This Friday will be a little bit of a landmark day for me. For the first time in over 4 years, Friday Night Youth Group will run and I won’t be a part of leading it. I’ve been involved in working with the Year 7 – 9 group since I finished school, and this year I won’t be involved in running the friday night program. After 4 years, I’ve graduated to working with the senior group.

For the last while my focus has been on running our Sunday morning program, which is where I’ve taken out our youth every second week from the main service, and we do a talk/discussion/discipleship type deal. And I’ve been just another helping hand on Fridays. But over summer (which if you’re a northern hemisphere person is your winter) I’ve been really challenged about where God is calling me to be at the moment, and have felt fairly gradually that it’s time I worked more with the senior guys, which really is much more where my “bent” is.

And there’s been a bit of a hole in our ministry to the senior high schoolers in the area of doing something social. They have a bible study that’s powering on and really meeting lots of the kids where there at, but there’s still definitely a significant group who aren’t really connecting at that level, and who really need to be feeling a part of the wider group. So that’s what I’ll be attacking. I’m really quite excited by the prospect, and the details have all happened in a hurry.

Basically, every 1st, 3rd and 5th Sunday of each month, we’ll be doing a social thing after the sunday morning service. The plan is to have the whole program run on a three week rotation, although we will obviously have to reassess after a few goes. But the idea is to have the first time with us going somewhere. Whether that be something low-key like a trip to the movies, or tenpin bowling, or something a bit bigger like a footy trip or a trip to the beach, etc. The second time we’ll have something low-key: order in pizza or grab some fish and chips and probably just hang around, catch a DVD, play cricket, whatever takes our fancy.

But the really exciting prospect is that on the third sunday we do something practical. I’ve been really inspired to get our teenagers out there doing something for someone who is not themself. So sometimes that’ll be just doing something at the church, and other times we’ll do servant evangelism type stuff, other times just do something to help out people with needs in the community (church and wider). It’s a really exciting prospect and if we can see these guys take a hold of the vision I can really see their attitudes and lives being changed.

It’s such an exciting time, and I’m sure that this entry is mostly self-serving, it’s mostly just getting the ideas really clear in my head, and getting some sense out of my enthusiasm. But in the off chance that someone reading this has ideas or war stories that might be helpful, I’d be thrilled to get any comments.