Something hit me pretty hard while we were in Boston - we serve an incredible group of students! As I saw our students labor in ministry together, I recognized our students love being together, they love being challenged, and they DESIRE real community and authentic experiences when they come to church.

This summer the staff and I really pondered how to continue to provide real community and authentic experiences on Sunday mornings and have come up with some next steps we want you to help us apply in our groups this year. This year we want your commitment to be centered on the particular group of students you feel called to lead. For some of you, this may mean "moving up" with the group you led this year, continuing to walk with them and build deeper relationships and trust. Others of you primarily filled a teaching role this year or the group you've led for several years has graduated - perhaps there is a group of students you have a burden for and feel called to serve. Just as we believe strongly that our teaching this year helped lay a great foundation of knowledge for our students, now this year we want to grow our vision by flowing the experience of Sunday morning through your direct, consistent and ongoing presence as the leader(s) for your group of students. So many of you expressed your giftedness of teaching and/or care ministry this year. We want you to continue doing this as you direct that gifted onto one group of students for the entire year (and possibly longer if God leads you in that direction). Through your continued and identifiable presence each week, we believe your ability to communicate and lead your students will be strengthened as they grow to know and trust you more. So many of our leaders could tell stories of how walking with a group of students for several years enabled them to build deep and lasting relationships that you can see the richness of during times like our Senior Robing ceremony and Senior service on Choir Tour. Those moments are waiting for all of you - as you commit to walk closely with a group of students for one or two years or maybe all of their high school experience.

We will continue to provide you curriculum that will be taught in 6 to 8 week blocks. To provide more consistency, we'll be asking that all our groups study the same block of material at the same time. This will allow us to better define the first 10-15 minutes of the BF hour and present opportunities to build more creativity into that time. We will still provide "breaks" in the schedule for you and use those times for our Fundamentals track. We are still moving forward on the teaching plan we launched last year. Our topics this year will include: a study on how to share your faith effectively, a study of the book "UnChristian," bible book studies over Esther and James and a study on Biblical Ethics.

As you make a renewed and deeper commitment to our ministry and students this year, I want you to know that we are going to make a deeper commitment to develop you as a leader. This will come in the form of large group meetings, one on one times with staff, blogs, emails, videos and other resources. These will be put in place to help you grow as a leader so you can better fulfill what God has called you to do in the lives of students. I want our focus this year to be on this question: where is God inviting me to join him and am I prepared to follow Him? I believe many of you already know the answer to that question and many more of you, through prayer and thought, will arrive at God's answer for you. In all this, be praying for our students and know that I am specifically, by name, praying for you. Leading students is not always easy, it often requires patience, a listening heart and a lot of love. Our students will push us with the craziness of being a teenager and then blow us away with their passion for Christ all at the same time. As I've told many friends over the years, there's nothing like working with students!

Let's make this a great year on Sunday mornings - where we come prepared to see God move every week and come excited to lead the students God has called us to help grow deeper in their walk with Him. This means all of us will need to commit to grow deeper in our own walk, to lay down any barriers and hindrances that may keep us from fulfilling God's call and plan for the students He's given us. Consecrate yourselves as leaders; bathe your ministry in prayer and then stand back and see what all a great God can do when we let go and trust Him. I can't wait to work with you this year and I can't wait to see and experience what all He is going to do.