Viva la Serve 2021

Several years ago we implemented an event to celebrate the hundreds of volunteers that help us do what we do at Crossroads Church. We decided to call the event Viva la Serve (translated - live the serve!) 

We take a Sunday night, bring all our serve teams together for a time of worship, vision casting and appreciation. We give them all a t-shirt with an annual Viva la Serve logo. (Here's this year's shirt design modeled by Donna and I with our friends Spanky and Kerry Arsement!) One by one, we call out the teams with representatives on stage while the crowd cheers them on. Then we highlight the past year’s stats - newcomers, baptisms, Next Steps participants and finally SALVATIONS! When this number is announced, everyone on stage shoots off confetti cannons and the crowd goes wild! This year part of my final prayer included the request, “God may we always have confetti on this floor until you come!”

Through the evening, we do giveaways with really nice prizes as a way to say “thanks” for the hours and hours our volunteers serve. I will have a brief message of encouragement prepared and then we feature a funny video parody of a song like Uptown Funk (we turned it into Serve Team Pump), Viva Los Vegas (we turned it into Viva la service) and this year’s Queen cover, We are the Champions (which we turned into We Are the Serve Teams). The crowd seems to love it so we will keep churning out this cheese until they tell us to stop! I will feature this year's video here in an upcoming blog post!

Last, but not least, we serve our volunteers all the boiled crawfish they can put down. Our amazing friend Spanky Arsement (pictured above) has a connection that provides us with the biggest, select crawfish you can find and our dear friend Phil Faul and his team from Fezzo’s Seafood boil them up to perfection. Every year when crawfish season comes around I usually wait for this event to enjoy boiled crawfish because it is simply incomparable! There is always a non-allergenic option for those who can’t do crawfish, but this year our crowd put down 2,100 pounds of the south Louisiana favorite. We do a non-allergenic option for the shellfish-sensitive that our friend Chef Troy at Cafe Josephine's whips up for us!