Crucible

We do a big guys rite of passage this weekend called "The Crucible" so I'm in the final prep stages of that. It's weird seeing how they do it at my new church and then comparing that with how I did it at my old church. I feel like I'm constantly screwing everything up. So much fun. JM

Crucible Improvements

The only thing I know that I want to change for next year's Crucible is to divide up the debrief of each characteristic between the other leaders. I normally say something and then invite the other leaders to share, but I think it would be better if we divided them up beforehand and had them prepare something short (like 5 minutes or something). JM

Crucible Recap

Man, Crucible was awesome again this year. Crucible is our 8th grade guys rite of passage event. We spend 7 weeks covering what we say are the 7 attributes of manhood: faith, responsibility, integrity, faithfulness, courage, self-control, and care and protection for the weak and unlovely. They are basically just modified versions of Rick Bundschuh's characteristics that he gives in Passed Thru Fire.
So we have a week of devotions for each characteristic, then a lesson on it, then they memorize a verse from the story and they memorize the definition of the characteristic. We also make them read a book. This year it was In A Pit. We test them every week and track their progress.
They don't have to have any percentage done to go on the weekend retreat, but in order to participate in the Saturday night initiation ceremony, they must have it all completed.
The weekend was awesome. I was worried that I wouldn't connect as well with these guys as I have in year's past, but this event really provides plenty of opportunities to do that. It's got a camping, military, prison feel to it. Basically it's all high stress, high expectation situations. We have an activity for each characteristic where the students are challenged to demonstrate their understanding of the characteristic. We don't tip our hand on the front end, but rahter put them through the activity, observe their behavior, and then debrief it afterwards.
The coolest part is on Saturday night we have an initiation ceremony. The students dad's come out, and we all eat dinner together. Then we have a prayer service where the student explains the characteristics to his dad, prays for himself, and then his dad prays for him. At the end, our senior pastor prays with each of the students.
Then we go outside and we give the dads the opportunity to symbolically recognize their son as a man. It's an awesome, emotional, spiritual time.
I love it, and the students respons so well to it. JM

Crucible Preparations

I'm getting so pumped about our Crucible weekend. We're 8 days away now.
Crucible is our 8th grade guys rite of passage event, and it is amazing. I would stack it up against any manhood program that I've ever seen.
I just looked at one called Men Of Issachar and while it is definitely more complete (it takes 7 years) I hated it, especially compared to the Crucible. I hate military/battle references in Christianity, and MOI is loaded with them. Plus, the whole thing just had this dorky D&D feel to it.
Crucible is awesome. I'll post some more about it this week. JM

Crucible Notebooks

We're creating a Crucible folder this year that will contain all of the stuff that the guys do. I'd like to basically build a version of it this year that I can tweak and modify so that when next year rolls around I can send it off to a printer and get something that feels more significant. Like fancy torn edges, off-white paper, a cool font, and stuff like that. JM

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