Dear Santa

I've made my Christmas Wish List this year.

And it only has one item on it.

A House.

By Christmas? Maybe?

Tidbits

I've always dreamed of being a sports writer. I loved sports, and I loved talking about sports. When I was younger, I reluctantly was brought on staff at our high school paper to write about our sports teams. And I loved it. I followed Hubert Mizell locally, then Mike Lupica (okay, he is a bit snarky, but he's still a good writer). I even started off college majoring in journalism and was the sports editor for a weekly newspaper when I was at UF.

So every once in a while, I still like to talk about sports in the blog.

Lately, in each weekly rewind, I've included a tidbit which was about sports.

But it was kinda out of place.

So it's my goal to do a weekly tidbits post separate from the rewind.

And here goes #1.

• Raheem Morris deserved to be upset about the call at the end of the first half of the Bucs game. That was ridiculous. Especially with the ability to go to the booth to get the call right. Easily the worst call I've seen in a football game since this doozie...
• I gave up a little too early on the Colts Sunday night, going to bed with a little over 4 minutes left. Should have remembered what they did to the Bucs a few years ago...
• But seriously, what was Bill Belichick thinking going for it on 4th down that deep in their own territory? He either had brainfreeze from the lack of his wearing his hoodie or that afraid of giving the ball to Peyton anywhere on the field with a minute and a half left.
• My fantasy team continues to be struck by the "I always play the hot team" bug. I have one of the highest point totals in the league, but still am at 5-5 and barely in playoff contention with three weeks left...
• The word on the street is the Rays and Carl Crawford might part ways during or after this season. If so, that will be a sad day...

Rewind (Just the Highlights)

Michael said it best when he started off our first service saying "I know every week we say it's a big week, but this week is a REALLY big week". As I sit here at the beginning of another week, I'm still sitting in amazement at the events of the past week. Here's just the highlights.

• 6 Decisions (in Decisions)- In Merge, we were on week two of our new series Decisions. Last week we hit on the idea that "decisions made in a moment have been cultivated for a lifetime." This week, we talked about the most important decision we'll ever make. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves, "What do we do with Jesus?" That night, we had 6 students face that question head on and decide to follow Christ. Craziness.
• Speaking of Decisions- We're on the fifth week of Vintage, and this week Timm was hitting on baptism. At the end of the message, he offered the opportunity for anyone who hadn't been baptized to get baptized right there and then. 13 people followed through with spontaneous baptism, including 3 students. I was pretty pumped.
• Vintage Stuff- We experimented with something new this series. Because of the Vintage theme, we decided to create Bumper videos of classic TV shows. Some of the shows, we did voiceovers to go with that day's message. In others, we were able to find a clip that fit well enough on its own. The last three weeks we did a Gilligan's Island spoof, showed a Sanford and Son clip, then pulled a clip on baptism from Nacho Libre. I know the last one wasn't vintage, but it was hysterical.
• One More- We have one week left in Vintage. It's been a great series. Hard to imagine it's only been 5 weeks since we had the Camaro out front and kicked this whole thing off. Now this week, we conclude it. And it's about to get personal.
• The Announcement- In case you missed it...over the past couple months (and it's really a discussion they've been having for a couple of years), we've realized that we have outgrown our building. So, from the baptistry Sunday morning, Timm announced that the building was up for sale. We have a plan in place, and the next phase is going to be announced December 6th...and I was just getting used to this first transition.
• Et cetera...- There are some other big things coming in the next few weeks. Make sure you keep up with the blogs in the coming weeks as we'll have some big stuff coming soon. Oh, and if you weren't aware, Chris Neff is now blogging. If his blogging is anything like his speaking, you're in for a treat.

Rewind

It's a day late, so I'll try to keep it from being a dollar short, here are some things to get caught up on...

• Sunday. Chris Neff brought it. I started giving him a hard time yesterday because if he keeps speaking like that, and people keep complimenting him they way they did, he's gonna get a big head. Just kidding. He rocked it. As did the band, and the church. We well surpassed our goal of 150 boxes of Mac and Cheese, collecting over 200 boxes for our Thanksgiving project. And we had our highest attendance since Easter. That makes 3 out of the last 4 weeks that we can make that statement.
• Youth. The last couple weeks have seen diverse services in our student ministry. Two weeks ago, the message and content of the youth service was heavy as was the result. This past week was exactly the opposite, with a ton of energy and excitement. The neat thing about this past week's youth service was that one of the kids who most would have thought would be the last person to do such a thing stood up and read a poem and explained how much the previous week's message meant to him. And we continued the upward trend (or at least matched our previous week's total).
• Group. I love our (unofficial) group. The plan was to begin a college-aged group when we moved over, but haven't been able to move into a house that can allow for that to happen. Yet, it still unofficially happen. And each week it's diverse and different. This week started deep with a biblical discussion on some sensitive issues. By the end of the night, we were experimenting with seeing if the Diet Coke and Mentos thing worked in people's mouths. Then a couple of our more brave group-ies put the Diet Coke and Mentos together in a Neti-Pot made famous in a previous post, and tried to allow it to go through their nose. Interesting. Since someone ( I won't mention names :) ) hadn't heard of the DC and Mentos deal, here's a video...

