Youth Workers Christmas Party

Hello everyone, I hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving! I wanted to post out about our upcoming Christmas Party on December 7th! It is less than two weeks away and will be two Fridays from now. We are going to meet in the youth area of the church on Friday Night from 7 till 9 PM! Your children are welcome to come and will just not participate in the gift exchange. Remmeber to bring a White Elephant "Gender Specific" gift under $10.00 wrapped and ready to go. We will have dinner provided and hopefully some time to play games as well. If you could please RSVP that would be easier for me to get food ready and prepared.

I am going to buy another Blu-Ray Disc for your children to watch in the game room while we are doing our gift exchange, but other than that we can all be together. I am excited for this night and look forward to it. If you have any questions please feel free to write me and ask. Thank you all so much for your hard work and efforts with the teens for this year so far. I thank God for all of your time and commitments to FOCUS Factor Ministries and maybe we can share some good stories of what is happening in our small groups next Friday night at the party. Have a great week and we'll see you soon.

-Joel

The First Impressions Team

I just wanted to update everyone with where FOCUS Factor Ministries is at with this new ministry team. I was approached by Sally and Dan to help out with this ministry. The goal is that each will have two teams of two teenagers under them who greet and shadow any new people who come to our Wednesday Night Programs. In other words, this would mean the adults only have to be here early two Wednesdays a month and the teens would only have to be here early one time a month (which is more realistic than asking them to be here early and help out with this every Wedensday Night)! I know that Sally has talked to Shea and Dan has talked with Thomas and I have talked with Torrie. I would like to see what everyone else thinks and maybe some suggestions as to who would be good teens to do this. If these three are going to help then we need two more girls and three more boys. I would like to talk with all of them tonight and start tonight (if at all possible) and then maybe have a planned meeting with all of the teens involved in two Wednesdays at 6 PM in the teen area. What do you all think of this? Are you as excited about it as I am? How can we make it better? Thanks to everyone who is willing to help.

Also, as a side note, the picture on this blog is what I am thinking of doing to all of your pictures to put on the teen web page under Youth Workers. What do you think?

-Joel

First Impressions Team

OK, we are going to talk about this topic next Tuesday Night at your YWT meeting, but I thought I would pre-empt that discussion with this blog so that you can be thinking and praying about it before the conversation begins. I have felt led to start a "First Impressions" team for FOCUS Factor Ministries on Wednesday Nights and possibly Sunday mornings. We have, in the past three years, had A LOT of visitors come to youth group and Sunday morning. The usual thing that happens on Wednesday Nights is that they come up very timidly either with a friend or on their own, trying something new, and just stand outside the Casa looking around and wondering what to do. I feel we have lost a lot of people because they weren't made to feel welcome! I cannot tell you the number of people that give Wednesday Nights a "shot" and end up coming for a month or less and then we never see them again. I can't help but believe if we had done a better job of helping them feel welcomed and connected they would've found their fit and stayed. I don't want to lose people due to a lack of showing them God's love in simple and easy ways. What do you all think about this? We would definitely need some teen buy in, but I think we can get that as long as we have some adults helping out as well. Thanks for all that you do and for your heart for the teens. Have an awesome weekend.

-Joel