Part of the Glue

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a podcast as a guest with Tim Schmoyer.  I spoke about unleashing student artists and gave some practical ideas on how to do just that.

In reality unleashing student artists can be a pretty time consuming thing.  One of the things Tim mentioned on the podcast was that it would be a lot of work to have students helping with the production of his videos.  This is probably one of the biggest hurdles I have had to overcome is knowing that involving students on almost every task is nine times out of ten more work.  Despite knowing this the reward is huge knowing that I am able to help future artists by giving them opportunities to help and fail now.  Artists are so important in telling God’s story in a creative and captivating way and we as the church have an opportunity to raise up artists and propel them into areas such as the business world, hollywood and even the church.

Every third Wednesday of September See You At The Pole takes place at campuses around the nation.  This is a great opportunity for not only students to pray for their schools, but for churches to encourage students to see their schools and friends as their mission field.  Below is a video we shot at a local school for syatp this year.  We weren’t pleased with the videos syatp offered and decided to make our own.

Recently we launched a new website or micro-site called whatisyourproblem.tv. The idea came to us when a couple of our students were creating videos on facebook and were really getting some attention. We got to thinking that maybe there is some stock in their idea and maybe the church or in our case the youth ministry could support their efforts and help them produce the show at a higher level.  We spent the last several months figuring out details and this past month we have been developing different episodes and creating the website.  The website was actually fairly easy to create using a wordpress template from themeforest. Once we created the website, facebook fan page and youtube site we were ready to go. Creating fun sites like these can be great avenues for students to share with their non-christian friends as a vehicle to starting spiritual conversations,  becoming familiar with a youth ministry and going to students instead of expecting them to come to us.  This is still a pretty big experiment, however giving students opportunities to take ownership and lead is always an experiment worth taking.