Just a couple of days ago we had an day team meeting where we needed to come up with our fall teaching themes for our Wednesday night program called, .deW.  This is program is geared to reaching students who are not attending church on a regular basis and to assist our students in inviting their friends to a safe program that is not real churchy.  While I understand that many of my peers feel that this is a ministry philosophy that is not really where students are today it is a program that brings in over 200 students a night.  Most of which have never even entered the doors of this church ever before.  Anyways, we needed to come up with some good topics to teach.

So, we loaded up in my car and headed out to the St. Louis Mills.  It is a large mall that also has a lot of creative concepts and themes located all through out the entire campus.  Once we got there we went over some basic ground rules and then split up into two groups and went out searching for ideas that could lead to themes for .deW.  Then we came back together over lunch and shared all of our ideas.  There were more than 50 ideas that came to the table.  Many of which we would have never gotten if we stayed in our offices.

Once we got back to church we created some general topics and then put each idea under one of the 8 topics that we came up with.  After doing that I announced that we needed to knock this down to only 7 topics.  With much conversation and time given to each idea we finally landed on our basic theme concepts for the coming year.  I am listing them below but realize these are not the actual titles just the concepts.

September – Who am I

October – Rated PG, a series on parents

November – Faith|Hope|Love

December – is our annual Journey to Bethlehem

Janurary – Glow in the dark

February – Game Over, a relationship series

March – Question and Answer

April – Grow UP!

May – we wrap up for the school year