Remember, ministry (and life) will kill you. It’s supposed to. It’s designed to reveal God’s strength through your weakness. His success in the midst of your failure. His greatness among your feebleness. And mine. The story goes that Mother Teresa was approached by a young man who wanted to know God’s will for his life. [...]
I recently met up with a long-time ministry friend who just got out of rehab. Let’s call him Wayne. I first met Wayne while I was serving at my first church. He was one of ‘those guys’: the ones with an amazing journey of finding Jesus. His life-story included being raised by a cocaine-using [...]
One of our students, and my bff, JaNette. Love tha’ kid. Amazing young lady who makes me smile.
We’ve survived our annual winter retreat this last week. It’s one of the few times/events that we completely integrate our middle schoolers, high schoolers, college students, and adult volunteers. (we’ll be doing it more often in the coming year, though…) So our theme centered on community. Last night we debriefed the retreat…a post mortem of [...]
It’s late in the day and I am at yet another conference hoping I didn’t waste my time and money to hang out with other youth pastors who desperately want God to show up among their students. After spending the afternoon/evening listening to their hearts, I am reminded how unreasonable they are. They expect the [...]
The first-ever tomcottar(dot)org online contest was a great success! Great creativity! After much consideration in a difficult situation I realized a few things. 1. I should have been more congnizant of Buffy (Spike Is My Personal Example) and Fight Club (Soap Inspires Mindless Pummeling of Enemies). Dang. 2. Personal emails sent to me asking "Is [...]
It was one of ‘those calls’. During lunch last week, I could sense the urgency in the voice on the other end of the phone. Some dear friends of ours were in a car accident. They had loaded up the SUV for vacation, decided to head to one of our favorite deli spots on their [...]
OK….there’s a little secret to surving student ministry that I’ll let you in on. How do we survive the summer full of Beach Break, Camp 7.8, Mission Trips, Middle School Mondays, Road Trip Tuesdays, Overhaulin’ Wednesdays, Wednesday morning staff Bible studies, Thursday night band practices…and still have some sanity left over for the wife [...]
Watch the video here of our kickoff of our summer project. And tune in each week as we transform this hooptie and ask God to transform us in the process…
The video from Project SERVE last Saturday can now be found here on YouTube.