This is the second “resource video” I have made for the Empower Conference. In it, Drew McClure talks about the foundation for Sunday mornings at Grace. Every week, our students open their Bibles and follow along with the teacher. We even have Bible carts that are full of Bibles for students who have forgotten their own Bibles or do not actually have one.

On August 28, we will be hosting a ministry training conference at Grace for student leaders, volunteers, and pastors from other churches called Empower. I have been working on a collection of videos that we will have available to them and will hopefully be helpful as well. Here is the first one, done very well by Erin Burchik as she speaks on the importance of students doing missions.

I will continue posting these over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

A few months ago I posted a couple of testimony videos that I have been working on for Grace. Well I am still making them for our website and I wanted to post some cool new ones.

The first is from Mark Messler. I like his because even though he is a lawyer (and a good one) he still says the most important thing he does is youth ministry. This video explains it all…

This second video is from Joe Pinson. He did a great job because he had no prep time. He just happened to be at the church and I had an opening so I asked him if he wanted to do his testimony and he nailed it. Pretty cool. His story is powerful too…

If you want to see the whole collection it is here: http://vimeo.com/channels/109997
I will be adding some more as I finish editing them.

Hey everyone, we are releasing our newest sketch comedy video and this is our best yet. If you enjoy it, please share it with everyone you know! It’s pretty funny (I think) and a good commentary on how serious some people can take facebook. Hope you enjoy…

Special thanks to everyone involved in this project!

I have been working on a collection of testimony videos that will go on Grace’s new Website when it is finished. We will be adding more as time goes on, but here are 3 out of the 6 that will be going on.

The first is from Paige Knudsen, who has an incredible story and perspective after losing her husband to cancer while she had 3 daughters under the age of 5. You should share this one with people you know because Paige does such a great job.

Here is one from Debbie Forbes, a woman who has been battling Ovarian Cancer. She talks about how she she has been cared for and now wants to care for others who have Cancer.

This next one is from Rusty Maddox and his story takes a little bit longer, but I am posting it here because it is a good example of God can use some really bad stuff in our life for our good.

Hope you enjoy them, I hope they give you some hope, and I hope you have a great day!

Well I am a little behind posting this on Wednesday night, but I thought I would recap last Sunday morning when I had the privilege of speaking to our College and High School groups on the second half of James 2. If you are not familiar with the passage, you can read it by clicking here.

It is a pretty interesting passage and some people even think that it contradicts the Bible. This is not the case however, and James actually compliments the rest of scripture very well. These were my main points:

1) Works are not the cause of salvation, but rather, they are the result of it.

2) Faith, by definition, requires works. If you claim to have faith, you are saying that you believe God is real, and that He is who He says He is. God’s qualities include all-loving, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. If we go against God, we are either saying we think we are smarter than God (not good faith!) or that God is not good (also not good faith!)

3) Faith in a loving God also includes loving Him in return. If we love Him, we will obey His commands (John 14:23). This is obvious. For instance, I love my wife and because of that I actually want to serve her.

4) If we focus too much on doing works, we will miss out on God and end up with an empty and cold religion.

5) Instead, there is one thing to focus on: living life in Jesus’s presence (Luke 10:38-42) We tend to get caught up and distracted by the details, but when we focus on God, works will naturally begin to happen in our life. When you experience and see the love God has for you, works will naturally come from the overflow in your life.

So thats it in a nutshell. I am not the best speaker in the world, but if you want to see the whole thing it is right here:

This past weekend I had the honor of teaching at Perimeter Church’s 6th grade. Morgan came along and we had a great time together hanging with the students and I enjoyed teaching them tremendously.

One of my favorite parts of thw weekend was the camp’s lake activities. They had a blob (which I have never done in my life) and a rope swing and a couple of big slides. The water was cold, but we braved it anyway.

I have here a video of myself doing two things. The first is my attempt to do a backflip off of the rope swing. As you can imagine, it was a disaster. The second video is of my second blobbing experience of the day. A man who weighed more than 100 pounds than me sent me flying. I like to think I did my impression of what would happen if Godzilla punted me. As you can see in the pictures below, I had no control over what my body and limbs were doing.

I am practically doing a split mid-air

Life above the rim

Hope you find some amusement in my inability to control my body in the air. Anyone else ever been blobbed?