Last night there were 72 middle school students at a place called the “Pinball Parlour”. The owner basically turned his hobby of collecting pinball machines and arcade games into a small business. It’s filled with at least 120 different arcade games. Although it's an awesome place to take students that’s not the primary reason we went. We had planned to do something we call the “Mix Bowl”. The Mix Bowl is a service project that our students started last year. It was during a teaching series on Matthew 25 that we discovered our students were moved to help feed the hungry in our local neighborhoods. The students realized that the people that Jesus refers to as "the least of these" are extremely important to him and because of Jesus they are extremely important to us. So we partnered with an organization called “Manna on Main Street” to support their mission by helping them make bags of trail mix for students that go to the “boys and girls club”. The concept is pretty simple. We have students split up by grade taking turns making bags of trail mix. When the students aren’t bagging trail mix they get to play games at the Pinball Parlour. We made serving extremely important without taking the fun out of it. Genius youth pastor move, I know. If you are a youth pastor feel free to steal it.
The dedicated students of Exit31 and the Rock student ministries were able to bag 1,017 bags of trail mix in 45 minutes. We had all the materials and trail mix ingredients donated. There was so much we even had leftovers at the end of the night. Today my buddy Rick (the youth pastor for TheRock) and I will grab a couple students to help us take all the trail mix over to Manna to say thanks for being so dedicated to feeding the hungry in our community. I’m so proud of our students for being willing to serve and help feed the hungry.
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