Epic Summer Retreat

Last week was our Epic Summer Retreat and it was amazing. There were 3 things I really loved about the retreat:

1. The retreat was free. During these tough economic times I'm glad we were able to bless our church families. It also allowed us to have a lot of students participate. We had 122 students attend the retreat and Wednesday night we allowed regular Epic attendees to come and we had 171 students! We have some huge momentum right now and it's only gonna get better!

2. The retreat was at People's Church. Every night service was in our youth room which gave the 40-50% of students who don't attend Epic and great taste of what we do on Wednesday night. I expect to see most of them back this Wednesday! They also were exposed to 100% of People's Church. I have taken students to camps with multiple churches and some of the times kids will make new friends and hang with them the whole time and never build relationships with students from their church. At our retreat every student had community with our leaders, our students, our pastor and our church which gives us a much better chance to retain students after the retreat.

3. We had 3 different speakers. I'm a huge fan of this because of the diversity, variety and each night brings something new. Our speakers were Pastor Herbert, my friend Andy Estrella and myself. I think we all did a great job and the students responded to every message in the altars. It was amazing! The best part was whether it was the 1st night or the 3rd night every student responded to an altar time, God touched lives in a powerful way and the best is yet to come.

Tomorrow I will share some more about our summer retreat.