12/4/22 - Grilled cheese, overcoming doubt, and planning future topics!

Happy Monday parents!

Last night in youth group the high schoolers ate some grilled cheese, prayed for one another, and spent our large group time brainstorming topics that they would like to cover and finishing up our conversation about doubt from two weeks ago!

One of the things I mentioned in the parent meeting was my desire to give high school students ownership of the program as much as possible. What that looks like in practice is using some of our time together to get their input and feedback on how things are going and the topics they would like to talk about! You can see a picture of the requested topics below.

After establishing that doubt is not sinful, and actually fairly common, we spent some time reflecting on how supporting one another through periods of doubt can actually be

We are still working to build trust and encourage open discussion, but I see more and more openness every week. As we head into the new year, I hope to keep trying to generate conversation between students as much as possible to break down the stigma surrounding talking about our faith openly. I’ll have a calendar together with those topics on the website by the end of the month :)

One of the other things we are throwing on the calendar is a weekly coffee time on Wednesdays from 3-4pm in the pit. Students are welcome to come to work on homework, prep for Wednesday night if they are volunteering that week, or simply hang out and drink coffee or hot chocolate! This is our first step toward building a stronger community, and will serve to be another entry point for the widest part of our funnel alongside monthly events! This is not obligatory and there won’t be any formal teaching, so no worries if your student can’t make it!

Next week we are going to talk about how to practically share Jesus (or faith in general) with our friends, and dodge some of the awkwardness that tends to go along with that before having our year end celebration on the 18th!

Thanks as always for stopping by and checking in! Have a wonderful week!