In last week’s post, I mainly put up pictures and talked a little bit about our trip. In this post, I’m going to share what I learned/noticed while I was at Metro. Some of the things that I learned/noticed at Metro I would like to add to Power House.

The sidewalk truck that I was on was equipped with a box that had an assortment of toys, kickballs, footballs, hoola hoops, and jump ropes. This box was placed by the tarps so the kids could play with them before Yogi Bear started. It was a form of entertainment while the team set up the truck. Various team members would join in and play with the kids. I’m going to put boxes like this on our trucks.

I never considered having several people run the teaching time. At Yogi Bear, there would be at least 3 people who would teach the lesson. They did this to keep the kids engaged. Their lesson was on rejection. One person would tell the life story, another person would bring it home by telling a story of how they were rejected as a child, and another person might come in with an object lesson. Each part of the lesson was like steps. As they got closer to the end of the lesson, you knew that they were building up to a point of decision (altar call). I would like to experiment with this style of teaching at Power House. The only thing I think you have to be careful of is that the lesson doesn’t get “dropped” when the different people come in to teach the lesson. I mean there shouldn’t be any dead time. And the next teacher needs to take the lesson to another level, building it towards the point of decision.

Each Yogi Bear team would do 3 sites a night. Wouldn’t it be cool to have each team do 2 to 3 sites a night? One thing that I noticed was after each site they would debrief. They would discuss what went well and what didn’t. This is something that we need to do more of. How can you do your site better if you never review what you did?

I noticed that Yogi Bear had a much wider variety of music. They would play a latin mix or something classic, and then some rap. I would like to get more variety of music for each site.

I talked about this in the last post, but the biggest thing I noticed was the attitude and energy level. These people were working around 12 -13 hours a day 6 days a week. They kept up their energy level and they had great attitudes. I admired that.

Anyone else who went on the trip, want to share what they learned or noticed? Comment here.

(I just had to put the picture of the Jewish guy up. Char kept taking pictures of every Jewish guy she saw)