Don’t forget that as we take today off to be thankful that our thanks should not stop today. As we enter a busy season, we should be thankful each and every day that God blesses us with the opportunity to serve Him here on earth as His hands and feet.

So spend time with your family, friends and even people you don’t know. Love loud, and encourage each other every chance you get. In fact, make chances to do so.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here is this week’s Jump Start. Take some time to read through Deuteronomy 6.6-9 and talk about it with me.

Friday Night Flood is starting to wind down as a program for this calendar year (there are only three more next month), but we seem to be maintaining or even growing student-wise. Tonight there were close to as many as we had last week, and the conversations flowed freely.

We had one of our students share his journey with the crowd. There was a wacky game to break the ice. And there was a lot of board game playing, and general tomfoolery. But I think the best part of the night was the openness for students to share about their lives. I had at least three conversations with different students that are going through a lot right now.

Here’s a couple of videos from tonight, captured from my BlackBerry:

The Game

The Message

Random Footage

It’s Thursday, and I’m taking my Sabbath today, but I could not pass up sharing this little video from last Friday Night Flood. One of our leaders is an engineer, and he had a thought. He wanted to see if he could harness the untapped power reserves of our teens on Friday nights. Well, he did. The result? Well, see for yourself. By the way, everything in the video is real.

Set List: Undignified (Matt Redman), Shadows (David Crowder*Band), The Hand that Holds the World (Starfield).

Prepwork For the Evening: Prepared EasyWorship schedule, input new songs, created H20 Action News, prayed.

Lesson Topic: Real Talk Evening – Open-floor Q&A from teens.

Scripture Used: Philippians 4.8, 1 Corinthians 10.23, Leviticus 19.28, 1 Corinthians 6.19-20

Positives From the Evening: Real Talk Evenings always bring a lot of great questions, and tonight was no different. They ranged from questions about discerning God’s will for life to how to encourage a friend who is turning away from God to whether or not music that isn’t CCM is okay to listen to. I really relish these evenings, and the mood in the room was really receptive to hear answers, and to provide them as well. The music was really well received, and even enjoyed by most.

Negatives From the Evening: We did have a couple of teens leave early without knowing why. We did not start on time because there were a lot of teens who straggled in late. No one volunteered to run EasyWorship, so Kelly had to.

Results From the Evening: I feel that there was a lot learned tonight, and that (once again) providing our teens with an open forum to ask their tough questions really went a long way toward validating their thoughts.

Student Involvement: Students drove the entire evening by asking questions.

Next Week: No WNL due to our community Thanksgiving Eve service.

Last week we tried out a new format for Wednesday Night Live with our Hot Topic night. In short, we collected questions and topics from teens, and then built an evening of discussion around the top two topics. We had teens share the results of their discussions, and in essence, they taught themselves that night. But there were 4 questions left over. So what do we do about that?

Two things. The first is that I opened up 4 Facebook discussion threads for teens to interact with. And the second is that I filmed myself answering the topics/questions and have posted them to our blip.tv and YouTube accounts, inviting teens (and other viewers) to share their thoughts. Here’s the first video. For the complete set, you can find them here.

I saw Knowing last night with Kelly (been a long time since we have really been able to sit down and watch a movie together). It wasn’t a movie that I had high expectations for when it came out, but after a strong recommendation I included it in our Netflix queue. In short, there is a lot in this film that could lead to solid discussion in a ministry setting. Here’s a snippet:

All throughout the movie we are given hints to the end of the world, questions of why John and his son are at the center of all this, and what happens after death. Can John and his son know that they will see his wife again? Why should John run to the sites of the disasters? Are we all here for a reason or by chance? And ultimately, just how far will John go to protect his son?

 

For the full-length review, surf on over here.

Last week I blogged about recording meetings and conversations as a useful tool in Student Ministry. Last weekend our leadership team held a meeting that centered around discussing Mark Ostreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0. I posted a short review a while back in the hopes of re-reading the book and getting a more in-depth review up to share. That never happened (the posting, I did re-read it).

