March Internship Report – Kevin and Alisha Greene

Published 17, 2017

North Annville Bible Church, Annville, Pennsylvania

Kevin

Ministry Highlights

Alisha and I helped continue to help lead our 5 year olds through 4th grade ministry. It’s been a blessing to see the relationships that I personally have been able to form with our children. It will be neat in a couple years when some of these children move into youth group and see if they remember the time we spent with them when they were in K-4th grade!

I developed a 12 week family training program that we will most likely use in the fall during Sunday school. Currently, I am leading up to this series by sharing some parenting notes/tips from a sermon I listened to with the parents of the children in our kids’ ministry once a week. I was able to write my first informational email to the parents and hope to connect more with the parents about parenting their children in the future.

I continue to transition from the 5 years-4th grade ministry and shift my focus to the 0-4th grade ministry. I was able to talk to one preschool volunteer on Sunday and she shared with me how much she enjoys teaching the preschoolers. She thinks that age is perfect for her. These great words are always awesome to hear! I look forward in the next year to make this shift.

The youth group had a good month of meetings and we are looking forward to the girls’ confidence conference on Sunday. Continue to pray for a few girls in the group that are really open about their struggle with their faith. Many of the teens are in the 9th-10th grade. The parents are praying for their children and asking us to come alongside them in prayer. This partnership with the parents is great! We are relying on God’s strength to help us get through and make the most of these challenging times.

Young Adult Community (YAC) continues to move forward. We had our final meeting this month with the current format but there has been a lot of planning and processing what the next phase of this ministry will look like. We are moving in a good direction and there is still an open door at the college, praise the Lord!

There has been significant work completed on the lifegroup/missionary display project. I will be finishing visiting our lifegroups and creating the display. I will also be finishing the display of our missionaries which will be both nice and helpful. Now that we have a better idea of who our missionaries are, we will have a better chance of getting our lifegroups (and other groups) to “adopt” a missionary and start building better relationships.

Key Prayer Requests

Junior Church Teaching Ministry: I will be asking every AWANA (Sunday night) volunteer to consider learning more about our Sunday morning kids ministry and to come check it out.

Young Adult Community (YAC) Ministry: Continue to pray that our new shift will move the ministry forward. Without a defined meeting schedule at the moment it will be easy to forget about this ministry. On the other hand, our co-leaders had a great conversation with their pastor about their aspect of this ministry on the college Tuesday nights, so that is a blessing!

Outreach Events: We are still waiting to hear back from a coordinator of an upcoming event at the local school district. I wiill reach out to him soon.

Pray for me as I work to develop a visual way to see our small group ministry and find a better way to communicate information about the missionaries we support. We continue to make progress on this. I am still waiting for missionary information to be given to me by someone on our missions committee. I am planning to visit other Life Groups this week.

Continue to pray for Alisha and she continues to meet with a girl from our young adult group. They have been going through a book together. They are almost finished the book.

Continue to pray for our youth group. There are at least 2 girls that are really struggling with their faith right now. Both are freshmen in high school. Just the battle between doing what they want to do and what they know is right and pleasing to God. At least one of them will be going with our group to the girls conference in the middle of march. Praying that will be a great and life changing experience for them.

Pray that our youth group gets more focused on the Engage program.

Pray for a great mission trip to Guatemala.

Prominent Lessons

Friday and Sunday provided a “cap” to a long process with a family that was going through a pregnancy that no one was sure how it was going to turn out. Friday, we held a memorial service for the twin boys that did not make it, and Sunday the parents had an opportunity to share where they were at in their story and say thank you in front of the entire church. It was incredible to hear their testimony and how blessed they were to be a part of a church like ours. They said that since this experience they really understand the power of the church in their lives and now want to be a part of that for someone else. Just incredible.

After all of this has happened, I suggested that we should make some sort of testimony video to capture their story to be able to share it with many other people. Their faith in this situation has been such an encouragement to me and so many of at the church. My prayer is that this situation has not only sparked a faith in the parents and this family but in our entire church as a whole I know not every difficult situation has not and will not go this way, but they will be a lifelong reminder that God is always present and will always provide what is needed.

I visited my first official church adult “small group.” We call our small group ministry Life Groups. I am working on letting people know about these groups by creating many tangible ways for people to see what our Life Group ministry is all about. It was awesome to see my prayers, thoughts, and desires come to life in that group setting. I’m excited to visit our other groups and to continue to encourage people to get involved.

Here are some special things that I remember from my group experience:

• The group was held at someone’s house, and one or two of the couples had never been to their house before. These people got a chance to see the house and the host gave a tour. It was neat to see the men and the ladies bond over different aspects of the house as the host family did a great job welcoming everyone.
• Much time was spent in fellowship with one another and talking about life. Of course, there were lots of snacks, but more importantly there were a lot of conversation as we all spent time in kitchen for over an hour.
• The teenage son of the host couple babysat the 4 children of another couple in the group so the parents could go to the group alone. (This one has as a special place in my heart as the youth group leader! How cool is this!? It is awesome to see the group figure out what to do with their children, and for this to be the answer is so awesome!)
• We were able to digest the recent sermon and it was great to interact with the group about the topic. I think it is helpful to hear the main point of the sermon again and in a different environment. It helps me remember what was taught in the sermon and the small group provided a place to talk about how the sermon applied to our own situations and my own life.
• Lastly, we prayed together. There was talk about ways the group to could a lady who was having a baby at our church, and reach out to a couple that was interested in joining a small group. We prayed for each other and for the group. It was very nice!

