I spent last week with about 200 students and youth workers from around North America. It was fantastic! Mike Novelli, the assoctiate director at Sonlife oversees our Merge event. Actually, he not only oversees it he is really the creative genius behind it. There is a team that gives tremendously helpful input and Mark Novelli and Kelly Dolan of Imago Media produce the event — but Mike is really the guy who got us all excited about the concept a couple of years ago. Tomorrow I am back at Merge 2 with another 500 youth workers and students. I can’t wait!

You can learn more about Merge here: http://www.sonlife.com/merge/

This past week was great for a lot of reasons. Students engaged in God’s story with passion and inquiry that amazed me, youth workers were able to get a glance at an applied learning model for youth ministry and they responded to it very favorably. I got to hang with a number of my friends — Mark Miller author of Experiential Storytelling, Tic Long from YS, Mike King and Topher Philgreen from YouthFront, Matt Wilks our director of youth worker initiatives at Sonlife, Jen Howver from VOD Communications, Calvin Russell and Mike Harder two of our regional directors at Sonlife and the list goes on…

This week I am looking forward to seeing some of my friends from Youth Ministries Australia. They are coming up to see the event as they are leading the Merge event (they are calling it Immerse) in a couple of cities down under. Should be another great week!