Thank you to all those who helped out at the Italian Dinner this week, but most of all thank you to those who came and enjoyed yourselves! We served about 70 plates of lasagna, manicotti, spaghetti, and ziti and even more fun! The chocolate fountain was a huge success, but the hit of the evening was the string quartet, Dos Duos. 

All told, after expenses we raised betwen $1100 and $1200 for the youth mission trip, which is a phenomenal success! Thank you for your support and for helping these youth serve in their community.

With guidance from our awesome youth volunteers Mike, Roger, Devon, and Rebecca, the Middle School youth group has been studying what it means to be stewards of God's amazing creation. They've come up with some pretty exciting ideas and are ready to work to put them into action, but they need some help from you.

One of the things they are working on is a square foot gardening project in place at the church.  The youth have itemized what they need and priced it, but found they will need to raise quite a bit of funds to make this happen.  Since one key part of environmental study is re-use, though, they thought the best way to pursue this would be to ask YOU for donations, especially of items that you might have but no longer use.

Please, go out into your garage or closet and take inventory of what you might already have and may not need to help in this project.  The list of things they need is below, so if you have items that you can donate to the project, please let Ken or Mike know or contact the church office. You can also write the items down on a piece of paper and put that in the collection plate on Sunday (mark as "youth garden project"). Something that you might no longer need could be very important to these youth and would be put to good use by this project. And when you see the garden project, you will be able to have played an active part of not only helping our young people, but also helping bring a little food to people in need.

To-Do List:

1. Revitalize Compost Bin
2. Water Barrels
3. Build Garden Plots (sq ft gardens)

Donations Needed:

• Water collection drum
• Rail Ties
• Black Plastic
• Potting Soil
• Chicken Wire
• Shade Cloth
• Framework for Shade
• Earthworms
• Veg materials
• Potting Soil  2 ft cu
• Spigots
• Stand for Barrel

A couple of years ago we did this, and it was a great and thought-provoking time. Please join us this year!

Here's the deal - a lot of people around the world go hungry. It's hard to know what real hunger is until you experience it, and - though we aren't likely to experience the anxiety that goes with true poverty - we can make ourselves aware of what hunger feels like. 

If you can, please begin fasting on Saturday at 6am. We'll meet together at church at 6pm for an evening of fun, games, and laughter, as well as a little time to think about what hunger mneans and what we're doing. The one meal we will have together is midnight communion, using food that folks in refugee camps often eat.

We'll play some more after that, and then after we have our fill of fun we'll grab some sleep and then join the congregation for worship in the morning. We will all spend the 10:45 service making sandwiches and other lunch fixings. We'll invite the congregation to eat with us, and encourage them to donate the amount they would normally spend for lunch to hunger relief efforts. 

One of the really exciting things about this event is that we will be hosting our friends from Friends! (That is, from Friends Congregational Church in College Station, not the TV show.)

This is a great opportunity to have fun. hang with new friends, and put our faith into action. I hope you'll make plans to join us - and invite a friend!

Everyone seemed to have a great time caroling and delivering flowers on Sunday! We took about 15 people and 30 plants to Pavilion assisted living facility and gave out plants, songs, and smiles. We had several folks following us around the building as we went door-to-door, including one young-at-heart woman who asked "where are we going to sing next?" 

Thank you to everyone who participated, and thank you to folks who bought poinsettias for us to give out. You helped the mission trip and put some smiles on faces!

Click "Read More" to see more pictures (and maybe even a video...)

To begin Advent, 19 youth and 6 adults bundled up in the arctic 70+ degree December weather and travelled to Slumber Falls in New Braunfels.

During the weekend, we spent a lot of time playing and laughing, but we also spent a lot of time thinking and praying and imagining. From Friday night until Sunday morning, we thought about maturity - about taking responsibility for our own well-being. We thought about ways to remain connected to those around us while holding true to our values, understanding that we can't change other people, but we can change our actions. 

As an Advent retreat, our Bible focus was on the life of Jesus. We looked at stories such as his discussion with the Syrophoenecian woman, his first experience as a leader at Nazareth (hint: things did not go well), the woman at the well, the woman who washed his feet with her tears, his experience at the last supper (as recorded by the gospel of John), and Mary's song upon learning that she was pregnent with Jesus. We spent a lot of time together, worshipping and wondering.

In conjunction with Advent and the theme of maturity, we did a sand mandala as an art project. A sand mandala is a repeating cirulcar pattern that is made with colored sand. It is a tradition of Tibetan Buddhism which went very well with the idea of process and waiting. Once a mandala is finished, it is destroyed. The beauty is in the process, not in some preserved artifact.

We also play.

We play a lot.

This time, we had several games. One of the highlights was a late-night game of capture-the-flag, with the adults patrolling the grounds as incredibly annoying - and sometimes completely oblivious - guards.

We also played a large-scale version of Angry Birds, with a giant slingshot used to launch a large red (angry) playground ball at unsuspecting pigs hiding in a cardboard fort. Add this to real-life hungry hungry hippos, Curses, hide and seek, and other games, and you have the recipe for a great weekend!

Thank you to all our adult leaders who volunteered as well as our church which so generously makes this event available to our youth at no charge.

Click Read More to see more pictures...

Every December, the youth group gets together to eat some pizza, hang out, and enjoy some Christmas movies. This year, we watched Elf (as always), but we followed by a great Christmas episode of Doctor Who, followed by the classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Every year, we close the night by watching a terrible, awful Christmas movie with a humorous voice-over. This year, the movie was "Magic Christmas Tree", which as satisfyingly atrocious.

Fun night, fun times!

The lock-in was a blast! The creatively named Team 1 came from behind to win the entire shabang, which meant the pick of prizes. 

Events included things such as a donut-eating race (which is trickier than it sounds when some of them have been randomly injected with carrot-flavored baby food), a whistling contest (again, harder than it seems when performed immediately after eating several crackers), caption writing contest, commercial contest, and a Bible verse scavenger hunt along with other silly activities. 

We also stayed up wayyy too late watching classic comedies. 

Good time - let's do it again before too long.

Click "read more" to see more pictures and the winning commercial (you really want to see this...)

Last Sunday, we had our first High School Youth Group of the new year. Thirteen of us got together and prayed and ate and dreamt together.

This year, we're going to be imagining how someone could create a food service in the middle of a food desert - a place in cities where food is hard to come by because of limited transportation and poverty.

This was our final brainstorm board - what began as a trickle ended up as a flood. Our next steps will be to visit a food desert ourselves and experience shopping there. Then, we'll get guest speakers and learn about how we might deal with logistical issues as we develop a vbusiness plan for a Fair & Fast Food Service.

This is cool stuff! It is awesome to be part of this group.

We ate.

We played games.

We ate.

We rocked out.

We ate.

It was awesome! Just 20 or so of us, hanging out, getting to know each other. It will be a great year!

Nothing says party like paperwork!

Seriosuly, we do a good bit of travelling together, so instead of asking for a different permission form for every event, I ask you to fill out one form for the school year that covers all of our events. This helps us make sure we communicate effectively, but it also help make sure that we are doing our best to provide a safe environment for your youth.

If you have not already done so, please fill out and return the attached form to Ken along with a scan of any applicable insurance cards. This is required for youth to participate in many of our events.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
2012 General Release Form (under 18).pdf		75 Kb