Part of the Glue

Recently I had the chance to sit in on a breakout session with Lilly Lewin at the Shift conference. Lewin co-authored a book with Dan Kimball called Creating Sacred Space A Hands-On Guide to Creating Multisensory Worship Experiences for Youth Ministry. Lewin shared with us one of the problems we face in today’s societies especially amoung teeanagers is the difficulty to be still and quiet before God. We preach about this all the time, however we rarely give students an opportunity to actually do this.  Lewin suggested creating opportunities maybe quarterly where you would setup prayer stations in your youth center. These “prayer stations” are described more in detail in her book with pictures and instructions, however the overall premise is to connect with God through multiple senses.  One example is a prayer station where you would read about the cup in the bible and then proceed to actually washing a cup both the inside and outside with soap and water.  Another station you might eat some goldfish or swedish fish and read about the feeding of the five thousand.  Lewin also suggested displaying art or even student art from photography to video to paintings.

This does get pretty complicated the larget the audience, however after experiencing the prayer stations myself I was really intrigued on what an impact something like this could really have when used on an occasional basis.

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).

Every year thousands of teenagers will embark on a camp with their youth group to some foreign land of “camp.”  Some will experience the beach, some the mountains and some like ours will experience one of the largest mud pits you have ever seen.  The question for many youth leaders and camp directors is how exactly they can bring camp home so parents can experience a certain part of what their students will experience during that week. Below are 7 ways you can bring camp home and let parents feel a part of what is going on.

1. live stream your services using ustream or mogulus.
2. twitter your camp #youthgroupcamp and tell students the hashtag to use when twittering
3. blog daily with pictures and articles for parents to see
4. setup computers with internet access for students to update their facebook and twitter profiles
5. have a parent day or night where parents are invited to attend a certain part of the service
6. consider coming back early and inviting all parents to attend the last session with their students at church
7. produce a highlight video of the week and show at a special post-camp service where parents are invited

This past week I attend the Shift Conference up in Chicago at Willow Creek. The conference for me was a highlight on a number of levels. Getting the chance to bond with our team as well as being inspired and educated about new “shifts” in student ministry not to mention the chance to network with others and time away to reflect all combined to make for an incredible week of learning and growing. I came away with pages of notes and many ideas hopefully to implement over this next year.

As I attended sessions, spoke with others and participated in breakouts I noticed a common thread in several “shifts” in student ministry.

1. the Role of the Family in Discipleship
The subject of the family was talked about on more than one occasion. Student Ministries are slowly realizing that while they are important they can only do so much in regards to the spiritual maturity of teenagers. Mark Holman mentioned that after conducting a thorough study, Mom and Dad are two to three times more important than any church program when it comes to one’s faith as a teenager. The study also showed that the Mother first and Father second where the two most important persons in regards to the spiritual development of their teens…not thier youth group leader or pastor. Ultimately Holman argued for both building strong families and utilizing youth ministries. Bubba Thurman youth pastor at Lake Pointe spoke about the importance of the family and shared his story of once being defensive when first hearing the stats Holman shared. Thurman has since then been leading the way in adopting a practical approach to integrating the family in Discipleship. One of the resources Thurman’s church has developed was a center called home pointe which focuses on building strong healthy Christ-centered families and giving families a plan to do that. Thurman argued for a holistic approach to incorporating the family in the church instead of creating another ministry or program just for the family. He encouraged youth pastors to think of how they could inform parents of what students are already learning by sending home material and involving them in things like camp by doing a live-stream or podcast. Holman also suggested creating opportunities to inspire and equip parents to disciple thier kids from a very early age.

2. Spiritual Formation as a Process
Richy Fisher my friend and boss and Dr. Kara Powell of the Fuller Youth Institute spoke in great detail about a shift to approaching student ministry of growing souls and not so much about growing programs and numbers. Fisher spoke about the importance of looking at God’s scorecard when leading a ministry and seeing the results through His eyes. Fisher also pointed out that spiritual formation is not assimiliation but a move to focus on maturity levels and being Christ-centered. A Lot of what Fisher talked about was introduced from the reveal study done several years ago. Fisher has since then been developing processes for students in his youth group to move in this direction and using a language that can relate with parents and students. You can download Richy’s presentation here.

Powell focused on some research the fuller youth institute had done and looked at four components needed to developing what she called “sticky faith.” The “sticky faith” powell described is very similar to what Fisher presented as being Christ-centered in the reveal study. Below are the 4 components she developed that lead to spiritual maturity.

1. Leaders focused on Jesus
Powel,  a long time fan of relational student ministry urged youth pastors to look at this model and examine itself to make sure they were asking leaders to simply follow them but to follow them because they follow Christ… Powell wished she would have talked to students alot more about God than she did. In a relational ministry students will move on to college or something else after high school and youth leaders will no longer be there for students to follow them.
2. Kingdom Centered Justice
Powell talked about the importance of preparation and debriefing when doing service trips or mission trips. Creating opportunities for students to serve and to be the hands and feet of Christ allow students the chance to really use their faith and they want this. Service Trips were the number one things seniors waned more of when surveyed, not programs.
3. Intergenerational Youth Ministry
Powell spoke about allowing/encouraging students to be involved in the overall church instead of always segregating by themselves. The health benefits of working alongside adults and seniors has a tremendous impact of students’ view of the overall church.
4. Early Preparation
Preparing students for college as early as a year before instead of weeks is something Powell also recommended. She spoke about how many students wished their youth ministries would have helped them find churches and ministries to plug into after they left high school…. liveabove is one website she recommended.

