Sandy's Sayings

Elevate Day 1

I would say there are about 125 folks here at The Elevate Conference. Most of the folks here are children's pastors trying to figure out what to do with 4th-6th graders. It's kind a weird, I feel like I'm the young one here and I'm almost 40! The two break-out sessions I attended were good. I took a class on pre-teen culture and strategies to reach pre-teens as well as how to use events in pre-teen ministry. Listened to a great guy named Patrick Snow who is on the cutting edge of pre-teen ministry. He was great and had some great reminders when teaching to pre-teens: student interaction, theme repetition, energy injection and small group connection. Patrick is affiliated with SuperStart which is ministry that caters to pre-teens and puts conferences together for this age group. So far, I feel our pre-teen ministry called The Edge is on the right track!

Off 2 Elevate

I'm off to The Elevate Conference in Rocklin. There are not many "tween" conferences out there and there are not many churches doing pre-teen ministry. I'm excited to see how this conference will be. Yes, I will be blogging from the conference.

Psalms from the wildside

As we've been teaching through through the Bible this year, we stopped in the book of Psalms on Sunday and had our Edgers and Jr. Highers either rewrite or write their own Psalm. So I thought I'd post a few of them over the next few days. Some were serious and some were funny!

Lesley's Group wrote this:
"God thank you for all the wonderful things you've made, and for all you've given me.
You're always there with me, no matter what I do.You guide me through the darkness, and lead me to the heavens. I think of you dand and night and never stop. You'll never leave me, no matter what I do. I don't know what to say except You're my God and I love you."

I Wondered?

I was just having this conversation about "Heelies" with our Jr. High director! Check this news story out!

Person of the Week

While at the Wildflower Triathlon I ran into several people I knew. One of the people I ran into was one of our Edge students, Connor. Connor raced the sprint triathlon at the Wildflower and finished at 1:40:41! I was so amazed at all the under 16 students who raced yesterday. So Connor, you did awesome and I hope you had fun! Hope to see you race again!

Quote Of the Week

Yesterday in our 5th and 6th grade ministry called The Edge, Ben was announcing Dudes Day Out and turned to ask if our Jr. High Director, Darcie Gripp would be going, even though she is not a "dude?" Over from the corner of 6th grade boys we heard,

"You have to be there, you are like one of the dudes!"