Let's Get Radical #1

What a weekend! After completing a series of lessons on a particular subject, I love to plan a weekend that is a fun, off-beat type service to provide the much needed variety necessary for a well-rounded children's ministry. And so this weekend, we scheduled a Super Sloppy Double Dare weekend. Perhaps you have had a service like this. After a time of praise and worship, we showed a 30 minute DVD (the animated stories in the Focus on the Family Adventures in Odyssey series are tremendous www.whitsend.org) and then we began the Double Dare by asking the children questions about the story. The next 45 minutes showed why this service is one of the children's favorite services as they attempted to answer the questions or take physical challenges that included gross, messy games using raw egg, shaving cream, etc. (For more information about our Super Sloppy Double Dare, please write me at billy@billyburnsministries.com.)

While I loved seeing the children being excited about Double Dare, the aspect of this weekend's services that thrilled me beyond words was to witness the children being passionate in their time of praise and worship. I opened up this blog by mentioning that we had just completed a series of lessons. The series was a six week teaching titled Let's Get Radical which showed that we serve a radical God who desires a radical group of people who will love Him with radical praise. In our last two lessons, we showed that the psalmist David utilized 58 different Hebrew words to describe his way of demonstrating his love for God including Hebrew words telling of David spinning around, dancing, bowing, leaping, bowing, etc. Sadly, David's passion has been hidden due to the limitations imposed by our Bible translators lumping these beautiful expressions of worship into single words like "praise" and "bless" and "worship". It was so beautiful to see that the teaching hadn't been forgotten. I was thrilled to see the children entering into a new arena of worship as they passionately demonstrated their love to God during our praise and worship.

Let me close out this blog entry by giving the titles of the lessons in our six week series. Space limitations in a single blog entry won't allow me to elaborate in length about the lessons and so I will take the next few weeks to give a brief overview of the Let's Get Radical teachings.

#1 - God is a Radical God

#2 - We are Made in His Image

#3 - God is Radical in His Love to Us

#4 - Radical Love, Radical Expression

#5 - Once You Know It, Show It!

#6 - We Can't Go Back

Until next week .... remember that today is the day of the Holy Ghost!