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.

Recently I got the opportunity to create some videos for Lead222 servant leadership experiences this summer. This year’s theme was “living in 3d.” As I begin to pray and think about how I could possibly begin to conceptualize “living in 3d,” I begin to consider that maybe I was trying to hard to teach something. Sometimes when we create videos we can teach some valuable lessons and yet other times we can create something that asks a question or leaves the audience to wonder. Jesus frequently did this using parables and sometimes even left some questions uanswered. Jesus knew that if he explained everything as easily as possible that when people recieved the message it would not be there’s to discover and they would feel no ownership in discovering the meaning behind his parables. We can do the same thing Christ did and use metaphors/parables that may not scream “Christian” but may cause students to think and feel ownership of what they are being asked to understand. Below are three of the videos we created for each of the night’s sessions.

Every summer we take hundreds of teenagers to camp and every summer we do everything imaginable to get them there.  Last year we created three camp promo videos that were based off a super bowl ad.  This year  I decided to take a comical approach that would threaten physical harm if they somehow didn’t. We wanted to create a video that students would actually want to share with their friends and perhaps use as an effective way of inviting them. Check out the video below.

Every year our student ministry does an event called LYF Awards.  LYF Awards honors all the students and adults that are currently serving in our ministry and have been serving over the last year.  Each year we develop media pieces for this program. Below is a video we created to honor the seniors who had served long and hard over the last six years.

Our youth ministry has been dealing with some difficult circumstances over the last several years in regards to awareness.  We currently have a student ministry building that is literally located across the highway from the rest of our church.  We provide shuttles on Sunday morning for students to ride over there, however we still face the issue of awareness because we are not literally connected to the other church buildings.  Over the last several months and really the last year we have been building a campaign to close the back door to our ministry.  We built a website www.lyf.net in the fall of 2008 to bring about awareness online.  Just this past weekend our ministry hosted a ministry fair inside the commons of our church. We setup different booths with giveaways, information and giant displays that hopefully yelled “yes we do have a youth ministry…come and check us out.” We started telling better stories during our worship services by creating short 2-minute videos that tell the stories of serving and leading in our ministry. Below is one of the videos we recently showed.

When it comes to the spiritual development of teenagers often times we think about certain doctrines and spiritual disciplines. We ask ourself what do they need to know? Like schools, churches often have a curriculum set in place for students to learn that is often broken down into oral teaching subjects. The problem with some of this is that a large part of this curriculum if not most of it is often designed for oral learners.  The truth is students learn and grow spiritually when they go on mission/service trips.  Students learn and grow spiritually when they attend a Christian concert or in our case a Christian movie. When you think about watching movies you rarely think about learning, however watching movies enables the viewer to gain a certain type of intelligence called “emotional intelligence” where the viewer is actually learning emotionally.  I’m not suggesting that youth leaders replace sermons with movies, however creating occasional movie watching experiences that emphasize positive Christian values can really help students process and learn spiritually something they may have never learned sitting in a lecture type enviornment. One of the best ways you can increase the EQ (emotional intelligence) in your students is to expose them to certain types of “Christian” movies on a periodic basis that they might not attend without your prompting or promoting. Students already see hundreds of movies a year, most of which are not worth their time, and so if as a youth group you encourage your students to see a certain movie every quarter you are not just suggesting a movie you are helping those students grow spiritually that learn better visually and through their EQ.
I had the priveledge to see screenings of both “the secrets of Jonathan Sperry“and “To save a life” both opening sometime this fall. Both films in my opinion are great options as you plan your curriculum and think about what movies will help students to grow spiritually.   I personally would recommend the secrets of Jonathan Sperry to a younger crowd (middle school age) and To save a life to an older crowd (high school age).

I rarely post youtube videos, however I stumbled upon this video that really resonated with me in my approach to telling stories in the church.

Last year in a post I wrote about creating transitional statements when incorporating video into worship services.  I felt a need to write about this again because this is something our church has failed to do and I know others must be wrestling with this as well.  The idea behind creating a transitional statement is carefully crafting a well thought out sentence before or after a video during a service to segue into a message or after a special video. This statement depending on how it is crafted could potentially help the medium to loose or gain power in the context of the rest of the service.  Whether a youth pastor is speaking to teenagers or a pastor speaking to his congregation, a majority of the time the people sitting in the pews or chairs trust these pastors and in so doing trust what they say.  They not only trust what they say as part of their message they trust what they endorse.  If a pastor endorses what a video says, this video for some odd reason will have more potential for impact than if it was played with no explanation or endorsement.  Now this endorsement or explanation doesn’t have to be long in fact the shorter the better a lot of times.

Below are some thoughts to incorporate this idea.

Do:
treat the video as a message or a story not a video
ask a question after the video that can transition to what you are going to say
agree with a certain part of the video
write the transitional statement down and practice it

Don’t:
Don’t call attention to the video as amazing
Don’t call attention to whoever made it and brag on that person
Don’t ignore the video as if it has nothing to do with the message

Transitional Statement Examples:
Sound a little familiar?
Can’t we all relate with that?
Have you ever felt that way before?
What an incredible story of life change…isn’t God doing amazing things in this church

Recently with our move from announcements to stories we were faced with a predicament…. that being time. When you tell some-one’s story a lot of times we have found a sweet spot of time that is typically rather lengthy. In the past we have felt that we could tell stories of life-change in 5-6 minutes, however showing a 5 minute video during a worship service can feel like a lifetime if you know what I mean. This week we attempted to tell a story in under 2 minutes. One of the things I did when shooting this video was to really help our talent re-tell parts of his story in smaller more concise parts. He would explain something that might take a minute long and then we would ask him to say the same thing only with fewer words. Another thing we did was try to break up his story into 3 different segments. Doing this allowed for different angles and overall made the story feel longer even though it was still pretty short. Below is the video. Let me know your thoughts….

For as long as I have been on staff at Sugar Creek there has been a love/hate relationship with part of my job.  That part being…. creating video announcements.  Sometimes we have made it fun and been real creative and other times it has been reduced to a series of slides with a voice over and a soundtrack.  We have always wondered how effective announcements really are and to be honest I always dread when our pastor says take a look at these video announcements.  Well recently there have been people that have left our church to attend a church that is “doing something.”   We realized this was a problem because we are doing a ton and doing a bad job at informing the church of what we are actually doing.    All that being said we decided to replace the two minutes worth of video announcements with stories.  As of right now the plan is to tell life-change stories every other week and in conjunction with that every other week we will either promote or recap an event through stories as well.  I’m really excited about this new direction and look forward to posting some of the stories on this blog.