So many great things took place in the 2.5 hours that we met. It was awesome to see the power of this type of ministry that I have been reading about and seeing the potential in different “small groups” I have been a part of. The more I visit these groups the more I understand the different things that the groups need as far as support and leadership. I think each group will be different (which is an awesome thing!). I am also reminded that what happens in between group meetings is probably just as, if not more, important than what happens at the group meetings. In a small group of around 10 people you can connect throughout the week in a much more intentional way than you can connect with a church of 200 people. It will be vital for these groups to continue to reach out and serve and invite. I’m praying this group will be able to help and pray for each other. It will be awesome to see how God uses this group to accomplish his plan.

Stepping in to help the 2 high schoolers lead their 1st-2nd grade small group was probably the most interesting of the “little” events that happened during this week. The 2 high schoolers are dating at they have been doing their best leading the group the last 4 weeks, but last week they just had a minor meltdown. The group did not go well. So this week I stepped in to show them an example of how the group can/should go. I’m excited to see their resilience and faithfulness, they haven’t given up. These opportunities allow me to step in and also provide advice about relationships. I challenged them to use this opportunity to serve together and make that the first priority.

Our Bible study leaders from college were telling me about their weekend and it was just a reminder of some realities of life. They experienced an uncle breaking up with his girlfriend and driving 8 hours to their house to spend time with family, a nephew and his newly wed wife staying late into the night talking about marriage related issues, a cousin who called and talked about a big change in his life as he has recently gotten saved and baptized, and finally a call this afternoon from a son whose girlfriend just broke up with him. It is significant to mention that not one of these people that called/visited our friends this weekend really has anyone in a church to turn to. To me this is sad. There is no small group for them to process these life changes with, no pastor to talk to, no sermon they are consistently listening to. I just think of all the people that need help and just need someone to work through life with them through these difficult things and they don’t know that the church can and should be the place for that to happen (but for some reason it isn’t, at least for them). No matter how much our friends have encouraged their family to get plugged into a good church and make their relationship with God a priority in their life the connection just doesn’t seem to be there yet. We are praying that these events will spark a renewed connection with the Lord and His church for these people.

God has each person and situation in His grand purpose and plan. I pray that we all can play our part and reach out to those around us that are begging for something in their life to change and point them to Jesus.

Key Goals for the Next Month

Get information into the high school juniors (and parents of these juniors) about meeting to discuss a young adult ministry group that needs to be ready to roll starting in June. We are planning to meet the last 2 weekends in April.

Continue to share the outreach vision and work on spurring on another outreach event. I will be visiting a ministry next Tuesday and planning another event with the school board president.

Recruit people to join the ministry teams. Specially, I will be inviting every AWANA helper to consider learning what happens on a Sunday morning in the kid’s ministry with the hopes that a few of them will consider helping for short periods of time.

Continue to make progress at our youth group Engage program. Engage helps students discover, develop and deploy their spiritual gifts and talents for the Lord and the church. The date of this event is April 8.

Roll out our family training series in the fall most likely but continue to faithfully email and communicate with the kids ministry parents the “warm-up” parenting series.

Have a great mission trip to Guatemala.

Alisha

Ministry Highlights

Participating as a leader in youth group and leading a girls small group.

Helping to lead YAC, our Young Adult Group. We have a wide variety of people who are attending from freshman Lebanon Valley College students to a married couple, to young adults from the community who never went to college.

I’ve been able to build my relationship with a young adult girl in our YAC group and walk with her through life. We have continued to read a book together and meet to talk about it to help her out during her season in life.

Helping to lead our NABC Kids Sunday morning ministry. I lead a small group of 6-7 kids and mentor high school students as they help lead the group as well.

This quarter (March – May) I am teaching the 5yr-K grade Sunday School during the sermon time on Sunday mornings.

I continue to visit a family from our church’s house to do some physical therapy treatment on a high school senior. We have been able to make a good connection over the last year or so.

Thankful for the time I have to talk to our Pastor’s wife about being a pastor’s wife.

Continued to do morning devotions with Kevin before going to work

Had some time to get together with co-worker outside of work this month. That was nice.

Key Prayer Requests

Continue to pray for a few girls in the youth group that are struggling. They are all struggling with similar and yet different things. Pray that they will be able to go to the girls conference in March and grow through these things.

Pray for my sister in law that is going through a lot difficult things in her life.

Pray that I continue to study well for my manual certification class and test and continue to learn a lot that can I apply to my job every day.

Pray that I do well in the clinic director training that continues through April.

Pray for me as I meet with the one young adult girl one on one.

Pray for me as I teach my 5 year olds – Kindergarten Sunday School class. It would be helpful to have another person teaching with me but right now it’s just me and 5-8 year olds.

Prominent Lessons

I have learned that there are many times when people have a lot of circumstances going on and often times they are unsure of how to handle everything at once or even just one situation in general. Oftentimes, I take for granted that I have little family drama and have learned that when people are closely involved with each other without continually giving and receiving grace, problems will arise.

This week I was challenged/asked to reach out to a girl from youth group who is struggling. Today I started with a simple text message and my plan to build our friendship and trust up and let God handle the rest. I have realized that parents are comfortable with asking me for assistance which makes me feel trusted and encouraged that they would come to ask me for help.

A major thing I learned this past month is that you can not please everyone. A situation occurred at work with a patient who received extra time and care was not pleased. My initial reaction to the situation was to be upset, however, after I thought through the situation and sought some advice from my boss, she helped me realize that the issue is not with me, some people will make what you do always a problem. And the biggest thing I learned was that this is okay. You can not please everyone all of the time.

Key Goals for the Next Month

Do well in my clinic director training.

Do well in my manual certification classes and tests that are coming up.

Reach out to and meet with a girl from Youth group who has stopped coming. (Had a good conversation with her Mom on Sunday)

Continue to build my relationship with a certain family at church and their children. The kids keep asking me when we are going to come over and babysit them again. They can’t wait!