Ministry Monday: Can I help you?

I love helping out other people. Seriously, I love it. I do it all the time. Some people call it coaching and others call it consulting. Whatever you call it I get a real joy out of seeing other people succeed.

One prime example of this is helping out Melissa Buck start a VBS alternative. She and some of her volunteers came down to Cincinnati for a day and I was able to walk them through how we do Smash Camp. Here is the email that I received from her after her VBS alternative was over.

Matt,

I just wanted to thank you for all your help in getting our MAX Camp off the ground! In case you don't remember, I'm from the Church in Holt, Michigan that came and visited you about starting a camp similar to SMASH. We seriously could not have done it without all the input you gave us. We had a pretty good turnout...about the same as last year with around ninety kids. There were about twenty in the preschool VBS part, so there were about seventy split up in the three tracks. Of those seventy kids, a little over half were from the community...which is the best we've ever had! Also, switching the focus from discipleship to evangelism really paid off...we had more salvations this year than in the past four years combined...and most of them were from community kids...Praise God!!! It was a really amazing week with a lot of happy kids. We held an end of the week doohicky on Friday night and we had over 200 people there. Our Pastor said he'd have bet a thousand bucks we wouldn't have been able to get anyone show up....I could've used the thousand bucks :) We're already looking forward to next year's camp and making it bigger and even better. Thank you so much for putting your idea out there for us to use and for guiding us along the way.

Thanks so much,

Melissa Buck

Cedar Street Church

P.S. My brother is a Children's Minister over in the thumb, and he recently started using Elevate...and he wanted me to tell you how much he likes it.

I can't think of a better email to receive. A matter of fact, I would love to receive one like this from you. I would love to help you out. Up to this point it has been very informal but a very formal way is coming soon. Stay tuned to some very exciting stuff coming. I can't wait.