ArkALMIGHTY invites us to the party

Last week, Marko posted a note informing us about youth specialties' partnership with ArkALMIGHTY. They are offering groups $1000 seed money to start service projects and random acts of kindness in towns.

I applied, and heard back from them last night. They have added us to their list of cooperating student ministries. How cool is that?

This ties in quite nicely with our Summer SPLAT. In late July, we'll be spending 3 days serving the Centre Region with students from other churches. It's our 2007 version of Summer Camp. We'll be staying in host homes as small groups, worshiping together each morning and evening, and working all around Centre County during the days. Some of the groups will do planned service projects, others will spend time blessing people with random acts of kindness (and here), while others will be praying around town.

I'm pretty pumped.

For a long time, our local youth network has been praying about unity, asking God what we can do to help students love each other and be a blessing to our community. We've tried lots of things--worshiping together, camps, weekend retreats. Everything we tried fell a little short of what we hoped for. We believe that getting students together to serve will move us closer to where we want to be. Serving others gets the focus off ME, and provides a practical, tangible way to love others and show people the love of God.

Woohoo!