Student Life has done it again. Year after year Student Life has been a leader in understanding teenagers and the world that they live in. Having worked for Student Life for several summers, I believe strongly in this organization and have grown to admire their passion to help teens to discover God’s word in a creative way.
I love this piece they created and can’t wait to share with other youth leaders in our youth ministry.
We all need people to sign up for things these days. It would be a horrible thing to have an event that no one showed up to because we never asked them to commit. We need students to sign up for camps, mission projects and we need adults to sign up to volunteer at these projects. Recently I started using google forms to manage all of our sign-ups.
You can create a google form in a matter of minutes and the great thing about google is that its free. When creating a google form you have the option to embed it into your current website or link directly to the form itself. Another benefit to using google forms is that it allows you the opportunity to be notified via email every time someone submits an entry as well as being able to view all the results in an excel file that you can share easily with others.
I was recently introduced to FBML by a friend of mine. Basically FBML (Facebook Mark Up Language) allows you to drop HTML into your facebook page. This is useful in creating facebook pages that look like a website and less like a typical facebook wall. I created one for a ministry called c2 we are doing with our student ministry. Doing so allows you the ability to get the look of a website with the community that facebook offers. I think in the future I will be developing alot more facebook pages this way with the plan to abandon micro-sites that were once so hot.
Here are the steps I used to create the page:
1. Create a facebook page
2. Get 25 fans
2. Once you have 25 fans go to facebook.com/username and change the url so that your page has an actual url you can advertise
4. Search fbml and click add fbml to my page
5. Develop your html document in dreamweaver or another web development program
6. Upload any images you are using to outside service such as flickr or a web server
7. Replace the path of the images with the outside path you created
8. Go into your code and copy from table to table (the max width is 790)
9. Go to your facebook page and edit the page
10. Edit the fbml and past the code in there
11. Once your code is pasted you can go to your wall settings and make that fbml page be your landing page if you so desire
I posted about this earlier here. In January our student ministry embarked on a reality tv show format for a four week series we called True LYF. You can see all the videos on the facebook fan page we created. Four four different weeks we followed various students in our ministry and challenged them to do various spiritual disciplines such as (bible reading, prayer, scripture memory and fasting). The idea was to expose these disciplines to students in a fun and thoughtful way that was similar to that of the show “The Biggest Loser.”
Below is the promo video we created for the series.
True LYF Promo from LYF on Vimeo.
Here is a fact for you, there are students and adults in your church who will never sign up to volunteer in your ministry. Here is another fact for you, some of these people would love to volunteer if you just ask them.
Sometimes we are afraid to ask people to volunteer their time who have not sought us out, when in fact we should see this as an opportunity for them to really serve in the Kingdom of God. Occasionally I will find a student or adult who is really into film-making but isn’t using their gifts in the church. I then call them up and ask them if they would consider using their talents to benefit the church. Most of the time they are interested and sometimes these volunteers turn out to be the best volunteers. We can’t be afraid of asking people to volunteer their time because of what we are asking for. What we are asking them to be apart of is kingdom stuff. This is the kind of stuff where people can really be used by God in tremendous ways.
Think of some key people in your church that you believe could really help in the needed areas of your ministry. Don’t cross them off your list too quickly if they are already committed to other parts of the church or you feel that they wouldn’t be interested because your area of ministry is not important enough. You’d be surprised at how many people will actually say yes if you ask them to be apart of Kingdom work.
I can remember when I was in middle school desperately wanting to be done with being a teenager and hoping to someday be an adult with real responsibilities. Fortunately I was able to find some outlets as a teenager working various jobs and volunteering in my youth ministry where I was challenged to take ownership. For me this was exciting, finally getting to a point in life where I was taken somewhat seriously and was able to do something where other people depended on me.
I believe students today feel this same way. Many of them are anxiously waiting for opportunities where they can be independent and carry out certain adult-like roles. While this can be a good/positive thing, it can sometimes backfire if handed off too prematurely.
