Wednesday Night Live!

The Mountain Top trip was not the only interesting part of the Summer of '94 at the First United Methodist Church of Kissimmee.  Our theme for the summer was Don't Look Back, as we tried to shift the focus of the ministry from what it had been (a great success followed by two years of turmoil) to what it could be.  There were lots of new events, but one of the keys to the summer was a new program we called Wednesday Night Live!  (The group from the first WNL is pictured at top).  The history at FUMC-K dictated that there would be a Bible study on Wednesday nights during the school year.  My personal ministry history was to have a fun and games times on Wednesdays during the summer.  I decided to combine the two and give it a catchy name.  We would have an hour of Bible study followed by an hour of weird, wild, wacky stuff.  No one was sure if people would show up or not.  But the Youth Ministry Team decided to give it a go.

We decided the Youth Counselors would teach each week, and that our subject for the summer would be the 10 Commandments.  Each week we would tackle a different challenge from God with a different teacher.  Karen Hall (now Gould), Carlene Heck (now Skiles), Cathy Thacker, Jerry Hanbery, Laura Drapkin, Kay Hill, Becky Watson (now McCleery), Jill Painter (now Watson) and I all served as teachers.  We tried to give a little different perspective to God's Top 10, and I think it worked, because the crowd kept building all summer long.

Of course it didn't hurt that the study was always followed by an event!  Things like The Great Gumby Search, Banana Night, Snow Blast, Christmas in July and a trip to Old Town made each week special.  As always, things seldom went exactly as planned- usually because Todd Willis and Jocelyn Sessions were cheating at the games!!!  But we always had a blast, and slowly but surely Wednesday Night Live! became a huge year-round part of our student ministry at FUMC-K.

We tried a few other new things that summer as well;  a Mid-High Mission Trip, a "kidnapping," Beach Breaks and much more.  You will hear more about several of these events.  Looking back, I think we succeeded in moving the group out of the past and into the present that summer.  So many of the youth were feeling like that were a day late and a dollar short for the glory days of youth ministry at the church.  With our efforts that summer I think we convinced them that they weren't late; in fact, they were just in time.  We were ready to follow Jesus into the great WIDE OPEN...

Because of Jesus,