Crucible

We started our 8th grade guys rite of passage this morning (we call it "The Crucible"). I love it so much. It's awesome to see the guys respond to the challenge. We had about 10 guys there this morning, and several key guys were missing. I'm thinking we'll have somewhere between 10 - 14 guys go through it.
One of the cool things about the whole program is that I play such a minimal part in the whole process. It's really spearheaded by the small group leaders: Tommy and Curtis. These guys do such an amazing job. I really can't imagine it without them.
I'll be posting a lot about the process over the next 7 weeks because it's just so exciting for me.
A couple new things were trying this year are devotions as homework and adding in a "faith" characteristic.
We talked about faith today and I really think that it sets up the whole series well. I think the students enjoyed it as well. The homework devotion idea is so that we don't waste time together covering the background on a characteristic, but get to dive right into a deeper discussion of it. This week is about responsibility. We'll see how these guys take to it. I tried to impress upon them the importance of it, but you never know if they'll get it. I was really thankful that Tommy closed up the lesson today by making sure they knew that it was important, but that we weren't going to babysit them and make sure they did it every day. They're accountable for it. Pretty cool. JM