Busy, Busy, Busy

Life has been somewhat chaotic lately. The great exodus to Pleasant Hill has begun, and last night we reached a very important benchmark. All living creatures have now been relocated. In case some of you were wondering - no I did not leave Morgan in West Des Moines for the last few days.

Instead our faithful rodent, I mean guinea pig made the journey with me last night. We have now spent three nights in our new home and it has been wonderful. I'd show you pictures of the houses, but frankly it'd be too embarrassing. Our West Des Moines house looks like a Hurricane hit.

With SOY we had a great day of training yesterday with Kara Powell, the executive director of the Center for Youth and Family Ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary. We had some great training as a staff and board as we talked about the Deep Design Method (Kara Powell and Chap Clark discuss in their new book, Deep Ministry in a Shallow World which, by the way, SOY is highlighted in) of evaluating ministries in order to make them deeper, and applied that to our mentor recruitment. We came up with some fresh ideas, so I'm excited.

On Monday night Kara spoke at a training we organized for our volunteers and for youth pastors/youth workers in the community. We had 47 attend as Kara led us in a training on "Building the 40 Assets into Youth". This training was based off of 40 developmental assets that the Search Institute discovered and research done through the Urban Youth Workers in America (UYWA) Study that the Center for Youth and Family Ministry completed. Awesome training! I am definitely going to incorporate it into our pre-match mentor training, and address it again with mentors post match. I am going to be a workshop leader at the Ignite Student Leadership Conference at Grace Church again this year, and I plan to make this one of my workshops as well.