Fun Faith!

For Dick and me, experiencing Fun Faith is like living our dream, a dream that God planted in our hearts many years ago. The fulfillment of the dream is still in the making.

Fun Faith is an outreach that our church does for the kids of the community. We are targeting the kids ages 9-12 that do not go to church, because right now that is what we feel equipped for and called to minister to. We know that if we invite them to church, most of them won't come.

When you are called to a minister to a certain people group, you must first learn to speak their language. If you don't speak their language, they won't understand you. Kids speak the language of " fun", so that is how we speak to them. When we speak the language of fun, we are saying to them, "Fun matters to you and you matter to us." Once the kids realize that we mean that, then they will listen to what we have to say. We speak a language that they understand.

Fun Faith is an event where kids ages 5-12 have FUN and learn about God. This year we had a 3 day event. Two days were at our town's civic center and had an Olympics theme. Our motto was "Go For God." The kids were divided into teams with different country names and competed in 4 different games to see which team would get the gold, silver, or bronze medal. The games involved big buckets of slime, crickets, a tricycle (Thanks Jake! The kids loved it!) whipped cream and a Wii. Also, each group also took a break from the games to hear an awesome Bible lesson.

We had an opening ceremony where we sang a crazy, fun song about Jesus and a closing ceremony where we song a slow, prayerful song about Jesus with a brief message about going for God.

And of course we had pizza and snacks at the beginning and end.

The last day was a water slide party at our house!!!

Here are some amazing facts about this year's Fun Faith.

-About 90% of our church adults were involved. This is part of our dream, to have the whole church catch the vision we have. It was so amazing to be able to walk around a place buzzing with excitement. We were able to focus on making sure people had what they needed and I even got to take video clips and pictures.

-We had about 30 kids participating. We have around 10 kids in our children's church so this was a lot more for us. But more than the numbers, was the fact that there were kids there that I have been inviting to church for a long time. Some of them came and 2 of them came to church on Sunday morning and loved it.

-Almost all of the people that were there, over 50 I think, joined in singing and dancing to the song " I Came to Party, With My Friend Jesus!" Just picture a sporting event for Jesus. I live for moments like that! Its part of my dream!

-All the kids raised thier hands saying they wanted to live for God and prayed with us.

-We were more organized than we were last year and Gidget helped us tremendously. She helped us with a lot of the leg work and planning and she did the Bible lesson. This was huge for us. The week before, I found myself not knowing what to do with myself sometimes, because things were already done. Thank you, Gidget!


There are many more details that I am excited about. I get excited by the details, because I know that they are part of the process of fulfilling the dream.