My Epic Journey

After a summer of planning, praying and interviewing, we have put together what we believe is a Dream LEAD Team.  Our LEAD team consists of students who model the following characteristics:

• Faithful
• Available
• Teachable
• Discipling
• Non-Comfortable (meaning they are willing to step out their comfort zone)

These students aren’t perfect, but they are working to develop each of these five characteristics in their life.  They make up our 2009-2010 EPIC LEAD Team:

• Tanner Bleedorn
• Evan Coane
• Caleb Hammock
• Eva Hyder
• Anna Jamieson
• Elizabeth Martin

The PURPOSE of the LEAD Team is to team up with the youth pastor and adult leadership team, to encourage their peers to live a godly life, to accept all those who enter our ministry doors, and to model a godly life by patterning their life after 1Timothy 4:12.

Please remember these students in your prayers as they seek to glorify God by serving others.

We had a phenomenal leader’s meeting last weekend with our AMAZING EPIC leaders.  I through out a quick question to them all.  What would you like to see EPIC accomplish this year (school year) and how can we do that? 

Here are their responses to the first part of that question:

• Connect the Unconnected.  We have a lot of students that are a part of Grace Point but not connected to the student ministry.  We want to simply make sure that they know we are here and if need anything we are desirous to help.
• Build Bridges.  Since our ministry hits 6th graders through 12th graders we feel we need to keep them separate for most of the time.  We have found though that they enjoy getting together occasionally.  We feel it is important to keep them separate for most of the time but also see the value of partnering up with activities.

• Think & Live "Outside the Box".  To use a Erwin McManus phrase, "we (as a church) have a choice, to either be a movement or a monument."  Often we choose the latter, and yet God setup the Church to be a movement.  We must not only THINK "outside the box" (our church walls) but also LIVE there as well.  We are desperately trying to figure out what that looks like and how we accomplish that.
• Become a True Spiritual Family.  Another thing we often forget is that God has created the Church to be a FAMILY–a living, breathing FAMILY.  We accomplish this by learning how to 1) love, 2) care and 3) value one another.  If we don’t work together and love one another then we will never be effective in reaching others.

We are still working toward figuring out the second part to our question, "how can we do that?"  But I am very confident that I have the most amazing team of leaders in the world and that together, this will be one of the most impacting years of EPIC.