Recently we held a meeting with some of our various student teams where one of our leaders challenged the students to take ownership and iniating start within their teams. It was cool to see the wheels turn as various students would come to me with ideas they wanted to do or come into our office on a monday ready to volunteer. The words “student ownership” spoke their language and ignited a desire to step out and do something. When we speak the language of students, we open doors for creativity and possibilities for them to lead in new and real ways.
Are you letting students in your ministry take ownership?
When the internet (web 2.0) first started to get big, we created websites and people went to them to get information. It was simple. Now that the internet is less about information and more about communication (web 3.0) the struggle to get information out there amidst the communication phenom-on is becoming increasingly difficult. Websites that used to hold valuable information are slowly becoming age-old dinosaurs while social networks such as facebook are now the number one visited website surpassing even google. While this is not a huge problem to loose sleep over, one way you can bring people to your website is to tease them through social media channels such as facebook and twitter.
One thing I try to do on a daily basis is to post something from our youth website onto our facebook fan page by copying the link and writing a short description. The facebook fan page then automatically sends that information to our twitter feed via the facebook/twitter link. Doing this on a regular basis reminds the students and parents in our ministry that yes we do have a website and there is important/valuable information for them on there.
In June of last year I stumbled upon some videos from some students in our ministry on facebook. They had created a little following from a talk show that they created using their webcam. I spoke with them and encouraged them that perhaps they could use this show for greater purposes and offered to help them in this endeavor. In august of 2009 we launched whatisyourproblem.tv, as well as a facebook page, a youtube channel and a video podcast on itunes. At the time we weren’t totally 100% positive of the direction or the purpose but we decided to move forward. Since doing the show and 22 episodes later we have created a following of more than 2300 fans on facebook and have really created a unique dialogue among this group of teenagers. Each episode their is some comedy and towards the end we try to focus on a specific problem sent in from the viewers. During one month we ran an ad campaign on facebook that targeted teenagers in our area. This campaign really helped to bring more fans, but overall the fans came from friends of our show.
Creating a talk show has been beneficial for several reasons. #1 it has created awareness of our student ministry to our community. #2 it has helped teenagers in a very real and authentic way deal with some very real problems they are facing. #3 it has provided an outlet for our youth ministry to say that yes we too can have fun and cut up some of the time. #4 it has provided an outlet for several teenagers to use their gifts and abilities to further the kingdom in a very unique way
This weekend I got the chance to sit and hear from Michael Novelli, founder of www.echothestory.com speak about the practice of “storying.” Novelli has been doing “storying” since 2004 and claims to be an experimenter who is trying to reclaim an ancient tradition.
Last year our youth ministry used this “storying” technique for a series we did that told the story of God from Genesis to Revelation. We creatively told the story in our large group setting and then practiced dialoguing the story in our small groups. The great thing about this method is that it really helps students to learn from the story instead of them learning several points you have prepared to teach them. In august I flew to Mozambique with a mission group from our church to record a documentary of the trip. During the trip we used the “storying” method as the content for the english speaking camp we held. This method in my opinion is one of the best discipleship tools in the since that when students learn the story they learn the truth in a holistic way. If you haven’t checked out “storying” you really should.
One of the things I remember hating about high school was being stuck in a class I knew I had no desire to learn about. Being a creative person I really struggled with math/science courses and wished at some point I could focus more on what I was good at. There is something about being a high school student where variety and options are important. Teens at this age are almost considered an adult and are having to make more and more decisions and choices on their own.
Recently we had a meeting with several adults in our youth ministry who have been leading electives for our high school students on sunday morning. We came to the conclusion that in the past “sunday school” had a bad connotation because it had the appearance of “school,” which meant boring and lectures. For nearly 8 months we have taken a different approach to teaching this age group by providing 6+ elective classes for students to choose from. The elective classes last 5-6 weeks and then students come together for a month of lecture based teachings by one teacher. The electives are interactive, discussion oriented, topic driven and give students the chance to decide what they want to learn about. For our youth ministry, “Sunday Nights” is where our discipleship groups meet so we decided to provide an outlet during the morning that was not as deep and could reach students at an entry level. Some of the topics consisted of Leadership, apologetics, film and faith, life after high school, evangelism, inductive bible study etc…I think there has been a lot of positives to taking this approach and letting students decide what they want to learn based on their particular bent.
