Summer Time

Every year that I have been pastor to students in our portable church we have made changes in our environments. This year will be no different. We will continue to meet for our Bible study environments on Sunday (AM for middle school students and PM for high school) but our last Wednesday evening large group environment meeting will be on May 30th. We do this for a few reasons. The first being a relief to our hard serving volunteer staff. Each and every Wednesday through the school year we have a team of student and adult leaders that show up at 5 PM to set up our environment. Whether it's the chairs we sit in or the fold up tables that we use as a wall around our sitting staging area. The band set ups and tears down our snack area, sets up and tears down. Our activity area set and tear down. You get the point. It's a nice break from the whole set up/ tear down deal. Changing gears in the summer also gives us the opportunity to build relationships with the students in different surroundings. You see we are having a "Summer Tour". This will be our third summer doing so. We will have bus pick ups and take students to a different location each week. It may be a different student ministry or a unique service opportunity. The "Summer Tour" has been a win for our ministry in the past and we believe it will be this summer as well. We have 6 dates scheduled for the tour and we have started promoting already through MySpace and our Student Ministry Blog.
Is your church portable? What do you do for your summer environments? Any new ideas?
I look forward to hearing from you.