Long-awaited update

Well, apparently I'm really bad at updating this thing, so I'm going to make a few posts to sum up what's happened so far this summer and then hopefully for the rest of the summer I'll be able to update more regularly.

Classes

Classes have been amazing so far. The Summit brings in a new professor (usually from Southeastern) every two to three days, which is neat because then we get to hear from these really really smart people in their area of expertise. So far we've discussed . . .

-Organizing your life around the Gospel and your calling
-Doctrine of Creation
-Doctrine of Salvation
-Interpreting the Scriptures
-Early Church History
-The Reformation
-Doctrine of the Church
-Baptist origins and belief
-Gospel-driven finances
-Doctrine of Sin
-Doctrine of Judgment
-Worldview
-Doctrine of Jesus' Death
-Doctrine of the Resurrection
-Our response to the Gospel
-Colossians (and worldview)

It's been pretty intense, because it's a lot of information in a very short period of time, so your head is usually full of theology just swirling around in there. We've been encourage that because of that, we should take really good notes so that we'll be able to go back over them to help us process things later. There's been some really really interesting stuff though, and if you want to discuss any of it with me, I'd love to discuss it all! Discussing it all usually helps the whole processing process. So just let me know!


Internship

My internship is with the Kidzone, the children's ministry at the Summit, and it's been fun so far. Mostly I do intern-y kinds of things at the office, such as printing out all the curricula for Sundays and just helping keep things organized. However, my roomie and I have been given free reign on a project for the summer. Our project is to design from scratch a mentor/service ministry for kids (1st-5th grade) which gives them the opportunity to serve on Sunday morning. Our "bosses" are there to help us if we get stuck, but basically we were just told to run with it, and hopefully it will get implemented this fall! The point of the service ministry is basically to teach our kids several things: that service is an important part of our faith and something that we should all be involved in; that we need to be giving back to the church and the community, not just taking from them; that we should be actively sharing God's love with other people through service; that they don't need to wait until they're older to begin serving God. So Carrie and I are planning that all out, and hopefully we'll get it all worked out by the end of summer. It's kind of intimidating, but really thrilling too. We also want to incorporate into the program some of the cores of the Kidzone - daily personal time with God, prayer, Scripture memory - so we're working on ways to do that as well. I'm excited to see what our kids will do!

Sunday mornings are crazy madness when you work with the Kidzone. Every other week we have Set Up, so then we need to be at church at 6am to get everything set up and ready for the 8.00am service. Then we get to attend one service (for me the 8.00), then during the 9.30 service I work either with the 1's or the 2's, and during the 11 o'clock service I work with the Grace kids, which is the special needs class. Then the weeks that I don't have Set Up I have Tear Down. I'm usually at church around 7 hours, so it's tiring, but it's really cool, too. I love working with all the kids; the babies are so cute and the Grace kids are so sweet! Overall, it's fun times.