[sunday review] merge 2day

merge 2day is officially underway! it’s such a thrill when participants actually start arriving – we’ve been here about 24 hours setting up, and always the excitement and anticipation grows as the day goes on, counting down the minutes until everyone arrives! we’ve got a fantastic group of children’s and youth ministry leaders participating in the event, and high school students with their youth pastors participating in the merge experience.

the typical rhythm of the merge experience is: story gathering, dialogue, group experience, response gathering. tonight we had our first story gathering as a large group (collaborative participants and high school students), dialogue time, and a children’s ministry debrief time.

tonight we experienced the story of creation and then reflected on several questions:

• what did you notice about the story for the first time?
• what do you wonder about the story? what questions did it bring up?
• what are we learning about god from the episode?
• what are we learning about humans?

it was a thrill to watch students and children’s leaders experience god’s story as a group, and to hear each other’s wonderings about the story. a few new things i heard about the story tonight:

• why did adam say, “at last” when god created eve? how long had adam been waiting?
• why did god put humans in charge? did he need them to be caretakers?
• why did god create humans from the dirt? it was different than the way he created animals.

new questions, new thoughts, new connections. that’s what this experience is about. tomorrow, we’ll get to ministry practical applications – but tonight, it was just about us experiencing and listening to god.