Part of the Glue

This past January at the San Antonion Film Festival I got the opportunity to get a sneak peak at Crown Financial’s short films.  I’ll admit I was skeptical at first, however after seeing them I was very excited and eager to use them.

The vision started after Chuck Bentley, CEO of Crown Financial Ministries begin to ask world country leaders what they could do to help.  Bentley soon learned that these countries needed compelling stories.

Recently Crown announced through the God Provides Learning Experience, that they will be made available for purchase sometime in August.  These short films in my opinion are great for any audience not just third world countries.  I was deeply moved after watching the abraham and isaac short film and could see countless opportunities to use these in the church. Below is a sample of one of the shorts.

We just finished a week long local mission trip for our youth ministry called Lead 222 Servant Leadership and one of the things we did this year for it was blog daily on our website.  Doing this helped parents, other students and anyone else who was interested in the progress of the trip see how we were doing.  We posted pictures, videos and wrote about certain experiences.  The hardest part about doing something like this is being disciplined and proactive to update everyday. Because we use drupal as the content management system on our website, setting up the blog was relatively easy.  If you don’t have a blog on your website or don’t have a website you can always get a free blog from wordpress or other blogging sites.  I personally would consider buying a domain name that offers wordpress hosting through the hosting provider.  It really doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to update everyday and doing this really reasures parents that their kids are having a solid time and can get a glimpse of what they are experiencing. After doing this blog we plan to do the same thing with our camp and other events coming up so that we can better tell the story of our ministry.

Part of creating media in a youth ministry means creating materials such as web, print and video pieces that advertise the ministry.  In doing this one of the things we are always in need of is pictures of students.  Often the choice is between buying an image from istockphoto.com or using one of our own.  We try as hard as possible to avoid using istock or sites like that when possible because it just feels unnatural. Using photos of students in our ministry feels more authentic and original and really gives students ownership in the organization. The problem with using photos within your ministry is that you may not have time to do this when you are trying to create something for a pressing deadline.  One solution to this predicament is to have a gallery of photos that are waiting to be used for future projects.  Consider having a photo shoot with some of your key students two or three times a year to allow for a quality photo gallery for you to pull from when creating all kinds of media materials.

Recently we held a student photo shoot in our studio and had 10 students show up for about 2 hours. All the photographs were taken by one of my student volunteers who really loves photography. Below is one of the concepts he came up with taking the name of our ministry and using scrabble pieces to spell it out on some-one’s face.