This weekend we had our Easter services at NewSpring and it was AWESOME!! 
Our services were on Saturday evening (4:00 & 6:00) and Sunday (9:15, 11:15 & 5:00) and they all had great crowds at them! It was an amazing weekend, here are some highlights…
- Over 12,000 in attendance through 5 services (1 campus, can you imagine next year!?)!
- Around 120 people received Christ (watching people stand and seeing their eternities change…FOREVER, never gets old)!
- Around 2200 children in attendance through 5 services (that’s a lot of chitins’)!
- Perry announced that in addition to our Greenville campus, we will also be launching a campus in Florence, SC this fall!
It was an amazing weekend and those are just the highlights! Perry talks more about this weekend and the amazing vision God has given him for our NewSpring Campuses…here and Tony talks more about the new Florence Campus & its launch…here! Check them out for more details!
For me, one of the great things about this weekend was the privilege to get to talk to our kids about salvation! I was pumped and, at the same time, felt like I was going to throw up each time before I stepped on stage for the “Freeze Frame!”
It’s always fun (by fun I mean…fun & challenging) with Elementary-age kids on Christmas and Easter because a lot of them, already know the Bible Story you are going to talk about. Chances are, even if they don’t attend church regularly they’ve heard the story of Jesus’ birth and the story of Jesus’ death & resurrection. But that’s the cool part!
This weekend we asked the question, “How do I KNOW God loves me?” and before I could even get the answer out, most of them said…JESUS! Which is awesome!! However, then we took their little hearts & minds for a fun little ride. Here’s a little run down of how it went…
- But what if you got to school tomorrow and someone said, “God doesn’t love you, He doesn’t love me and you can’t prove otherwise!”
- What would we say? (”Yes He does, doesn’t PROVE anything)…How do we prove it? Where would we look? (the Bible)
- Then we went through the story briefly, but with details.
- Then asked, if your friend had just heard that story for the first time are they going to say…”Cool I get it!” -OR- “ba-huh?”
- The answer was…”ba-huh?”
- From there we talked about how Jesus was God’s son & had no sin.
- We do have sin! And talked about 4 things we know about sin…
- Sin is when we disobey God.
- The Bible says we were all born into sin (we all have sin).
- Sin HAS to be punished.
- The punishment for sin is being separated from God forever.
- That’s when the beautiful part of the story comes in. God loves us so much He couldn’t let that happen.
- He did the ONE thing that would help us…He sent His ONLY son, Jesus to earth.
- Jesus lived a perfect life and was punished for us. (This next part was one of my favorites…)
- But we forget, God hates sin (loves us)!
- When Jesus was hanging on the cross God was taking all his anger & wrath for sin…and punishing Jesus for it!
- Did Jesus deserve it? No, He chose to do it for us!
- Imagine how much that hurt God to punish His own Son, for us!
- We KNOW God loves us because of Jesus!
- Then we talked about Jesus being like a gift.
- He is our gift of forgiveness, but like with any gift…we have to take it.
- We went through what it means to ‘accept His gift’ and then we ended with a challenge…
- We’ve heard the story of Jesus, talked about it, thought about it, but have we EVER had a time where we said, HERE AND NOW…I need Jesus?
- Prayed and got back to the skit!
One of the coolest parts is…all of that only took about 5 minutes (the script went into more detail & took longer)! The best part was, of all the years I’ve been telling the ‘Easter story’ on Easter…this year I felt like they got it more than ever! I could see their little hearts and minds working and getting the story of Jesus on a more personal (and even deeper level) than they had experienced before! It was AWESOME!
This weekend was INCREDIBLE and I feel blessed to have just been a part of it! But enough about me…what about you guys!?!? How was your weekend? What were Easter services like your way? Come on…spill the beans! We want to hear all about it!
March 25th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
I”m with you. This Easter was awesome! My prayers going into the weekend were that God would bring MANY people to church and that He would provide in every way so that people could focus on the message of Easter, not on the details. Easter fell on spring break in our town and many of our volunteers were gone, so it was exciting to see God provide enough help at just the right time. I know He does that, but this year the needs were particularly great and it was so fun to watch Him consistently provide for all our needs. It was so exciting to have the kids pour in the door — a record number of them — and have the entire morning go so smoothly. On days like that, you feel God’s Spirit in the room drawing all eyes on Him as kids worship Him and listen intently to the message of the cross. You know God is working when your numbers are so high and yet no on is frantic, there are no “needs” to be met because God has gone before you meeting all the needs right before you even know they are needs. I love to watch Him bring attention to Himself like that!