SRC Tailgater

Football has always had an interesting side role in our church. Many SRCers are fans of teams in the NFL, and one of my favorite things about the church is our fantasy football league. We wanted to coordinate an event that coupled our love for God with our love for football and the fall, and the SRC tailgater was formed. Here's what we did:

• We picked the first week of October, because it put us in the fall without being too cold.
  
• We launched a new series called Teaming Up on parenting.
• We told everyone to bring lawn chairs and food for themselves and some to share if they wanted. A grill was provided.
• We parked our cars, setup in the parking lot and hung out.
• We stripped down all the responsibilities that people usually carry on Sunday mornings: No sound system, no band, no hospitality table, no kids church. Everyone could just come and relax.
  
• We played a battle of the sexes crowd game, sang a couple songs, and I shared a short message on parent's choices of Attitude, Affirmation, Approach and Associates. Mainly though it was people catching up and getting to know each other.
  

It was a great day. I measured that by the number of people that said they hoped we do it again soon. I got text messages from people telling me what they loved about it. And probably one person summed up the vibe pretty well. She said, "You know sometimes I just get caught up in stuff, and it's nice to have days like this where we just eat together and remember why we loved these people in the first place."

I also gauged its success by the way people just hung around till 12:30. Some people came and said their goodbyes to me three different times because they would get caught up in another conversation. The SRC Tailgater was awesome, now if we could figure out how to do it every week of football season...

--Ben