1st Series Launched

After being at Grace Fellowship Church for a few weeks now this Sunday finally felt like I got my start.  Yesterday was my first Epic, our Student Ministry worship service.  It was an absolute blast diving in and being a part of such a critical part of the Student Ministery here at GFC.  Our Epic service serves as the primary entry point for teenagers into our church.  The second significant aspect of our Student Ministry is to get them into Community Groups.

We decided to get things started with a series called, “Community, where everybody knows your name!”  While we’ll be diving deep into the Word and understanding Community on several levels over the next 3 weeks: Community with God, Community with Believers, and Community with the Lost, we are also making a strong push for teenagers to join a Community Group (did you connect the dots) which launch the Wednesday after Labor Day weekend.

For anyone who is interested, here is an abbreviated outline of the sermon I preached this weekend:

EPIC Worship Service
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Series: Community
Week 1: Community with God (the Trinity)

INTRO
I opened by asking students what are the different types of relationships we have and gave them opportunity to respond.  I then shared a few illustrations of me and my two sons as examples of an intimate relationship.  We then addressed the question, “Why?”  Why do we need / desire relationships?  This is where I introduced the concept of the Trinity to the students, making the case that we need community because we were made in God’s image, an image that reflects community.  After introducing the idea to them we walked through 4 areas: Creation, Salvation, Prayer, and Mission, and I used Bible verses that demonstrated how the Trinity is involved in each of them.

CREATION
Genesis 1:26-27
Genesis 1:2
John 1:1-5

SALVATION
Ephesians 1:4
Galatians 3:13
Titus 3:5

PRAYER
Romans 8:26
Romans 8:34
Acts 1:2

MISSION
Matthew 28:18-20
Acts 1:8
John 17:20-21

I closed with the Gospel and giving students an opportunity to respond and we also put a call to action to believing students to join a Community Group in a few weeks.

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One of our goals as a Student Ministry team in the next few months will be to make all of our sermon series resources available to anyone who would like to use them.  Not sure when exactly we will make this happen, but it is a goal.  I’m humbled by the resources we have in the Student Ministry at Grace and I know there are other Youth Leaders out there who don’t have the resources but desire to do biblically based, quality Youth Ministry.  That is our heart behind making fonts, graphics, logos, outlines, audio of the sermons, etc. available.  Until that time, here is the outline for, “Community with God.”  Leave me a note in the comments below if you’d like a word for word transcript of this sermon (or tweet me or hit me on facebook).