David after the Dentist
Thanks to Justin for this clip…
David After Dentist from marianozarate on Vimeo.
Archive for February, 2009
Scott Van Pelt suspended from ESPN
SVP is one of the few favorites I have at ESPN anymore. And they recently suspended him from his afternoon radio show. If you have time, listen to the clip below. That was enough to warrant suspension. Why? Could it be that ESPN has a multiyear, HUGE money contract with MLB?
Duh, duh, duh…
February 10, 2009Ponderings Part 3
How can I integrate students into the larger church body more effectively when it doesn’t look like the services we put on? Serving, leading, even attendance…
Our model of church on Sundays is fairly traditional. We have some elements that push us toward more contemporary, but we are who we are. Having said that, everything is done with excellence, and there is always a lot of energy in the room every Sunday.
So, let me start by saying our church loves our students. Our music pastor incorporates them into the Sunday morning service a good bit through letting the youth choir sing, having a student do the solo with the choir or sing on the praise team, be in the dramas, etc.
They support our efforts in fundraising for trips, and they respond when we are the entertainment for Thanksgiving Night Dinners, Music & Fine Arts expos, etc.
Having said that, our students aren’t serving in the church. They aren’t necessarily leading anywhere. In fact, we have a pretty big discrepancy between Wednesday attendance (our youth service) and Sunday morning attendance (students in the Sanctuary with adults). I realize this is a problem at a lot of churches, but I’m not content with that being the case.
Some of the things we’ve done:
- periodic Student Ministry rallies at 9am on Sundays (normal Sunday School time) . Our band leads worship, and we have some fun things going on for students. At 10:30 we all go to the service together. We’ve done it once and it was very well attended. We have another one coming up in 2 weeks, so we will see.
- target specific days and adopt an area for students to serve (welcome center, opening doors, etc) to expose them to these areas of service and give our students visibility.
- our students go down front for worship in the Sanctuary. They do this on Wednesday nights, and unprompted from me or anyone else on staff, some of our core kids decided to do this last summer. They are still doing it. At first it made some of them uncomfortable and some of the adults didn’t understand it. I have never pushed them, but I am quick to thank them for it, and to celebrate it with them. My approach has been, “the fact that you are engaged in worship even when it may not your style…that’s real worship!”
These are just little things. So what can we do? How can we bridge the gap?
February 9, 2009Ponderings Part 2
If technology is such a huge part of culture, especially student culture, how can we leverage it for the Gospel more effectively?
I’m going to list some things that we are currently doing or are about to start. This is in no way intended to make it look like we’ve got it all together. Some of these things work well for us, and some are experiments. We are sincerely searching for better ways to leverage technology to reach a very tech-savvy generation of students. Our goal is not that technology would become the message, but that technology would help us get the Word from “Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” a little faster.
- we have a group on Facebook. We chose Facebook because it is the preferred social network among our students. We are trying to keep a pulse on this though as new social networks pop up.
- we have a website (blog style) that includes a calendar of events, a flikr stream of pictures, coming events, and announcements, a video stream of our services and a loop of archived videos
- we podcast. I’m not sure how relevant this is to students, but it’s a low work thing for us, and makes our talks available.
- we stream our Wednesday night services live. We use mogulus to stream the service and provide the chat features. This past week we had 27 unique viewers of our stream.
- we are rebroadcasting our service on Saturday nights at 11pm. We have live chatters (students and leaders) in the room to create a sense of community for anyone that shows up. We felt this was a time students are home sitting in front of their computers anyway. So we are inviting them to this time by…(see below)
- we advertise on Facebook using Pay-per-click ads. We advertise our stream with an ad called “go to church in your PJ’s” When they click through it takes them to the stream page. During non-live service times they see archived footage.
- we use TxTSignal. We have just started this, and are interested to see how this works. We have been gathering numbers for several weeks, and will begin using it as one of our primary communication methods in a few more weeks.
- we are about to start a blog just for our leaders. I got this idea from Chad and loved it. I wouldn’t be the only one to post on the site, but it will give me a great opportunity to put info in front of them. We have been doing a weekly email to our leaders.
edit Billy reminded me of this one after I posted. We also use WorshipWebsite.net to communicate with our band and creative team each week. He creates orders of worship with embedded youtube clips of the songs to be played so they can hear them before practice. He also attaches chord charts, we can see video elements, etc.
As I stated, this is an ongoing conversation for us.
What are we missing? What do you do, or what are you considering that we could explore?
February 5, 2009Ponderings Part 1
Is there a more effective way to do student ministry than a big midweek service and satellite discipleship?
Wednesday nights or the midweek service tend to be our big deal. Some churches do their big thing on Sunday mornings or Sunday nights instead. No matter when they do it, it’s usually a big programming night. The complimentary piece is discipleship.
Newspring’s Greenville campus launched their Student Ministry completely focused on small groups. Their youth pastor produces some pretty cool videos for all of their small groups, and they all get together once a month (I think) for the large gathering. So that’s more of a tweak, than a change.
Are the big programmed nights necessary? Does student culture “need” those kinds of nights to generate excitement, provide a destination for invites, and produce a gathering for community? Is there a more organic way to do this?
Are small groups the best way in Student Ministry? Does Sunday school still work anywhere?
I am filled with more questions than answers. I know we have to be willing to try some things.
What are your thoughts?
February 4, 2009Woops!
After committing to blog more, I’ve been AWOL. Not my fault. I had a hack in my blog. Some spam comment creating a problem which Bluehost gracefully fixed, but I was out of the country. So…
1) I will start my posts mentioned in the last post tomorrow morning.
2) You will have to jump one more hurdle to post a comment. Should take you an extra 2 seconds, but will help keep the spam out.