Part of the Glue

Ever since I went to Africa this past summer God has been awakening me to his true power and my need for Him.  It’s easy sometimes to do ministry or my job with my own strength and not depend on Him or seek His direction.  Recently in our youth building we moved our prayer room from an area which was currently out of sight to a more prominent place in our facility.  A couple of our leaders decided that we needed to gather monthly if not more to pray for this ministry.  Organizing a prayer meeting is harder then you think, because a lot of times you have to deal with people’s schedules and convincing them prayer is important.  We finally came up with a time where we would meet the last Sunday of the month before our small groups and spend 30-40 minutes in prayer.  We sent out a mass email this week and just to remind our leaders we sent out a group text using tatango so they wouldn’t forget.  Prayer is one of the few things that can bring us together and unify us with one purpose.  The more we pray together the more our hearts and vision will be in the same place to reach students.   Prayer is kind of like glue in that it knits our hearts together as we seek God.

Sunday is a big day for most churches….hint it being sabbath and all.  A lot of times we focus so much attention on Sunday we ignore the rest of the week at least in a programming since.  Now with the advent of things such as facebook pages and blogs…content can more easily come into the homes of students more than once a week.  For our series that started last night called TRUE LYF we created a documentary that follows various students in our ministry and challenged them to do various spiritual disciplines.  These documentaries ended up being pretty long (30 minutes) so we decided to show a highlight clip at church and the full versions each day during the rest of the week on the facebook page.  We also decided to develop a devotional guide for students to follow the same challenge the students in the video had to do.  The benefit to adding these extras in this series is that it really allows the message to come home where life really happens.

You can check out the facebook page HERE and watch the promo below.

If you are like me you’ve waited long enough and finally are fed up with not being able to properly communicate to your students via text messaging.  I did some research earlier this week and came across a service I tried a while back but decided not to early on because of the ads that came with the text messages which I hate.  Now the ads are gone and the service is no longer free, however this site is worth checking out.  Tatango.com is a text messaging service that allows you to text groups of people and unlike most other text messaging services, this one allows you multiple admins and the ability to create subgroups which is perfect for any youth ministry.  Check out Tatango.com today…

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.

I recently launched a new ad campaign for our youth group through facebook.  Once you have a facebook fan page setup you can go to your fan page and click promote with an ad.  The great thing about these ads is that you can target them to 13-18 year old students that live within a certain mile radius of your city.  You can also decide how much you want to spend and choose between clicks or impressions.  Creating a facebook ad campaign for your youth group may help get exposure in your community due to the high volume of students that are on facebook.  Visit facebook.com/ads for more info.

A couple of months ago our student media team at my church entered the 24 hour film race.  We had to write, shoot and edit a short film in 24 hours.

Our film has gone on to the national competitions and we need your help.

Vote for our film “the choice” HERE and spread the word.

The truth is most students in your ministry are not actors and the few that can act probably still aren’t incredible.  We recently did a series on evangelism in our youth ministry called ASK.  The concept was to thread a series of videos together that show students being afraid to ask something.  The last video focuses on asking your friends about God, while the first three are other real life situations.  These videos were actually easy to shoot because we didn’t have to record audio on site.  After filming each video we would go into our studio and record the voice over separately.  I recommend this approach as an easy means to creating videos because the acting is all through facial expressions and is not dependent on a students ability to say lines.

Ask – Bathroom

Ask – Girl

Ask – Text

Ask – Faith

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.