if you’re interested in the conversation around social justice you may find this free small group material from the heritage foundation helpful. they’re finishing the filming this week. should be available in august. click HERE to sign up.
ht rudy ~ urban onramps
yeah...far right is camp counselor extraordinaire parker selby
loving the email from simply youth this morning. 
beyond the great deal…they’ve got a promo that includes a picture from our outpost. cool thing is one of the guys pictured was at saddleback last year with me for the student leadership conference and is now finishing up week 5 as a camp counselor here locally. and our students are headed off to camp next week .
but if you’ve been to summer camp already, simply is looking for your best pictures and if you got the winning one you’ll grab 5 sets of the “books your students will actually read” bundle. so send your entries here. pretty cool!
i was going through some of the video that we shot during d2s09 last month and stumbled on this little short. i need to find out how the issue was resolved, but i’m guessing the students didn’t clearly understand their own self-interest. the leader, jackie, pictured in the video has a great heart and a great sense of humor so i’m confident that she created a memory or two herself. enjoy.
one of the big memories from our trip to the gurus conference was the beloved red beast – our ’94 ford econoline van. its a beauty. the muffler popped off before we left town (glad i was driving rose’s car) and well let’s just say it was the butt of many jokes the whole three days. on the way home, we weren’t even out of louisville when i got a call from kevin saying he had blown a tire. so we answered the larger question of…how many new hopers does it take to change a tire? …all of them. that done we decided the spare was a bit gnarly so we located the closest walmart and made an investment. thinking we had the destination of home in our sites we set off again. this time the muffler started dragging (about 12 miles from walmart) so we pulled over to fix it. then…a few hours later…109 miles from home… i’m on the phone with kevin…he had just called…and i hear “bwosshhh” and sure enough another tire blew and took out the rear heater connection which meant we were completely stranded. 
we did some creative rearranging and providentially our executive assistant was about 20 miles away and helped to transport the rest of the team back home. kevin and i decided in all our years of doing student ministry (and this wasn’t even a student ministry trip!) i’ve never made these kind of memories. hope we don’t ever again. but yeah…journey is more important than destination. had lots of time to connect.
been a busy 24 hours at least for day one of the gurus of tech conference..but very productive. the trip is worth it just to see the good work of southeast christain church. lots of great conversations with many good hearted folks who are making an impact for the kingdom through their craft.
one highlight was seeing the college ministry, the post, in action tonite. creative, edgy and relevant for sure, but also life transforming. saw several cool things in just their context. 1) sending a team of 20+to kenya for a two week mission and we watched a baptism of two new believers. one call part to that was a young man who had just been baptized himself just a few weeks ago. very cool.
the post worship
sending out the post team to kenya
two new followers taking the dip after the post worship