Both Fisher and Powell spoke about processes and thinking with the end in mind and encouraged youth pastors to really look at what is truly important in regards to helping students develop in their faith.

I recently finished reading Andy Stanley’s the Principle of the Path and decided that this principle really had a lot to do with my approach to being creative.  As a video producer I am constantly trying to be creative in the way I write, shoot or edit videos.  Not all the time, but sometimes I feel I lack in creativity and usually this is because I am not on a path.

Creativity is just one of those things you really have to work at.  A lot of people believe they are not creative, however the truth is being made in the image of God we are born with the ability and desire to create.  The difference from someone that is often labeled as a “creative” compared with someone who struggles to be creative is that the “creative” often chooses to work exceptionally hard at being creative and often times has a clear path to do this.

One example in describing this principle are body builders in the way they maintain their strength. You would never walk up to a body builder and ask, “so how did you get to be so muscular?”  You know they had to work at it and put extra effort to not just be heatlhy but to be stronger than the average person.  Their strength wasn’t an accident or lucky dna strand, they chose to take a path to maintain their strength.

To stay healthy you might need to work out X number of times a week, but to maintain creativity the path is not always as clear.  There are no real creative counselors that will sit down with you and give you a prescription for what to do in order to maintain a creative well, however there are some approaches that will foster creativity if practiced often and routinely.

As a Christian I believe that first I must ask God to be creative and must ask him to give me ideas.  Part of depending on God for strength is depending on God for creativity.

As a film-maker I believe that I must constantly be watching films of all kinds both independent, foreign, short and major blockbusters.  I must be reading books on film-making, screenwriting and cinematography.  There must be a large in-take of not only certain films but certain writings that will serve to not only inspire me but direct me in what has been done and what should be done.

As a lifelong learner I believe I must be reading blogs, books and magazines on various subjects and especially those of Christianity.   Having a cultural and spiritual well to draw from is extremely important. I also believe that I must be observing what other creative people are doing and following their example. Stealing other creative people’s ideas and making them my own is one example of this. One of my friends Matt Coleman of Unblind Productions was telling me about his screenwriters group that has really helped him be consistent in writing screenplays.  This group he created was able to foster an environment of creativity because of the objectives and goals they set in place.

As a leader I believe I must help others foster this creativity by writing blogs like this one, speaking about creativity and helping others create a creative path in order to maintain creativity.

What are ways you are able to maintain creativity?  I’d love to hear your thoughts….

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.

1. Information, Information, Information….Use it as a free communication tool that can inform parents, leaders and students of upcoming information.
2. Assign several staff/volunteers to be mobile journalist and capture real-time certain events and programs your ministry does through twitpic and text.
3. Use the  #hashtag feature which will allow people in your ministry to see what is going on at #yourstudentministry when they search for it on twitter
4. Have your youth pastor/leaders twitter, which will humanize them and allow parents and students to see how they live their lives throughout the week.
5. Create a twitter account for your ministry and link it to your website….this will help to generate users.
6. Start conversations or ask questions that you want students in your ministry to be thinking about…perhaps something from a previous series).
7. Have an event like camp where you encourage students to sign up for twitter and twitter their experiences throughout the week using a special #phrase. Once setup you would post the tweets on a screen for everyone to see using a special program or website.

www.twitter.com to sign up

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

In the New Testament Jesus gives us the command to go and make disciples.  1 Thess 2:8 says that our desire was to share not only the gospel but our lives as well.  Discipleship is a foundational relational process and in my opinion is the most time-consuming, inconvenient and messy part of the Christian Life.  It requires intimacy, time and accountability and in the end may not always work out as planned. Discipleship is sharing your life and sharing your life is hard work.

As an artist for a church my job is to create and tell stories both fiction and non-fiction that inspire and move people in their faith and part of that being the work of discipleship. “Artists” in the generic being are often times looked at as someone who has something to say and thus uses their medium to say it. Whether writer, singer, film-maker all want to say something using their own creative medium or canvas.  The question I have been pondering however is can an artist really truly say something profound about anything they themselves have never experienced.  If I were to make a video about evangelism and had never shared my faith I would probably feel that I would not be doing this video justice by trying to say something about a subject in which I had no personal experience. Certainly this is not the case for everything, however the more and more I practice discipleship and the more I practice film-making the more I realize how to tell better stories about discipleship because of my personal experience.

When an artists creates something out of nothing a lot of times they draw from a well. The well figuratively speaking is filled with knowledge and personal experience. Now they can create with knowledge about a subject, however personal experience is part of the well that allows the artist the ability to critique the subject so that in telling the story they are not only telling a story they are saying something about that story.

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….