Part of the Glue

In our youth department we have been experimenting since the beginning of summer letting our high school students pick what they want to study on Sunday mornings.  Recently I got an opportunity to teach a class on film and faith in which we watch clips of a movie and then draw out spiritual meanings in the film. The first week we talked about 1. being able to use films as conversational tool with non-believers and 2. being able see spiritual fingerprints in culturally relevant films that can allow us to experience God in new ways when we start looking for themes of redemption and metaphors in these films.  This Sunday will be the third week of the class as we look at good and evil in the movie “The Dark Knight”.  I have found that doing this series has been something the students have enjoyed and has really helped me to look a little closer at some of my favorite films.  Here is the syllabus for the class.

5 week Outline
Pirates of the Carribean 2 (the power of metaphor)
Dead Poets Society (coming of age)
the Dark Knight (good vs evil)
End of the Spear (Christian films and their message)
Hotel Rwanda (true stories)

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Reality TV is everywhere these days.  The other day I was heading to lunch with some guys from work and everyone was talking about the biggest loser and who they thought should have stayed on the show.

This idea of ordinary people becoming tv stars even if only for a week is a fascinating idea that most of us seem to gravitate towards for some reason.  We like to see regular ordinary people on the screen and we like to see real life situations we encounter everyday.

Recently in our youth ministry we decided to create a reality type show for an upcoming series in our youth ministry.  We decided to follow four students and show them going through various spiritual disciplines (quiet times, scripture memory, prayer and fasting).

This week I am filming a student as he attempts to do a quiet time every morning before going to school. This was a new concept to this student and so far has been an interesting exercise to get him thinking about God early in the day.  After filming for 2 days I am really excited to see how this project will turn out.  Perhaps a project like this will help other students to get excited about spiritual disciplines and see them in a very new and practical way.

I recently created a video where we took the script from a skit guys script.  The script was originally designed to be a drama, however with the time crunch we deal with in our services we decided to video the skit and condense it down to two minutes. Most of the time the videos we create are pretty original, however this time we decided it was okay to steal the general idea and make it our own.  Below is the video

Run in such a way from LYF on Vimeo.