Try arranging a fake church van or bus breakdown about 1 mile from the camp or retreat you are headed to and have your students walk the rest of the way to camp. It often seems like students talk more about the van breakdown then they do the event or activity sometimes.

Once they get close to camp drive by with the van with a sign on the back or side of the van saying that they just got punked, then gather the group together to have lunch and talk about what it felt like to be punked.

Warning if you do something like this – it just may start several to punk you back so be ready to take it back if your gonna dish it. It will definitely give your students something to talk about and make them think about when they punk their friends.

Feel free to change what you need to change and share this post with others as needed. If you would like more lessons, please let me know. I think the biggest search I get on my site is for lessons.

If you are wondering how to play the songs, you can look them up on ccli.com or if you don’t have that even though your church probably should, you can go to www.iwillworship.com and probably grab how to play the songs.

Anyways, below I have two versions powerpoint 2007 and powerpoint 2003

How To Grow In Your Christian Walk ppt 2003

How To Grow In Your Christian Walk pptx 2007

The whole event this year was themed around, “The Messiah” and it’s event that definitely catered to middle school aged youth. The first thing I noticed after I checked in our group was the set up of the event. The convention center that they used in Tulsa was a rectangular room that had about 8k in capacity, but they divided up the room to where half was an area to play on inflatables, basketball, station to grab T-shirts, CDs, and art, and an area for students just to run and play hacky sac or football with their youth ministry. I really thought that this was great because right away they could go into the event and hang out and play until it started.

The other half of the room was where we gathered around the stage which was set up just right with chairs that went around 180 degrees and room for students to gather around it to get close to what they were doing on the stage. They also had a skate stage in the back set up with the skate crew that they had at the event to start the sessions which was really fun.

The speaker was Heather Flies and she was a great speaker for the students – lots of energy and connected very well with them.

The event had a nice flow of play/break time and session time. They thought very well about how the middle schooler thinks and acts.

The worship was siiiccckkk! It was led by Worship was lead by Hettie Marie and Foundation Red Band. Very engaging and energetic and uplifting.

They also had an artist that painted during the worship times that themed the whole weekend’s message of the Messiah. His name is Eric Samuel Timm and you can see his paintings below.

321 Comedy Improv made us all laugh and have a great time – our students did the improv with each other all the way back home. Untitled Skate Boarders were really cool too starting off each session with some skateboarding moves.

During our breaks we had small group discussion time about what they speaker was talking about and helped them think about how it applied to their lives.

All in all I thought that the trip was well worth it. Hope to continue to see the spiritual impact of the weekend. Below is some pictures to help you see our trip there:

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Other then getting there (because of plane delays and not getting in the hotel until about midnight) it was a good conference for being it’s 1st time!

I plan on sharing each youth ministry idea that each speaker shared so I will do that over the next few weeks, but my overall feel of the conference was good. I liked the small feel of it and felt that I could meet and spend some time with other youth leaders.

The things I didn’t like about it was I felt that we and the speakers really didn’t have enough time to interact and ask questions. There were some technical hitches with some of the programming like microphones and video, but nothing major.

The speakers at the conference were pretty good and engaging. The worship to kick off the event was high energy and uplifting. They sounded very good. The event itself was located at Northside Christian Church which was actually in New Albany, IN which is just across the river from Louisville, KY.

Since it was the 1st conference that they have tried I give the conference about a B-. I walked away with some good ideas and I was challenged to think about my youth ministry in some different ways. I would recommend it if you are in the area, but not sure I would recommend it if you have to travel a long distance.

Here are some pics:

The stage

The Crowd

Me with Chris Ball the MC of the event

Me with the other Bald Dudes at the conference!