Last week my church hosted the Anglican 1000 conference, a gathering of current and future Anglican church planters in North America. It was a great time of vision and training for the ACNA and their church planting initiatives.

Being a future church planter myself (at least I think I will be) it’s always great to be around innovative church planting leaders. It’s inspiring and motivating! Church planting is a hard work—they often say the hardest work—and also the most rewarding. I’ve always sensed this and therefore have embraced what I believe to be a call to church planting with fear and trembling, along with patience and prayer. We shall see when God opens the door and leads the way for my family and me to enter into this venture. For now I will just hang around church planters, glean good ideas and be inspired by their faith and determination.

Being the host of a conference was a very different experience. My church was busy and the staff I work with had a lot of duties as well as name tags that you would have thought said, “Ask me anything, I have the answers.” Which was awkward for the new guy, only having worked at Christ Church for 5 months now, because there were a lot of questions I didn’t have a clue how to answer. Luckily I know people who know the answer, which is half the battle, right?

One of my duties, which I rather enjoyed, was to be a chauffeur. I was able to drive around a few of the speakers—you can listen to their talks here. I would recommend any of Scot McKnight’s talks and also David Taylor’s talk was amazing. Really, they were all pretty good, Fr. David Roseberry, Mike Breen… all of them!  But my primary assignment was driving around Sir Scot McKnight. I was excited about this because the word on the street was that Scot is also a pretzel, a Freeport pretzel. This was my high school mascot; everybody gets a chuckle out of that.  And sure enough, Scot McKnight was also a Freeport pretzel. Gave us a lot of good conversation, talking about good old Freeport.

Scot was great! I enjoyed talking with him and picking his brain a bit about blogging, writing, traveling and speaking, as well as theology and ecclesiology kinds of stuff. Always fun to chat with fellows who are far smarter, well read and well traveled than yourself. Scot was very gracious and I really enjoyed chatting with him.

One thing we talked about was blogging. Scot blogs about three times a day and plans out much of his blogging at least one week in advance. WOW! I struggle blogging once a week. But aspiring to write and speak more in the future, I realize how valuable a blogging platform can be. So once again I’m inspired to do a bit more blogging. I know I say this and blog about blogging once every 6-8 months, so here it is again—my hope to blog a bit more. I have about two pages of blog ideas, now I just need to write them and schedule them out.

Here’s to blogging and inspiration.

It’s true I pastor students, middle school students to be specific. It’s a new gig for me and one i enter into with excitement and some biblical fear and trembling.

I read student ministry blogs here and there. I want to do that more; there are so many great ideas and encouraging people out there.
What student ministry blogs should I be reading?

And i’m looking forward to sharing some of the things we are doing here in the student ministry at Christ Church Plano.

Christ Church is a really great place! It’s also a really interesting mix of a liturgical church, rooted in tradition, history and beauty, and an evangelical bible church kinda feel with a high value on scripture and a personal relationship with Jesus. Most of the things you typically think of from a liturgical church and a bible church both find themselves being gracefully lived out right here in one place. Geographically we are in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, a place called Plano that has its own kind of charm and plenty of suburban challenges.

I’m pretty new around here, just into my 3rd month, but I think this mix of things is going to make for some great but unique ministry in the student ministry world. I still know a lot of folks who are doing event-based attractional ministry, i know folks who are doing strong small group ministry, and i know folks who are trying to do missional youth ministry. I even know some folks who are doing a mix of all the above. The journey i’m on is to figure out how to do youth ministry in a liturgically sensible, biblically formative, socially conscious, and above all disciple-making kind of way.
Maybe there are some folks out there trying to do similar kinds of things. WHO ARE YOU? We need to talk!

Basically i’m excited to talk about student ministry, middle school ministry, failures, successes, and all the crazy stories in between. Student ministry is a wild ride but i’m excited to be a part of this community of people in a new kind of way. I’m excited to dive deeper into the conversation.

Grace and peace
erik

Well if you get my ministry emails you’ll know that my summer had been CRAZY busy! It has been pretty amazing, i’m not gonna lie (i’m working on a summer update email / blog post – stay tuned). But because of my busy summer covering 8 states and thousand and thousand of miles i’ve taken a little blog vacation.

HOWEVER… while on this blog vacation i have dreamed up a few sweet posts and have been working on em’ here and there, i’m looking forward to sharing these nuggets soon. The sharing will commence in a couple weeks. I’ve got a few more things going on and 1 camp left to get ready for.

In the mean the time…

#1. I’m working on a summer update eNewsletter. Should go out next week.

#2. We are still, slowly but surely working on a new ministry website and blog. Hoping it will be up sometime in August. I have my fingers crossed.

#3. Oh just you wait!

For now, grace and peace my friends!
erik

Here is a little teaser… a few of my favorite summer instagram pics… ENJOY!