Big Vision

Back in April I was challenged in my personal quiet time to think big, way bigger than what I can accomplish, but with a God sized vision. This began a work in my personal life and in my ministry life. I kept thinking about all of the students that I would see on different campuses, at the mall, just riding their bikes down the sidewalk. I then started to ask God what this meant. To make it short, He gave the simple statement: every student. That's it. So I started to pray about this and asked Him to guide me and direct me in regard to this broad vision. I shared it with staff and student leaders. every student. Without hesitation and reservation all have jumped on board with this vision. Here is the break down:

Our Mission:
We want reach every student in the Jupiter area with the love of Jesus.
Jupiter High School – 3,800 students
Dwyer High School – 2,000 students
Independence Middle School – 1,200 students
Jupiter Middle School – 1,200 students
Other schools – 1,000+ students
Total = appx. 10,000 students in Jupiter

Ministry Vision:
Our Student Ministry seeks to reach every student in the Jupiter community in the 2008-09 school year. We will do this by filtering everything we do through our 4 core values, utilizing our environments and partnering with other local churches and para-church organizations.

Now it's time to pray, fast and sacrifice. Will you join us?

Student Leadership

I have been the youth pastor at our church for 6 years. I love it. To be honest the past couple of years have been rather trying, as we have gone through a church split and have navigated through personal challenges at home with our adoption. I feel like this is the beginning of a new, fresh season in our church and in particular, our student ministry. With this in mind, earlier this year when I was planning out the summer schedule God put a heavy vision on my heart. That vision: reach every student in Jupiter with the love of Jesus this coming school year. That is some 12,000 students! That vision has not cooled off, but the burn is hotter. As a part of that vision I knew we had to be very deliberate this summer with our programming. Community building (Summer Tour), Getting outside of our comfort zone (Mission Camp) and now Student Leadership Training. Tonight was our first session we will have over the next 5 Wednesdays. We started tonight by defining leadership and helping our students to evaluate their weaknesses and strengths. Our guide is Denise Vanecks "Leadership 101".
Here is the upcoming schedule:
Tonight - Leadership Defined
July 30 - What Kind of Leader am I ?
August 6 - The Serving Leader
August 13 - The Communicating Leader
August 20 - The Mentoring Leader
August 23 - Campus Training

O-Yeah!

Tomorrow our student ministry will be joining our friends to the north (612 Students) in a little getaway to Orlando and our friends at Calvary South Orlando (Momentum Students). We have fun evening planned for Thursday as our band will lead worship, Pastor Charles Nestor will bring it and us youth pastors will bring some of our crazy antics. This continues our Summer Tour. Next week we will have a worship evening and the following week we will go out on the town. Needless to say, an action packed summer.

Summer Tour '08

Our student ministry doesnt have a normal summer schedule as many ministries do. We organize something called the Summer Tour which consists of taking our students to a different location each week for the purpose of community building. This year we are partnering with my boys Billy and Phil. Should be a great time! To find out more about the Summer Tour go HERE. Props to Phil for the logo design!

Schools Out Party

Last night we held our annual Student Ministry Schools Out Party. This year we did it a little different as we combined forces with my boy Billy in Port St. Lucie and invited some guest musicians as well as our house bands. All in all it was a great night and we were able to give students a night to remember! Thanks to Chic-Fil-A (Andrew!), Proverb, Luminacity, 612 Band, Merge Band, Todd Shoemaker, Chip the sound master, all the amazing volunteers and my sister, Bethany (photos) for the amazing evening. We were able to minister to over 200 students!! Next up.....Summer Tour 2008!

Our ministry

I was thinking about our particular student ministry and wondering how we compare to other ministries out there. We are portable, we meet on a public school campus for our large group environment and we use a bunch of second hand equipment. We have small group Bible studies on Sunday nights and we are very active on multiple campus'. I would not say we are huge ministry numerically but we do have a relatively large influence in the community. So what is your student ministry like? Lets compare notes.

The perils of being portable......

We are into our 10th year of being a portable church, so when it comes to frustration, I understand all of the frustrations that come with a portable church, I have been at Calvary for 7 of of those years. Any way, a couple of weeks ago we lost storage at our Sunday location (Jupiter High School). It was very fun scrambling to find more space for all of our equipment (besides that which is stored on cube trucks). Well that same week the principal from our Wednesday night venue (Independence Middle School) told us we lost our storage there too! What a dilemma. We have a Student Ministry cube truck, but it has been out of commission for about a year and a half. There were some serious axle bearing issues and we decided to hold of on repairs. Well hold off no more! We have gotten the truck fixed and ready to fill as we have been inconvenienced again and will have to move all of our boxes, etc. from outside to inside instead of from the nice, convenient storage that sat on stage. I know our band is disappointed as well as our worship leader (Jeff) and me. The countdown is on to the completion of our new facility! Are you part of a portable church? What are your frustrations? Have you had any surprises lately?

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.