The Challenge

Man Up! Challenge Tour Blog

MAN UP! Challenge hits up Sonshine Music Festival (VLOG)

VLOG report from Cornerstone Music Festival!

Ichthus in KY… good start!

Hello everyone!  We apologize for the delay on both the written and video blogging that has been happening.  There are good excuses for this delay which I will get to here in a second.  The first festival was incredible!  The start was a little unfortunate as we rolled in on Tuesday night.  We began setting up camp as usual and wanted to make it more hospitable than usual so that we could have a solid set up for the week.  After 45 minutes of setting up a T storm came uninvited and caused us to tear down camp in 10 minutes in order to save our tent and screened patio.  This disaster meant that Peggy (our van) was an unorganized wreck for the rest of the week.  From there though things just got better.  We set up our booth on Wednesday and from then on we were working 16 hour days (8 am – midnight).  Obviously they were long but just as successful!  Our booth consisted of all of our free things (frisbees, sunglasses, cinch bags, and stickers) as well as the books and the pull up bar of course!  The guys’ record ended up being 48 and the gals holds at 18 currently.  The bar will continue to travel with us around the nation and we will see who the strongest man and woman are (physically of course).  This bar turned out to be a blessing but somewhat of curse at times too.  As you all can probably imagine there were many youngens and even some adults that were only interested in doing pull ups or in the free stuff.  On the other hand, we did have 3-4 times as many people attracted to our booth compared to the others because of it!  We figured it is definitely worth to keep around!

Now moving on to the real successes.  For those of you who don’t know, our main challenge for people we talk to is to get them into small groups and go through the book together so that they can get their sexual sin and issues into the light.  By doing this they are fighting for each other and holding each other accountable in these areas so they can live a life of purity and follow Jesus in a freer manner!  MANY people were ready for this challenge and showed a lot of interest in the ministry, and there were MANY that weren’t ready or interested in what we were saying.  But, we constantly try and remind ourselves that we are not about the numbers.  It’s not about getting as many as we can to go through the book or accept the challenge.  It’s about discipleship and getting the right and spiritually ready to deal with these issues.  A couple of specific success stories are worth noting though.

We had two young men (freshmen in high school) extremely excited and gung ho about the Dangerous Men book.  They were so pumped that they even brought one of their dads back to talk to us about it.  We also had two young women from Bowling Green University looking to take the material back to their homes and start a group up.  Multiple people poured their hearts out to us and revealed secrets and sins that no one had ever heard about.  There was even one senior in high school from Wilmore, KY that we had the awesome opportunity to lead to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ for the first time!  Praise God!

Lastly, we met a family that was so incredibly generous that they opened up their homes to us for the past three days!  We love you Tasha, Darian, Dion, Keegan, and the rest of you Kentuckyans we met!  They fed us, did our laundry, let us play on their volleyball team (Chicken Lips), and allowed us to sleep in their beds!  Unbelievable generosity and trust after only meeting them for a half hour at the festival!  We are now arriving in Mineral City, OH (south of Cleveland) for Alive Festival to do it all over again!  Please pray for physical health over us (some of us are feeling a little under the weather), spiritual protection from Satan for us and those we will be talking to, patience, energy, and finally the right words to say to these people!  We are stoked to move on and can’t wait to see what the Lord has in store for us here in O-H-I-O!

Love to all Man Up! Challenge Tour followers!

-The Man Up! Crew

The MAP

(Sean reporting)  Hello everyone!  Since Ty’s post yesterday we’ve had quite the experience.  We rolled into Richmond, KY (right outside of Lexington) to camp for the night.  All three of us exited the van and nearly passed out from the level of humidity and heat that hit us…  It was about 95 degrees with 90% humidity, sick!  It was hot (even for us Iowa boys).  We proceeded to set up our 8 man tent and screen patio while sweating profusely and swatting bugs from our faces.  After burning a few hours the lightning, thunder, wind, and rain arrived without much warning.  We threw everything in the van (her name is Pegasus “Peggy” Volcano Explosion for future reference) and piled into the tent.  The rain fly held up for a while but not too long after the storm started, the temperature dropped a bit outside of the tent but was hot as ever inside.  This meant A LOT of condensation build up inside the tent and us getting dripped on all night long!  However, we made it through the night and decided that that was enough of the storms and humidity for the day so we chilled out in Peggy and watched a movie.  Currently we’re at a Super 7 motel for the night to clean up and charge up before we head to Ichtus tomorrow for the week!  Thanks for tuning in!



Sunday June 13, 2010

Hey everyone! This is Tyler, we all are currently catching up with some emails and battery power on our computers and phones at a Cafe/Bookstore in Charleston West Virginia! We spent a great majority of last week in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at Messiah College. While there we participated in a conference for Christian Student Development. We talked to a lot of really awesome resident directors, campus pastors and even some campus security officers! (shout out to Ken)  The conference was amazing! God was working in awesome ways and allowed people to open up to the ideas of dealing with sexual sins! We challenged multiple campuses across the nation to free themselves and their students from sexual strongholds in their lives. Many stepped up to the challenge and with God’s will many accepted the challenge and will be implementing LFL Dangerous Men and Unveil on there campuses this fall! So after the conference ended and Lowell and Dave went back to Minnesota. Pete, Sean and myself drove to Gettysburg for a day, Philadelphia for a day and then our most recent trek was to Washington DC. While spending time in each of these places we tried local cuisine, like “Philly Cheesesteak…..” well I suppose we only tried one cuisine but it was delicious. We also explored our nations past, from viewing the White House and Lincoln Memorial and then even all of the battlefields of Gettysburg! So things are great and we are hanging out in West Virginia today, maybe catch up on laundry before we head to Kentucky for Ichthus Festival in Wilmore. Hope to talk to you all soon! Until then, God Bless! I also want to ask you all to keep praying for us because God has been working in all of our hearts and we really want that to continue! Thank you very much for your support!

Tyler

Our FIRST Video Blog (vlog)

Man Up! Challenge Promo Vids:

Tour Prep:

Hey folks! Pete here. The guys and I are stoked to get this Man Up Challenge Tour going! We have been praying hard and working hard to get signed up for all the festivals, raise enough dough to make this thing happen, and get all our gear ready to cruise the country. We are planning to do some epic manly challenges (hence the Man Up Challenge Tour) at the festivals, such as pull up contests, tug o’ war, and “rockput” (like shotput with a big ol’ rock). And of course the main Man Up Challenge is to help you start the process of lust free living. Leave a comment if you have any other ideas! Stay tuned for more blogging in the future!