Pastor Lisa...

Where do I begin? I have a job in Wisconsin as a youth pastor. I begin October 1st and am so excited. They've never had a youth pastor before so I'm starting from scratch. Between 6 and 12 teens show up for Sunday school and family night so it's a very small group. There is a large section in the basement of the church that is dedicated to the youth that is just waiting to be painted and decorated. There's an open area for playing games like dodgeball and a couch area with a large screen tv. There's also about 4 classrooms that are used as storage right now, one of which will become my office. I can paint it and decorate it and furnish it however I want. I can't wait to see how God is going to use me in this next stage of my life. My question for you is do you have any ideas? Curriculum, decorating thoughts, outing suggestions? I need all the help I can get. This is a huge responsibility and I'm up for the challenge but just trying to figure out how and where to begin.

Back To School Bash

I was in charge of this years annual back to school bash. All the planning, programing, set up, the whole ordeal was up to me. I have not been able to barely breath for the past two weeks because there was so much stuff to get done. I had no idea how many kids to expect especially because we had youth groups from all over Wisconsin coming. What an adventure it was. Things turned out extremly well. Everything went very smoothly and there were no major problems at all. We almost made it through the evening without having to call an ambulance, but right at the very end of the night while we were getting cleaned up a girl had an asthma atack. When she had recooperated I thanked her because it wouldn't have been a real youth event without the ambulance showing up. I divided the kids up into 8 teams of about 16 kids each. There were three stations going on at one time with two games at each station. The kids signed up for two stations during the first hour (so they played 4 games) then they signed up for different events in the relay race. In total we had 19 games to be played. When you bring together a mud pit, slippery tarps, pudding, oatmeal, spaghetti, jello, sardines, syrups, shaving cream, and many other gross itmes you're bound to have a great time. At the end of the night everyone was completly dirty and sticky, so we called in a fire truck and had them all hosed off. It was a great night. Thanks so much to everyone who helped me, I couldn't have done it without you!