Believe 2008 - 2009 Line up

I have been working hard with the Believe staff on next year's Jr High Believe tour. Our first event is in Baltimore! I was just there last week doing some promotional lunches. It's going to be awesome. Our theme this year is speak. We will be looking at the life of Jeremiah and we have a great cast of speakers and artists to help us do that: Speakers; Scott Rubin, Steve Carter,Nathan Head, Kurt Johnston, Jason Raitz, Artists; Eric Timm, Jared Hall, Brent the stunt guy, The Rubyz and Dust Graphic Novels.

As you can see our look has gone comic book crazy. We have partnered with Dust graphic novels so get ready to see Believe comic book style. Check out our artist line up as super heroes (they are in real life anyway since they work with jr high students!)

introducing Evan

For those folks who attended last year’s Believe Tour you will remember the 14 year old boy Robert Peirre who joined us. It worked out great having an actual jr high student with us on tour in many ways. I was forced to think about every component of the event through Robert’s eyes. I can remember many conversations back stage about various elements of the program and how I changed them after talking with Robert.

Well this year we are fortunate to continue the tradition of having a jr high student actually with us! It also serves as a reminder to all of us who work with jr high students regularly how different every student really is. Let me introduce you to Evan. Evan will be playing the keytar on stage all weekend. Be ready for the killer Chicken Dance song on Saturday afternoon. If you are joining us at Believe this spring be sure to have your students all log onto www.savethekeytar.com to learn the moves to, soon to be world famous, ‘Mas Tortillas’. Mas Tortillas will be featured at Believe during break times.

Just to give you a glimpse into the nutty mind of Evan check out this cartoon that him and his Dad recently worked on. We can’t wait to see you and your students this spring!

the new toy on the Believe Tour

So we have a stunt guy on this year's Believe tour and he did so well not hurting himself this fall we thought we would award him with a new crash mat. The mat came in yesterday and the staff couldn't help but try it out. Brent, I hope you put it to good use, we had fun with it as you can tell!

Time to start all over again

I am working on next year’s jr high Believe event theme. The way that I usually enter our artist planning meeting is with an overarching theme and the take home message for all 5 sessions already laid out. We then spend our time talking about the best way to make that session come alive. What I need to start hammering out is that road map of the overarching theme and the 5 take home statements. For instance, as our artist group met for this year’s tour I had only this ready to go: The theme is CONNECT. God wants to connect with you so listen, speak and look. That was divided up into 5 sessions. I also knew our Bible content would be the life of Moses.

God has used two things in my heart over the past 3 months as I have labored over next year’s theme idea. The first was a sermon at youth specialties by Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil. She gave an awesome talk using The Lion King as an extended metaphor for reclaiming our identities as the people of God and our role, as student workers in pointing students back to their true calling. This session really resonated with much of what I felt our students were dealing with at Christ's Church and started me down this path.

The second is a quote in a book by Chip Wood called Yardsticks: Children in the classroom Ages 4 – 14 A resource for Parents and Teachers:

"Twelve’s greatest need is to be with their friends. Teachers and parents take a back seat on the long ride toward the driver’s license. The primary developmental struggle is the confusing struggle for identity: the child/not child begins the search for fidelity in relationships. This is an all consuming quest beginning at twelve. Minutes turn to hours on the telephone and in front of the mirror. Twelve’s define themselves by jackets, hairstyles, shoes, CD’s, tapes, movies, videos, TV preferences, sports teams, the mall, the dance rage, what older kids are doing. School becomes the place to be, but not always for our intended purposes."

Jeremiah 1:4 -10. would be a big starting point of inspiration for the tour. I just don’t have it fleshed out as of yet. I do see us using this text in programming. Students think that they are whatevers or random particles without specific direction. The Bible Character we would look at for the weekend is currently Jacob unless something else just knocks us off of our rocker.

It is an exciting process but I always feel so much better when I get the language down for the theme and main session take home messages.

let me know your thoughts!

A look at Arlington Believe

The Believe in Arlington, TX was great! Jason Raitz was our speaker, Eric Timm is painting on the tour, Yancy is a special artist! It was the most solid start we have every had at Believe. I can't wait for Gatlinburg next weekend.