Annual Wakulla Springs Family Day Back to School Freeze Yourself to Death Thing At Wakulla Springs

This year makes two, the second time we will go to Wakulla Springs for the annual Back to School, Freeze Your Tail Off, and Eat Grilled Meats With Your Brothers and Sisters Who Are Not Youth If Your Parents Come Cold Water and August Heat Extravaganza. Yes, that is the title, long and annoying but still fun at the same time. This event is open to all Parkway Student Ministry folks, meaning that if you are in any grade between 6th grade and graduate school you can come. Plus, if you are a ministry volunteer you can come. Also, if you are the parent of one of these folks you can come, in addition if you are a sibling of one of these folks listed you can come if your parents come. So, potentially there come be thousands upon thousands of people there, maybe millions. But, you need to RSVP to me, Kevin Wiggins. Use email (click this off color text), comment on the blog, or use the Facebook event profile, you may even look at me in the face and say I will come, but you run the risk of me forgetting and then eating your lunch. Keep in mind that you do not have to RSVP if you do not wish to eat, but I must buy groceries and cook, so you must let me know if I am to buy you a grocery.

Here are the condensed details:
When: Saturday August 18 (School starts August 20 FSU & TCC begin the 27th)
Where: Wakulla Springs
Time: 11:00 am to 3:30 pm (or however long your family wants to stay)
Lunch will be ready at 12:00
We eat, hamburgers, hotdogs, and various picnic type sides, you are welcomed to bring something if you wish, just let me know.)
For: All students involved in The Parkway Student Ministry, their parents, and if their parents come their siblings can come too, and various ministry volunteers.
PLEASE RSVP in some manner.

Where we at, YO?

Where we at? That, over there to the left, has been the question on our mind lately. As is typically the case the question of “at” is usually followed by the question of “going”. This too has been on our mind lately. Where we at and where we going? It has been quite challenging over the last few weeks in our college ministry brain trust known as Get Closer. We have collectively wrestled with who we are, what we wish to be, and how we are going accomplish the task of both discovery and accomplishment. So far we have learned this is no easy task. But, we have come to some conclusions.
At Parkway, our student ministry is in a good place. But, it is very important to say that we have not arrived. We are moving, we are headed there; the only problem is that we don’t know exactly where there is. We feel pretty sure that we know the direction, but where we stop is completely up to God. While this may be disconcerting to some, we feel that God leads us and we trust God. So, we just go and listen, and turn when God says turn and stop where God says stop. It is fun.
So, what does all this mean? I feel that it is time to make some changes. In fact, we (core college student leadership types) have discussed it so technically I should say we feel that some changes are coming. Exactly how these changes will appear is still up to God, but I feel that we can certainly state some broad areas of change that we feel are important.
1. Get Closer, while still to be known as Get Closer, will change its focus a bit. Currently Get Closer is a bible study. A simple, sit around a table reading the bible, bible study. While studying the bible is definitely important, we already do that pretty well in other Parkway Student Ministry activities. So, no more just sitting around a table reading the bible. A refocus is coming.
2. How do we refocus Get Closer. Well we go out and make disciples, to quote a feller named Jesus. While this seems like a simple action, in some ways it is, but we find that the “going” part of that statement is the hard part. Granted you cannot make someone a disciple unless they are willing to become a disciple. You definitely cannot gauge their willingness to become a disciple if you don’t even know them. Seems when you know someone, you know as friends; you tend to talk about things. Even spiritual things. They can then either say, yes I am interested in Jesus or no Jesus is not for me. Either way you have gotten to know a new person, you may even get yourself a new BFF, or at very least a BFFN (BFFN- best friend for now, is an intentionally ironic joke gauging a Christian tendency to befriend non-Christian types in order to win them for Jesus without really caring for the person, if you should happen to be looking for a point to argue).
3. We must intentionally critic our efforts to insure that we allow an identifiable process. By this we mean that if someone is interested in Christ in a life altering way, we need to insure that they have an identifiable process by which they can check their growth. Not that Christianity, the act of following and being changed by Christ, is academic or procedural. Rather, a personal relationship with Christ is, well, personal. Though, ask anyone who seeks to follow and be transformed by Christ if the process is easy, honest people will very likely say no. So, a group of like-minded friends and acquaintances would seem a natural benefit. At this point, organization structure and group purpose become paramount. Thus we have government, because however many thousands of years of human existence we currently have under our collective belts we have learned that groups don’t always naturally behave in positive ways. So, group structure is important. A process that allows people to move as they develop is crucial, we must continually develop this process.

