Lakeland Seventh-day Adventist Church

I'm beginning a record of the preparations for our next Youth Ignited evangelistic series, starting April 11 and continuing every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at 7 PM until May 16. If you are a member of the Youth Ignited team, you can also add entries to the record by logging in and creating a blog post with the tag "Youth Ignited".

After our youth evangelistic series last November, we decided to do the next one in April because Bill Waters is scheduled to come in July to do a full adult evangelistic series. During our camping trip in December, we decided to specially focus on reaching youth, which includes people aged 14 to 30. We began holding an AY meeting Friday nights at 8 PM, where we could start getting experience in doing a program specifically for young people. At the AY meetings, I got lots of valuable input and created the basic format for the meetings. Each program will include worship, a message, group discussion, an appeal, and social time.

Worship will be a time to come close to God. Jasmine Abram is putting together a group to provide worship music.

The message will be simple and concrete. It will cover only one topic and will use nature, history, current events, and real life experiences to show that the Bible deals with reality, not just ideas.

Group discussion will be the core of our evangelistic outreach. After the message, Youth Ignited team members will gather those present into small groups to discuss questions relating to the topic. This will be the time to get to know people, encourage them to share their experiences, and lead them to make decisions for Jesus. As far as possible, our team members will work with the same groups every night. People whose lives are being changed will be a far more powerful witness for Jesus than what is presented from up front. Because this part of the program is so important and cannot be scripted, we provided training on facilitating group discussions last night. Those of our young people who were not present for the training last night will need to get it later.

After the group discussion, an appeal will be made. Rather than asking people to make a decision, we will make clear the impossibility of avoiding a decision by presenting all possible responses and their end results.

On Friday nights the social time will be a smoothie bar, and on Saturday nights we will open the basketball court for games.

I want to thank some special people for their contributions so far:

• Roberto Colon, for suggesting that we focus on youth,
• Ron Hoffecker, Jr, for emphasizing the importance of discussion groups,
• David Axt, for providing training materials for discussion group facilitators,
• Eric Dixon, Zachary Maskelony, and Petronella Munyemweri for sharing the responsibility for this evangelistic series, even they preached at the last one and knew what they were getting into.

Why are we doing this? Because we look forward to the soon coming of Jesus and want to finish the work of preaching the gospel. I am not interested in creating a great youth program for our church. As soon as we have reached those aged 14 to 30 in Lakeland, we will be done. My prayer is that the work of the gospel all over the world will then be finished, and Jesus can come to take us home.