program and continued our series, The Race to Revelation, and this week we were in 1 Corinthians. I don't know if it was because of the soccer or what, but kids just kept coming in during the Bible study and by the end, we had about 50 students at youth group (that's big for us). I definitely struggled trying to only get on slight soapboxes for the sake of time, but honestly between divisions in the church body, immorality, and spiritual gifts I really was giving a teaching on pretty much all of my "pet subjects". The things that the students hear me say over and over again, they werenow able to see for themselves. There were quite a few somber faces as the verses were taught on how we're not to do with believers who continue to live an immoral lifestyle. And then dealing with how we should be able to say "amen" to what others say in the church and how "God is a God of order, not of disorder" was a whole other task to try and not spend too much time on it. I'm so excited so many people ended up coming for that study, now I just pray they continue to come (we had a lot of new students last night).

It was a really cool time of having both fellowship and legit Bible study, and I'm just so stoked to see what God's going to do as we continue getting new ideas and more passionate about the things of Him.