• Still to Come. This Sunday is going to be HUGE. In more ways than one. Seriously, if you can find a way to be there, do it!
• Tidbits. The Bucs won (which the Swami predicted), and in doing so, they made a strong case for bringing back the creamsicle uniforms. Seriously, no one goes retro like the Bucs. And Freeman looked good. The Gators won. Again. The SEC Championship is now set and it's Florida v. Bama. Now will both teams be undefeated? That soccer girl? She deserves to be suspended for this season. And probably next. And if you wanna see an hysterical clip, check this out. Dude makes one of the cleanest open-field tackles. Wraps the guy up, brings him down. Only one problem, it was his teammate.

batman-u

In case you missed this one...the Spurs and Kings were playing a b-ball game Saturday night (which happened to be Halloween). Someone had the bright idea to let a bat loose in the arena. The game had been stopped earlier as the bat swung low towards the arena floor and interrupted the action. The staff couldn't corral the bat with nets, towels, etc... but later on as the bat tried to interrupt again, he messed with the wrong person, the Spurs' Manu Ginobli.

(Merge) Rewind

Things are going really well at RPC. We've had some exciting meetings over the past couple weeks as we look at space issues and begin to plan and pray for the future. Church this week was hot, literally as we finished up week 3 of Vintage. Gabe and the band got things started with La Bamba, and shortened the set because of AC issues. Timm was solid in talking about lordship. And we had probably the most fun making this week's bumper video, which you can check out here. No word on the house yet, and my hearing isn't all that much better. But this post is gonna give me a chance to catch everyone up on where Merge is at. Yesterday marked the completion of our third month at RPC, so it's time to take a little assessment of just how far things have come. So here goes...

Merge- Merge is the name given to our overall student ministry and also to the philosophy behind our Wednesday night youth service. Our goal is to create an environment where unchurched students merge with students involved in our student ministry. The Wednesday night experience is CRAZY. It's high energy and loud, and should be a place unchurched students love to attend. The cool thing about Merge as we've gotten started is that we've been meeting on Wednesday nights for about a month and a half, and we've already seen the attendance double. It's increased almost every week, and this past week (including leaders) we had 46 people packed into the portable. That's exactly double the initial group of 23. This past week was a little more serious as we dealt with a tough topic of moving from hopelessness to hope. I recounted the most difficult experience I've ever had in ministry and how despite the seemingly hopeless situation, God's hope continued to shine through.

eMerge- Students need a large group environment like Merge to be excited and to invite their unchurched friends to, but they also need a small group environment to grow. We've entitled that environment eMerge, as it's our goal that students emerge from group with a greater understanding of what it is we're trying to do, and where it is we're trying to go. As Merge has grown, we've seen healthy growth in eMerge, especially in the high school group that meets on Monday nights. It's our goal to have 60-70% of the students who come to Merge get plugged into eMerge to connect and grow. I'm going to mention leaders later, but I can't tell ya how essential it has been to have Chris Weatherly leading the small group experience for us.

subMerge- Our student leadership team is affectionately dubbed subMerge because what they do under the surface has huge ramifications for everyone involved. The leadership team has just started, but we had our first meeting this week, and it was exciting for the students to already begin the accept the responsibility of student leadership. We talked about their need to be part of the process of connecting students who might visit on a Merge night to get plugged into the other aspects of the student ministry. subMerge is going to take some time to get "there," but I'm excited about the prospects of leadership.

YTBN Merge Band- One of the tough parts of starting a student ministry basically from scratch is that we all want to move in fast forward, to have everything at once. One of the things we've been talking about is the need to build a broad foundation to start and to not try to build too tall too quickly. But we have a LOT of students excited about starting up the "yet-to-be-named" Merge Band (which ironically might end up being the name). Their excitement is palpable, and they've already got their first taste of being on stage.

Leaders- I learned my first year in student ministry that for a youth group to achieve all it's capable of achieving, it's paramount for me as leader to invest in developing more leaders. Leaders only have so much time and can only develop a limited number of meaningful relationships. It's pivotal to develop leaders who can help the group grow exponentially. At RPC, we have the most diverse group of leaders I've ever worked with. Every week, Beth, Chris, Megan, Kaydee, Austin, James, Wade, Kyle, David and Logan all pour their heart into what we do in student ministry. I'm gonna write a blog in the coming months on them, just cause they deserve it.

So there's a brief rundown of where we're at so far in laying the foundation of this new student ministry. If you know any middle or high school students in the Winter Haven/Auburndale area, let them know about the new Merge Student Ministries. And if you have any questions, hit me up...

FYI

In case you missed it, Timm did a series of posts last week on the vision behind RPC. Check them out here, here, and here. Great stuff, and some things to chew on as we prepare for the coming weeks and months.