Embracing the Culture

Last night, we had a roomful of students (and it's a big room) from our student ministry show up at our Super Bowl extravaganza.

They ate 22.2 yards of pizza...two first downs. It didn't cost them a cent...but a few donated a few bucks to the children our students support in Columbia and Haiti.

They cheered madly at the good commercials. Their favorite: The FedEx commercial that mocked Super Bowl commercials. Their winners were the P.Diddy Pepsi commercial (especially when Xzibit pimped his truck) and the Jack in the Box commercial where Jack told the guy who offered him a donut and he told him his donut "was a scam" and "go eat your hole." Their booed incessantly at the losers: Any bank ad (I just don't think you can make banking funny), the rugby commercial, and Vin Diesel's movie ad.

They were even into the game, too. The crowd was split as to who they wanted to win which made it fun...and kept it in a fun spirit since they really didn't care one way or another.

At halftime they kinda sang along with the Beatles tunes Paul McCartney played. Really, they just mouthed the words while they were playing video games or ping pong or foosball. However, when they played "Hey, Jude" they sang really loudly when one of our volunteers, named Jude, stood up and started waving his arms. Several even lit their cell phones and waved them back and forth...the new "holding up your lighter" at concerts for the smoke-free generation.

They stayed to the end of the game...right down to the last interception.

We took pictures since our church just went through a communications deal so the entire church could become aware of all the ministries and what they're up to, and I think the photo of a bunch of kids who showed up will look a lot better than if we'd taken a picture of the number of people in our 4th service last night (6:30 PM...what're we thinking?).

It was a fun night, and I have the suspicion that more ministry took place last night than if our ministry ran it's regular programming.