We had our THRIVE discipleship retreat. Here's a bit of a recap:

Stuff that Worked Well

• Staying at the houses - students had a great time hanging out. I know that lots of Guitar Hero was played at my house.
• Service project on Saturday - there's this really cool ministry in our church that throws monthly birthday parties for kids at this shelter. We basically hung out with kids and ate cupcakes. I hope some of our students (that aren't already involved) get plugged into this monthly.
• Worship times and Bible studies - Nikki Lalague led worship for us. She's a senior in high school in the OC and I've known her since she was an 8th grader. She did a great job. Ben did a fantastic job especially with the Friday night Bible study. He was in the zone and in his element teaching like that.

Stuff That Could be Improved

• Schedule - I packed the schedule too full on Saturday and it wore us out.
• Curriculum - the curriculum from Student Life was pretty good. It gave a good overview of why we should love the Bible and why it's important. It had some good ideas to get them digging in, but I'd like to have had a few more tools to equip students with.
• Turn-out - We only had about 20% of our typical Sunday attendance there. I would have liked to have seen that number closer to 40% or 50%. I think we promoted it well, but the low turn-out is probably due to a couple big factors - fall sports and low desire to grow spiritually.
  

Labels: spiritual growth, youth ministry

This entry was posted by Mike Lovato, on Thursday, October 18, 2007. You can leave your response.