Category: Ministry
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MexiGO! 2014
I have been busy organizing another intergenerational mission trip to Ensenada BC Mexico for College Avenue Baptist Church this summer. We’re calling it MexiGO! 2014 and once again, we’ll be working with YUGO Ministries out of their Ensenada Outreach Center. We’ll build homes for families who live in poverty and we’ll give neighborhood children a…
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Mexico Mission 2013
Last week I led a group of 20 people from CABC (College Avenue Baptist Church) to Ensenada, Mexico for an intergenerational short-term mission trip. Once again, we stayed at YUGO Ministries’ Ensenada Outreach Center (EOC) and worked with their staff to build a home for a family living in poverty and also to conduct a…
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Fifty Years Ago This Month
With so many graduations going on this month, it occurred to me recently that I graduated from high school FIFTY years ago. Yep, a half-century ago, I marched with the Camarillo High School class of ’63. More significantly, it also occurred to me that it was fifty years ago that I started doing youth ministry.…
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CABC@PineValley Was a Hit!
Our church (College Avenue Baptist Church) recently held it’s first-ever intergenerational, all-church retreat at Pine Valley Christian Camp, about 30 minutes out of San Diego. It turned out to be the coldest weekend San Diego county has had in quite a few years. Temperatures dropped into the teens at night (we even got some snow)…
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Parenting Tips for the New Year
Actually, I wrote these tips about twenty years ago but they were recently reprinted in HomeWord’s January 2013 Parent Newsletter. Here they are for a whole new generation of parents: Parenting adolescents can be a scary prospect, as kids get older and begin to create some distance between them and us. Still, it doesn’t have…
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YS Lifetime Achievement Award
After being assured that receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award doesn’t necessarily mean your lifetime is over, I was pleased to accept a LAW from Youth Specialties at their recent San Diego National Youth Workers Convention. From what I hear, this was the first of many that will be given to individuals who have contributed in…
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Taking Your Kids to “Big Church”
Every 5th Sunday at College Avenue Baptist, we cancel all of our childrens programming during the morning worship hour so that families can worship together all in the same place. Our services are intergenerational in the sense that our youth and adults worship together, but normally our children (K through 5th grade) have a “children’s…
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Mexico Family Mission Trip #2
Just returned from our second mission trip to Mexico this summer and it was a very special one. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure about this trip because most of our July team were newbies and we didn’t have a lot of Bob-the-Builder types. But they certainly rose to the occasion after we got…
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Mexico Family Mission Trip #1
I just got back from a week in Mexico with a group of families from my church, the first of two trips that we are doing this summer. Thirty-three moms, dads and their kids spent July 17-20 at YUGO’s Ensenada Outreach Center (EOC), a terrific base for short term missions in Baja. I’ve been there…
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The Eighth Deadly Sin
Pastor Carlton Harris (College Avenue Baptist Church) just completed a powerful series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins. One of my takeaways from the series was that the Seven Deadly Sins are particularly troublesome for Christians, for those who are inside, not outside the flock. In other words, they are the sins of the…