2008 Wiener Nationals

This morning our church, Highway Community - hosted our 5th annual Wiener Nationals - on this, National Mustard Day (seriously - google it!).











Wiener Nationals is just one of the creative outreach events our church sponsors in an attempt to connect to our community. WN starts with a scumptious barbeque - featuring specialty wieners and sausages! Here's one of our co-chefs, Peter, whom, as our only Chinese chef - we nominated to light this year's Olympic Charcoal.














Following these opening ceremonies.. we transition into the cooking of the meats. This year over 400 people attended the barbeque. That requires a lot of meat! However, our crack staff does a professional job (if we do say, ourselves).

Then, we get down to the races. The organizer and inspiration for the races is our senior pastor - Dean Smith. That's Dean manning the registration table this morning.

The next picture is his daugther Courtney and Abigail - a past National Champion.

As you can see from the pictures - the races are comprised of a series of heats with six athletes competing in each heat. The competitors don brightly colored jerseys as they prepare to vault from the shoot and race to their owners at the end of the race. As you've probably noticed at this point.. the WNs feature, exclusively, daucshunds! Yes, Wiener Dogs people!

This event has grown within the community to the point that this year over 50 competitors participated in the races. What's very good for our community is that many, many of the competitors come to the event through word of mouth and have had no previous exposure to Highway. So, we get a chance to put a fun, lighthearted and warm taste of Christ into their lives as they interact with our members and compete.

For a 'church in a box' - (note that we meet at Palo Alto High School and every week we set up and tear down our entire church!) - it's exciting to find interesting and compelling ways to draw people to us.. and hopefully to Christ!