So, now you have three points, like a good sermon just no dead dog story to get you teary eyed. However, you do get a recap. Change is important to the development of our ministry. Get Closer will no longer be a sit around a table bible study. We will develop Get Closer into a missional endeavor. We will develop ways to interact with our community, live our lives getting to know people who may or may not wish to know more about Christ, and hopefully in the process be more like Christ. You know, do things like love folks. Not to forget that we shall purposefully develop our organizational structure to insure movement towards Christ.

Church Words

Yesterday the Parkway Student Ministry “Brain Trust” got together to discuss highly complicated matters. So much so that I relent even attempting to write about the meeting. I fear that no mere mortal can decipher our combined intellect in any meaningful way. Yes, it is true, we are crazy awesome. Our crazy awesomeness only seconded by our ostentatious humility.
Um, that was fun, now I am finished and shall move on to what I wish to write about. The meeting yesterday, which really means very little to you if you are not, in fact, reading this today, so from this point forward I will say simply the meeting. So, there was a meeting at a point in the past. A few college aged type folks sat in a room; around a table looking in the general direction of a dry erase board. Between the table and the board stood me, my name is Kevin.
At this meeting we discussed why we seem to lose so many of the twenty something demographic in the Church (Church as opposed to church, meaning bigger than Parkway). What happens between nineteen and thirty that cause such an epidemic of disengagement? We soon learned that there is no easy answer. People disengage for many reasons. Seams that some people just don’t care about church, others don’t care about God. Some want to party, and church and party don’t seem to go together. See what I mean, many number of reasons. All of those are out of the control of the church. But is there more, are we missing something?
As we talked we started coming up with words that helped us describe what we felt to be important characteristics of a church. For instance, many felt that a church should be real in an authentic sort of way. We started getting the hang of the exercise and came up with a list, we felt that important characteristics of church might be concepts such as: boldness, bravery/courage , organization, challenging, purposeful, driven, takes responsibility, serving, and deep. This is a broad list, and it might seem like an obvious list to some. But as we discussed this in more depth we discovered that it is very easy to under perform in these areas. In fact, sometimes a display of these characteristics can actually cause trouble in the church. Challenge someone in an area that they tend to display laziness, see what happens. It may just as easily mess up your day as improve it. We determined that it is far too easy to sit and be than it is to go and do.
Is this part of the problem, do we avoid disciplines that encourage the above list of characteristics? Do we too often follow the path of least resistance? Do, twenty something aged folks sense this and flee?
I cannot be certain that the path of least resistance is the problem, but it definitely causes one to question. Twenty something folks, for that matter even a large number of thirty some things, are missing from the church. Do we church types encourage laziness and comfort over sacrifice and effort. One does not need to read through much of the bible to see examples of the characteristics in the list. Read any one of the gospels and Acts you see Paul exhibit courage in life threatening situations on nearly a daily basis. Jesus. I really don’t need to say more. As Christians, we believe Jesus is God, and He came to live on earth for 33 years. If that was not crazy enough He came in an era without simple things like air conditioning and cars. Brother had to walk everywhere, in the heat! Um, let’s weigh the options; live in heaven, live in earth? Doesn’t seem like there should be too much debate.
But, we sit. Don’t push too hard, people will not come. Don’t push too hard, people will not stay. Don’t push too hard, people will not give. I don’t know, just some thoughts.

West Virginia Mission Trip

For many years now Parkway has partnered with the Southern Baptist Convention of West Virginia. Every August we offer to help at their annual Shepherding the Shepherd conference, a minister’s family retreat for pastors and staff ministers of West Virginia Baptist churches. We take a team to help at the conference by providing childcare during conference sessions. This year is no different. We are committed to taking a team to help. Our college ministry is playing a major roll in this effort. You can help. We need volunteers to go to West Virginia and volunteers to help fund the trip. We hope to be able to fund the trip for the first seven to sign up to go. All it will cost you is your time and effort. Please consider this opportunity to serve. We still need people to go.
Dates:
Leave Wednesday August 1 around noon
Return Sunday August 5 around noon

Contact me for more information.

Kevin Wiggins
Email
877-4141