Good morning friends! 

This past week we began our new Sunday school material and wrapped up some Deep Discipleship stuff in Youth Group!

Some of you may remember the "Can I Ask That" book series we went through right when I came to FRCZ, and it's back by popular demand! The seniors who caught some of the books are still interested in going back through them, so we are going to begin by simply asking the question "Can I trust the Bible?" 

This is a curriculum designed to help students think about their faith for themselves and prepare them for a world that asks hard questions. The tagline on the book is "Doubt isn't toxic to faith - silence is." This is a discussion based curriculum and has the potential to get pretty emotionally charged. My leaders and I are all ready to dive into those places, but its also helpful if you all are aware of what we are talking about. I would love to talk to you more about this so if you have any questions feel free to shoot me an email!

Youth group is going to begin Faith in an Anxious World on February 9th! This series is designed to help students identify and manage points of anxiety in their lives by putting full trust in God. I'm very excited to see how our students respond to that material and I will update you here! 

Please pray for a healthy baby, and an easy delivery! Dynelle and I can't wait to meet our little guy! Have a great week!

Good morning parents! 

This past week we spent our Sunday school hour talking about king Josiah and the unique nature of his reign. Without the law of Moses in hand, he abolished idolatry at the age of 16 and rebuilt the temple. There is a lot we can learn from Josiah, and its a pretty inspiring thing to know he did all of this at the age of our students! Ask your child what their takeaways were! 

In youth group I tried something a little different and I just asked two questions for the teaching time. the first was "If God had it His way, what would our church look like?" The responses were pretty incredible. We talked about worship that wasn't focused on worshiping a particular way or focused on ourselves, inclusivity, and lots more. This would be another great question to talk to your students about at home! I left them with this question - "What is stopping our church from looking like that now?" I think this is a question we can all afford to ask ourselves from time to time, just to make sure that our hearts are in the right place and we are on a course charted toward Jesus. 

Just to keep you all in the loop, Dynelle is going to give birth to our first child in the near future! There is a plan in place, and the High School volunteers are going to be standing in for me while I'm on paternity leave. I only intend to be gone for two weeks, but Friday nights are going to have to move!  For the next 8-10 weeks I will be asking members of the congregation to host our Friday night fellowship. If this is something you would be interested in, I would love to have you check out the sign up under the "Schedule information" tab! This is to make sure our little guy can develop a strong immune system before we put him in the same house as 20 some teenagers. The new Friday night schedule will be 6pm - 10pm during this time and we will reassess how we are doing at the end of these couple months. Thank you all for the support you have already given Dynelle and I and I can wait for you all to meet this little dude! 

Have a wonderful week! 

Good morning!

We kicked off 2020 by taking some time to discuss how we feel we are doing as a youth group! One of my greatest fears as a youth pastor is that I teach material I think is valuable, but students are not interested and therefore it isn't impactful. To combat that, we have a conversation about once a year about whats going well, whats going poorly, and what we are missing. I snapped a picture of our whiteboard from youth group and if you would like to see what the students had to say you can check it out below! 

I am hard at work making sure we have Sunday school and youth group planned and covered for my fast-approaching paternity leave! We will be transitioning from The Gospel Project in Sunday school to "Can I Ask That" material! If that sounds familiar, it's because we had great success with this material when I first started at FRCZ! We are going to return to the first book and start some more conversational and in depth Sunday school times! 

Youth group is going to continue with deep discipleship until Baby Prins is born, and then we will begin a 4 week series called "Faith in an Anxious World!" Expect to see a lot of fun updates here as we start these topics!! 

Thanks for checking in and have a great week!