unity

Thursday mornings you'll find me at St. Paul's United Methodist church, in their coffee lounge, hanging out with a handful of youth workers from around Centre County. We usually spend some time in prayer, and some time talking about what's going on with our ministries/churches. We've been meeting for the better part of 7 or 8 years. One of the recurring themes is the idea of UNITY among our ministries, since we're all interested in seeing students follow Jesus.

Today we wrestled with (yet again) what God wants to see happen in the Centre region. We know that he longs for us all to know him, to love him, and to be part of the body of Christ. We believe that God is in the process of making all things new, and that means the transformation of people. We get hung up on the "what" we're supposed to be doing. We pitched several ideas today, and managed to shoot most of them down.

We've tried many things over the past 8 years--worship services, prayer times, trips, game nights, comedians, bands, movie nights, broom ball, school assemblies, paintball...the goal for us has been getting students to interact, to leave the comfort zone of "our group." This past summer's SPLAT (a summer camp alternative that kept us in State College, with planned service projects, random acts of kindness, and prayerwalking during the days, and worship/teaching in the evenings) has probably the best thing that we've done since the first 2 summers when we all met at the Barn for some great times of worship.

A number of us are reading/have read Chris Folmsbee's A New Kind of Youth Ministry. I think that we are once again on the cusp of seeing God breakthrough in the lives of our students/leaders, and in our community. I pray that we can keep the momentum that we have, that we don't get distracted, and that we can once again begin to move with God's Spirit.

I came out of that meeting this morning to read Ephesians 4 during my time with God today. He spoke to me once again about the necessity of UNITY--we are one body, united in Christ, filled by the one Spirit of God.

This could be great...