food

Parent/Student Progressive Dinner Updated!

I posted yesterday about our Parent/Student Progressive Dinner and added a slide show of some of the pics from our photo booth. After posting it I was looking back through the pictures and kept thinking we missed some people. I did! Somehow several pictures ended up in a different folder on my memory card – don’t you love technology?

Since we have such beautiful people in our church family, I felt they needed to be in the slide show.

So, check out the updated video below and gaze and the awesomeness of our families!

Parent/Student Progressive Dinner

When our IMPACT Leadership Team met in the summer to look at our school year calendar and plan various events, activities and service projects, we also talked about how we could do specific events for the family. We wanted to have something on our calendar that brought the family together. One event happened this past weekend – our Parent/Student Progressive Dinner.

We have done progressive food events in the past and thought it would be a fun event for families. Who doesn’t like to eat? We decided to host it in the church building and incorporate some interactive elements. We made it a football theme, gathered food you might eat while tailgating and included some football trivia activities. We also had a photo booth. It’s always fun to capture pictures of each event and the photo booth was a way to do that and let the personalities of our families come out.

A brief video containing some of the photo booth pictures is below. We look forward to doing more events that bring students and parents together!

IMPACT Tailgate Party Video

Last Sunday we had a Tailgate Party for our students. People tailgate before football games, why not before church! We had a good time with some tasty breakfast food, 9 Square (our students love that game), corn hole and even some gift card giveaways.

Dale put some of our pics into a video. Check it out:

Progressive Dinner #impacteatandgo

Group SelfieThis weekend we took our IMPACT students on a Progressive Dinner. The idea of a progressive dinner is definitely not new, but it creates a good opportunity for students and adults to spend time together around a meal.

We had three stops for our evening (salad, main course, dessert) and our hosts were awesome. The weather was nice enough that after finishing a course, we could go outside.

To add another element to the evening, we had various photo challenges at each home. We encouraged students with smart phones and Instagram accounts to take different pictures and post them on IG with the hashtag #impacteatandgo. It made it easy to search all the pictures that our students took.

While getting ready for the evening, I read about a website – ink361.com – which allows you to connect to your Instagram account. Then, you can search for specific users or hashtags. I plugged in our hashtag on that site and it pulled up all the photos we took.

It was a fun evening with a good balance of structure and free time. We had good food, took some fun pics and enjoyed hanging out together.

Here are just a couple examples of the pics our group posted:

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Flexitarianism

During the summer our students have been studying the book “Not A Fan” written by Kyle Idleman. It’s a been a good study and is an excellent read for either students or adults.

In our discussion last night, we were talking about how at times we can be selective when it comes to following Jesus. The word the author used is “compartmentalize.” It’s where I give part of my life to Jesus, but I hold something back.

That is when we were introduced the concept of flexitarians. I had heard of vegetarians and even people who were vegan, but not flexitarians. Several years ago MSNBC had an article on the new trend in eating. It’s an interesting look at how people approach lots of things, including food and Jesus.

Here’s what one flexitarian said, according to MSNBC:

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a bad vegetarian, that I’m not strict enough or good enough,” the 28-year-old bookkeeper from Concord said recently. “I really like vegetarian food but I’m just not 100 percent committed.”

The article continues:

“These so-called “flexitarians” — a term voted most useful word of 2003 by the American Dialect Society — are motivated less by animal rights than by a growing body of medical data that suggests health benefits from eating more vegetarian foods. ‘There’s so many reasons that people are vegetarians … I find that nobody ever gives me a hard time when I say I usually eat vegetarian. But I really like sausage.’”

The challenging statement is in the first quote.  You can fill in the blank with anything – food, exercise, even Jesus – “I really like                                  ,  but I’m just not 100 percent committed.”

Where are we living as a flexitarian?

Tailgating…@ Church!

As we were planning our fall calendar for our students, one of our sponsors had the great idea of doing a tailgate party on Sunday morning.  Rather than meet inside during the Sunday School hour, we met in the parking lot.  We had a grill going with sausage and peppers & onions (smelled great!).  We also had corn hole, more food, a little throwing of the football and a tailgate…which is where our group gathered for the picture.

Our volunteers did a great job getting stuff together.  We had plenty of food, a good turnout of students, good weather (not that we could control that if we wanted) and a great morning.  We even had some adults come out who tried to join the youth group!  It was a great time tailgating.  Definitely something we will do again!

Looking forward to Lettuce Wraps

Tonight my wife and I are heading to pf changs for dinner.  We have a couple of gift cards to use, which always makes dinner so much better.  If you haven’t been to pf changs, you need to try their lettuce wraps.  They are so very tasty.  Not really sure how they are made, but they are delicious!

Looking forward to dinner out and the wraps.  Hooray for gift cards!