Join us in the fight against hunger and homelessness.

We are raising awareness by becoming homeless for the evening of December 5th-6th.  We will be meeting at church at 2pm on Saturday December 5th. Our time together will end after church on Sunday morning.

Throughout the afternoon we will be collecting food items for food banks from local neighborhoods, helping lead worship Saturday evening and Sunday morning.  We will also have a time for a panel discussion and video on hunger hand homelessness from some of our church members with first hand experience. Our diet will consist of the bare essentials of rice and beans and oatmeal.

This event is open to the whole congregation.  If you would like to participate please let us know. Chris@lifeforceyouth.com

Here is some more information and a permission form for our youth.  Permisison form

Homeless for a night from Chris Bishop on Vimeo.

Have you ever noticed that it costs almost $20 to go to the movies anymore? Theme parks are $50, and if you just want to hang out at the mall I bet you will end up buying a giant cinnamon sugar pretzel with an extra large Slurpee, even if you don’t mean to.

The Student Leadership Team was recently thinking of ways kids could hang out after school, but for free. The answer was easy- why not at church?

So here’s the deal: every Monday starting sometime in December, the youth will have an opportunity to be picked up by a youth group volunteer (over the age of 25!) and be driven to MUMC. There, we’ll have different things going on, such as…

- a quiet room to do homework

- a placw where kids could socialize, but do homework

- snacks

- the youth room will have 3 computers with internet access (I think.) These can be used if a kid wants to type up a report, but ONLY FOR THAT PURPOSE! Sorry, but NO FACEBOOK! You can survive by not updating your status for 3 hours…

- board games, decks of cards, and more fun stuff

- etc. etc. etc. (more stuff I don’t remember from the meeting…)

Anywho, this will just be a great and fantabulous time for kids to hang out/play games/do your homwork, and it’s free! It will be from 2:15-ish (when high school gets out) till about 5:00. From 5-6, we will be having a Bible study, and any youth of any age is welcome to come! If you do not want to go to the Bible study, your parents must pick you up and take you home.

We are all super excited about this. You can check out some pictures Chris has put up already on this site, as well.

More information will be coming shortly.

Join us at Wednesdays at 7 till about 830 in the youth room.

My trip to Africa, was basically one of the best things I have ever experienced. As the plane landed and we were driven to our compound, I could not believe that we were actually in Liberia. We met tons of people, including the Bishop! We became his special guests at many different events, very cool. Meeting the staff, teachers, and students of the school was really awesome. I loved being able to sign with them and learning new signs and different styles. Totally cool!! The kids were all such great participants in VBS, they loved the simple things like coloring. We tried to play soccer with them, but they were ridiculously good! We introduced frisbee to them, they picked it up quite well and had fun with it. They loved getting their pictures taken with us. We all became very attached to them and were sad to leave them. We all came back with plenty of pictures, souvenirs, and stories. Gods love was felt so strongly over there, these kids who struggled everyday just to survive were so thankful for us coming. And how hard they were working to help with their school was unbelievable, I can never take the things I have for granted. Someday I hope to go back and see these people again.

After coming back home, the first stop was a BK for the hungry travelers who wanted anything that didn’t have rice in it. I then spent a day home getting ready to leave for college. Wow, what a turn around! I was running on auto-pilot it seemed, I couldn’t really believe everything that was happening. But, it was all so amazing. I moved into my dorm finally, with no worries of my roommate, I knew she would be awesome. I was worried about what I would forget, where and when I was going to put everything in my room. How I was going to fight jet lag, how everything flowed here, who I was going to hang out with…I felt like I knew no one. The school threw us into Welcome Week activities and somewhere in all the fun I caught up on sleep, managed to buy most of my text books, settle in and find some great friends. As classes started, everyone was freaking out, there was no routine yet and all those syllabi…slightly overwhelming. I almost lost my sight of God in some of this my focus wasn’t on him, It was on myself. I was struggling through the week, not getting enough sleep and not having focus on anything. So I finally decided to go for a run, then I attended worship with my dorm, and went to the FCA meeting. It all brought me back, straight back to God. I had finally slowed my life down enough to hear God.

Here’s some questions and thoughts to think about:

Why do we seem to lose our focus so many times? What can you do to keep your focus on God? Take time to STOP and listen to what God may be trying to tell you.

I miss you all and will be writing again soon…hopefully!

P.S. wow, sorry that was long people, kudoos to those who stuck it out and read that whole thing!

One of the books in my backpack opened with this question. I thought that it was a strange one to ask for a book about teaching Bible Studies.

This past weekend we had our All Saint’s weekend. This is the time in the church where we lift up and praise the lives we lit candles, read and spoke names aloud of the people in our lives who have made an impact.

These people who we think of as saints are people that did something that has outlasted them. We have other people that are living saints in our lives.

So let’s change the question a little bit. What are you going to be remembered for by your friends, or people at school? Are you going to be the one who would always trip someone in the hall, or the one who would stop and help pick up a dropped book? Are you going to show others who the church is a place of love and acceptance or one of hate and filled with hypocrites?

We are built to last longer than just here on Earth. We have the promise of eternal life, and we can live on through the impact we make on Earth.

There is a story of a mother who would yell to her kids every morning as they went to the bus. She would say, “Go MAD.”

But what she was really saying “Go Make A Difference.”

What are you doing to make a difference?

1. Each week I will try to post a follow-up to the weekend’s lesson on Wednesday.  Kind of like a mid week devotion.
2. Every couple of weeks we will have an article by a student.
3. We will make a form so that you can report God sightings that you have had through out the week.  This way we can post, share at youth group/FUEL the ways that God is at work in and through our lives.
4. I have been working for about a week now to try and figure out how to get a better way of managing our pictures.  I have a ton and need a better/safer way to post them so that we can have them available to you all.
5. FINALLY, if you see something that you would like to be posted please use this site to contact me or forward me a link so that I can get it into a post.  It could be an article, picture or video that you thought was cool.  Just let me know and i will get it up here.

Let me know what you thikn about these things and other ways you would like to see the site used.  later on.

student-information-sheet

annual-medical-release

How would worship be different? What would bible study be like?   What questions would the sermon try to answer?  How would you do it?  who would be there?  What would the mission of the church be? Why would people come?