Anyway, I did record the meeting, and even though my kids take center stage a few times in the recording, there is a lot of useful discussion about the book. Most of it centers around how we see the major shifts at play in our church and Student Ministry, but I think there might be information that could be useful to you in your ministry.

Here are some of the things that we discovered in our discussion:

• Our church, and our student ministry program have a lot of 1.0 and 2.0 mindsets about them.
• We have a lot of church members/attenders that are willing to support the ministry financially, but not with their time.
• We have a lot of 2.0 influence in our Friday Night Flood program, from it’s evangelistic roots, to how we will bring in guest speakers to share their experiences with teens.
• Friday Night Flood also takes on a 1.0 mindset at times when we have a guest speaker who preaches to/at our teens.
• Our Sunday School program used to be very 1.0 in nature, with the teacher(s) effectively preaching to the students, and not always engaging in conversations.
• Sometimes we find ourselves in an “old school” mindset when it comes to teens and their technology by banning cell phones during the church service. We feel it might just be a 3.0 mindset to utilize that connection rather than get rid of it.
• One of the most interesting items I think we came across was the idea of our need to shift away from contacting students to get them involved in our programs. We find that far too often our contacts with students center around inviting them to plug in, rather than connecting with them to get to know them and build relationships primarily.
• We see the good things in our ministry that came out of a 1.0 or 2.0 mindset, but also see that there were a lot of negatives. We see the need to grow and shift away from those mindsets that have not been working and find something new.

I realized after one of our volunteers contacted me that I posted this audio without our team’s consent. Not a good thing. While I have edited out specific names, families and conversation elements that dove in too deep to share about our own ministry, I overlooked asking our team members if they were comfortable with sharing the audio with you. I have taken down the links. I will be asking my team if I can share it with you, and if I get the green light, those links will come back live.

I uploaded the audio to my Box.net account, but I had to break it up into 4 parts because I only have a free plan. So below are links to each file. Feel free to stream or download them, I only ask that if the discussion is useful to you in your own ministry, please let me know.

Part One -  Part Two -  Part Three -  Part Four

Here is this week’s Jump Start. This time around I reflect on Psalm 119.11, sharing about the idea of being hidden, and what that means to memorizing Scripture. Hope you can use it in your ministry or in your personal journey.

Tonight was a great night for Friday Night Flood.

For starters, we were able to see our two new leaders back in the saddle, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves tonight, connecting with our teens. On top of that, within the first 15 minutes or so, we had an explosion of teens show up. Nearly a dozen brand new teens. We had one teenager share her testimony during our breaktime. It was powerful. The room was silent the whole time she was on stage, with every person in the room attentive to her story. Another teen already asked to share her story next month.

Even the little things went well tonight. Putting the building back together at the end of the night went very smoothly. Everyone was on their way home by 5 after 11. The challenge and the announcement about our dodgeball tournament in December were well received (with a lot of excitement about dodgeball).

Now, there were a couple of flaws. One notable one involved teens who signed out trying to get themselves run over in the parking lot. And the registration computer took a little while to get up and running to start the night.

But I think the most intriguing part of my evening was a conversation I had with a father of one of our new teens. You see, he (and she) are Wiccan, and he was concerned that we might be forcing her to hide or otherwise bury her beliefs while she was at the program. I was able to share with him that we are more concerned with having conversations and getting to know teens on Friday nights, and that we are not going to force her to hide her pentacle necklace, or make her hide her beliefs. We want to engage in conversation and learn about her (and all of our teens).

He seemed to be very grateful, and even relieved that I am so open-minded and willing to listen. I even managed to get his number, and plan on calling him to see about getting together for lunch, and hearing about his journey so far.

Tonight was a great night all around. Even the negatives can’t overpower the great successes that God had tonight.