From Sampler to Sower

Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, A fairly typical week for us.

Message Summary: Our You Decide series was in it’s fifth week Tuesday night.  That’s encouraging.  When we started asking students to send in questions they might have about the Bible, I wasn’t sure just how well it would go or how long it would last.  But questions are still coming in to our Poll Everywhere poll and now I’m beginning to wonder how many good quesitions we’re going to have to leave unanswered.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 10 of 10, For the same reasons as the Junior High service, this was a difficult night.  Fortunately, by the time the teaching time came around in the service, the Excedrin I’d been taking all day finally began to kick in.  I really did think, going into this service, that there was a chance I’d have to cut the teaching short.  But God is good.

Message Summary: We’re in the fourth week of our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask. As I’ve mentioned for the past three weeks, we’re using a  Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions teens have and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.  This weeks top questions included “Who is Legion?” “What’s the difference between the Old and New Testament?” and “Will all dogs really go to heaven?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, By the time the Senior High service rolled around, most of the glitches were worked out of the system and everything went pretty smoothly.

Message Summary: This was week three for our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Text(s): Genesis 4, Romans 5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 9 of 10, We’ve already talked about the ways we’re using polleverywhere.com to facilitate this series.  We also used it during our game time Tuesday night.  Unfortunately right in the middle of our game the service started returning 504 errors both to me who was using the web interface and to contestants trying to text in answers.  I’ve never had this problem with them before, and it was cleared up within 10 minutes, but obviously you need to have a back up plan if you use Poll Everywhere.

Message Summary: If you’ve been following our weekly updates, you know that our new Senior High teaching series, You Decide, focuses on soliciting and answering students questions.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Text(s): Genesis 4, Romans 5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 of 10, Difficulty is up, just because there was so much different this week.  None of it was especially hard, in particular because of the great services available from polleverywhere.com (more on that tomorrow), but this week was far from typical.

Message Summary: Many of our typical subject lines (sermon title, message in a sentence, even text) don’t really apply to this series.  As I told our students last week, we’re trying something new.  With a series called You Decide we’re giving our students the opportunity to determine which way we go in our teaching.  We’ve challenged them to ask questions.  If there’s something they always wondered about the Bible, ask.  If there’s an issue they are facing for which they’d like a Biblical perspective, then ask.  If there’s something that their friends are going through and they want to know how they can help, just ask.

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