Church Tours - Day ONE

Only one day after buying my new Honda Civic I get to take it on a little drive! As I quickly approach my trip to Arizona, I find myself on another trip just days before the 2400 mile haul to Peoria, Arizona.

I am taking a class for the very beginning of the summer called "Discipling Youth." Basically, for this class we are touring around to different churches, youth ministries, and church camps to get a feel for how different people and different denominations do church. I think this is a great experience for the same reason why I think my trip to Arizona is going to be very beneficial, because too many people think the way that they do things are always how they should be done. So, now that you get the gist of things, let me tell you about my first day this far:

I woke up and headed to the church to pick up the rest of the group to head to Bethlehem. It's a small group consisting of two friends of mine, Jon, Laura and of course the girl I see everywhere I go, April Tatta! You can check her blog out HERE. Anyway, we got to Bethlehem at 8:30 to go to First Baptist Church. The service was pretty good. The worship pastor sounded a lot like Jimmy Buffet, the Senior Pastor seemed to know his Biblical Theology and I really liked how you had children, teens and older folks all in the same service.

They had a contemporary worship service, followed by a gap for Sunday school (which I got to hang out with some teens at) and then a more traditional worship service with a choir. One thing I really enjoyed about the service was that they had this part in the service called "Children Chat." During this time, all the children come up and listen to a short Bible story and they ask the kids questions. It's really awesome just hearing their simple answers and applying that to how Christ asks us to have a child-like faith. That was my favorite part.

Tonight we are at Camp Ichthus up in Palmerton, Pa. We're going to have a class up here and then go to see the new Star Trek movie! From there we are going to have a camp fire and then hit the sack. We're heading up to Syracuse tomorrow, so I look forward to it. I certainly know that I will sleep well tonight from being up late putting the finishing touches on my mothers day gift! LOVE YOU MOM!

PS - Happy Mother's Day to all the rest of you mothers out there in the bloggisphere! You are all eternally under-appriciated!