Part of the Glue

I love wordpress and especially the ability to design and develop a site without having to really know a ton of coding.  Recently I ran across a company called pagelines, which is similar to headway themes in that both are a cms for wordpress. After using both themes, I have quickly fallen love with pagelines because of its stability and look and feel.  You can check out the site that I am currently developing here.  Bottom line, if you need to develop a good looking website without spending a ton of money, then purchase a wordpress theme.  Oh….and if you want to be able to customize it a ton…..its probably easier to purchase a cms wordpress theme like pagelines or headway….just sayin.

Recently we handed a bunch of gift cards from sonic and starbucks to our small group leaders in our student ministry.  The purpose of doing this was to encourage and help leaders financially meet with students outside of church.  We wanted to give out pre-paid visa cards to the leaders, however we discovered a $5 fee that prevented us from being able to do this.  How do you equip your volunteer leaders financially?

Last weekend I had the opportunity to take a group of students to the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival. While at the festival we watched short films, documentaries and features….all with a faith message.  The students I took are part of our drama/media team and have been helping me to create videos and dramas for several years now.  One of the things I enjoyed most about the festival was our discussions each night after the films in our hotel room.  These discussions seemed to spark a dialogue of hope and excitement to keep creating and to begin new ventures that have not been tried.  Many of the students in our group are planning to enter the festival in January of 2012  under the young film-makers category, which I believe they will do excellent in.

Back in the spring of this year, Simply Youth Ministry partnered with Worship House Media to bring together a store that would focus entirely on youth ministry.  You can check out their website here.   While on the store, you might also check out one of my favorite producers Radiant First Productions (hint shameless plug).

In the past week, there have been numerous reportings of students being cyber-bullied on the internet, some of which have taken their lives. Hearing this news saddened me and begin to put questions in my mind if it could happen where I live.

In the old skewl days if you had a problem with someone, a note might get passed about you or gossip initiated among friends.  Today, however if someone gets upset with someone they can post something hateful on their facebook profile or text all their friends the latest gossip.

Just this week students I knew who are in our youth ministry who attend our church thought it would be funny to hi-jack someone’s facebook profile and put hateful things on there.

I believe it is our role as youth leaders to teach and lead students to live lives above reproach not just at school but on the internet.

What are your thoughts???

We are in the process of using a new tool called Send Out Cards for our youth ministry.  This great product allows you to upload a database of contacts, design a card and click send all in a couple of clicks.  What’s great about this service is you don’t have to buy the cards, stamps and and worry about delivery…..they handle all that for you. SendOutCards prints it, stuffs it and mails it, all for less than a greeting card at the store.

Uses for ministry purposes:
*sending a card to a student you missed them at your last event
*sending a card to students on their birthdays
*sending a thank-you to leaders in your ministry after an all-night lockin

This summer we had several events that were water or underwater related.  We went to the beach, schlitterbahn, had pool parties and most recently created some water/mud activities at our youth camp.  For these events I could not afford to spend $3,000 on an underwater case for our camera so we decided to buy the kodak playsport.  This little camera shoots in 1080i and 60p in case you want that slow motion into the water shot.  In my opinion this camera is better than the flip and dual purpose because you don’t have to use it in the water but when you do its perfect.

Recently I have been doing some web-desiging and was trying to figure out a way to showcase the hundreds of videos we currently have that are on youtube, vimeo and blip for our student ministry.  Currently we keep our quality vids on vimeo, everything else on youtube and sermons on blip.

After doing some research I discovered that the cheapest solution was going to cost anywhere from $200 to $250 a month to host a video sharing site where I could aggregate all of our videos.  All that to say that solution was too expensive so I continued to look for a free solution and found miro community.  Miro Community in my opinions is one of the best ways to aggregate all of your videos into one location without spending an arm and a legg. You can upgrade your miro account for $100 a month and have your own domain if you choose (still cheaper than other solutions).  What I like about Miro is that it pulls the feeds of my youtube, vimeo and blip accounts and allows me to customize the page so that it feels somewhat like our existing website.   You can check out our miro community here.

I have been working on creating a new student ministry website for several months now and finally launched it.  www.lyf.net is the site.  This was the most fun designing a site I have ever had.  The site is easy to navigate, has great content and very easy to update.  What was the trick you might ask….wordpress.

Here are a couple of things I did in designing the site.

1. Bought Headway themes as the primary theme for wordpress.  Best investment our ministry has ever made when it comes to web design. Headway themes allowed us the ability to design the site very easily without having to have a lot of coding knowledge.

2. Downloaded the slickr gallery plugin that pulls flickr images for your photo gallery.  This was a great solution to push our photos onto our website with minimal effort.

3. Moved all of our videos on to external sharing sites such as youtube, vimeo and blip.tv and then pulled them into a video sharing site called Miro Community. Miro allows you to customize the site so it looks similar to your existing website without having to format everything special for flash etc…

If there is anything I have learned that has helped me to execute well…. it is the value of planning ahead.  Occasionally I can wing it and come up with a great series or video in less than  a week, but more times than not the best ideas take time to marinate and time to discuss in boring meetings.  Its easy to focus on what is due this week and much more difficult to focus on a series or project that is 3 months away.  One of the things I love about action method is that I can break up various tasks I have.  Tasks that are due immediately, on-going projects and the favorite “backburner items”.  Having a place to look at on-going projects on a periodic basis I have found is one of the keys to actually getting them done.  If the idea is in your head and never makes it to paper or an online application, the likelihood of it being remembered is probably not that good.

Recently I asked one of my bosses if we could begin to think about our fall series in September so that I could create the pieces during the summer.  Asking him this question forced both of us to figure out a meeting that would help us to land such a large decision.  I love the thought of being able to be months ahead in the creative process because that helps to give me an edge that I just can’t have on a week by week basis.