At 8:00PM on August 14th, at Rocketown in beautiful downtown Nashville, a campus will relaunch. A campus geared towards reaching college students that are in a stage of life that is as much about growing than it is about learning.

I am personally pumped up and can’t wait to start. I’ve got big dreams and plans and I am praying that God does as well, but I also have questions.

Cross Point Community Church believes in this age group. While most churches have a college ministry, Cross Point has a college “church”. An entire church campus dedicated to college students. That’s where the whole “how to launch a campus in 10 days comes in.” Sure, we will launch. We have volunteers returning, new ones starting and teams in place to make this successful, but I can’t help but be challenged by this question: How do we create an environment where college students will come and consider this campus their “home” church? This isn’t a secondary meeting. It will be the same programming as Sunday morning.

Most of us grew up getting up on Sunday mornings and going to church, so we have a mindset that church happens on Sunday morning. This is going to be a change for some people. Or maybe we will attract those kids that never got up on Sundays and went to church, or students who were out too late on Saturday night. That’s just fine with me.

Whoever comes, I believe the answer to my question is this: Community. Once a student steps inside the doors at Rocketown, my prayer is that they will experience that “Everyone is welcome, nobody is perfect and anything is possible.”  A campus cannot launch without being intentional about community. That’s our goal. Acts gives us an account of the first church and Act 2:44-47 lays out how we can launch successfully.

⁴⁴ All the believers were together and had everything in common. ⁴⁵ They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. ⁴⁶ Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

I pray we sacrifice to give to those in need together. I pray we meet together regularly. I pray we eat and laugh together. I pray we worship together. I pray we see many saved together.

August 14th at 8:00PM at Rocketown. It begins. Let’s do this.

Week 3 was the big one. Purity. We talked about it all. You know, portable grills, neural pathways and fish. Yeah, really we did. Purity is so much more than just sexual purity. It begins in the mind and we challenged the students to create healthy neural pathways (google it, I promise I explained it), and when it comes to temptations – don’t be fish. Fish are nothing but an appetite. See the bait, want the bait, eat the bait and before they know it they are hooked and being reeled in. Don’t nibble. Don’t take the bait. Make your purity a priority.

It’s going to be tough. It’s not going to be easy. We know that. We know that because a lot of the times all we do, all, all, all we do is sin.

Week 2 consisted of bringing “Godly Back.” As in bringing God into a relationship. As with every message in this series, I am telling my students that these are intended for their future. At this age, they just don’t need to be in a relationship. But let’s face it, they aren’t going to listen to me on that one. So hopefully they will listen to me on this one.

If you want to bring Godly back in a relationship:
- Become who you want to marry.
- Talk about God.
- Your relationship should bring you closer to God
- Always keep in mind. Dating is a process for marriage.
- Ask yourself, “Does my relationship glorify God?”

Here’s the video we created. It’s set to Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back.”

I promised that I would post the video that we shot for week 1 of our Flee series. Our message centered around 4 reasons you should “flee” a relationship.  They were:

1. If mama ain’t happy.
2. Friends don’t let friends date losers.
3. If there’s disrespect you must reject.
4. Don’t flirt to convert.

Week 2 is about “Incorporating God into your relationship” and the song we remixed is “Sexy Back.”  I promise that it makes sense. Enjoy.

As most of you know, I am now a student pastor at LifePoint Church.  I get to walk beside middle school kids as they enter the most awkward, trying, and clueless time of their life.  Believe it or not, it’s a lot of fun.  The first thing most people say when I tell them what I do is, “Ewww…middle schoolers.”  It’s like this age group has a disease that you can catch and most people want to stay as far away as possible. Well, I guess I got the disease because I can’t wait to see my students on Wed night.

I love hearing that they are mad at their boyfriend because their square dancing partner in gym class is a girl that is pretty.  I just wish that was the extent of the issues that they are dealing with.  They run much deeper than you can imagine. There is a LOT of pain and hurting.  I now respond to the question of “Why middle school?” with “Everyone Needs Healing.”

Anyway, that 150 word introduction has now lead me to the point of this post. Tonight we start our moral boundaries series.  The big series of the year!  The one that causes parents to cringe and small group leaders to suddenly get sick. This year we called it “fLee”.  An obvious rip from one of my favorite shows, “Glee.” It’s not a series to slam the show, although that would be pretty easy, it’s a creative decision.

We filmed 4 glee-style music videos a while back. Complete with rewording the songs and recording audio tracks. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun and the students are really excited to see what we came up with.

Week 1 is “Shady” set to the song “Baby.” We are talking about the type of person you date and give them 5 signs that they should flee a relationship. I will post the video and update of the specific message points this weekend.

Here are the lyrics: