From Sampler to Sower

So, you’ve made that awesome Animoto video of scenes from your last youth retreat. You want to show it before service starts, but you always show countdowns before service so things start on time, and you just don’t know what to do about this connived conundrum . . .

Don’t worry.

Do the logical.  Turn your own custom video into a countdown.

There are a couple of good ways to do this.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 10 of 10, For the same reasons as the Junior High service, this was a difficult night.  Fortunately, by the time the teaching time came around in the service, the Excedrin I’d been taking all day finally began to kick in.  I really did think, going into this service, that there was a chance I’d have to cut the teaching short.  But God is good.

Message Summary: We’re in the fourth week of our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask. As I’ve mentioned for the past three weeks, we’re using a  Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions teens have and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.  This weeks top questions included “Who is Legion?” “What’s the difference between the Old and New Testament?” and “Will all dogs really go to heaven?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Cowardly Warrior

Sermon in a Sentence: Actually, I didn’t have one going in . . . but more on that later.

Text(s): Judges 6-7

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 12 out of 10,This was one of my toughest nights in youth ministry ever.  The game took a little extra prep, getting audio clips ready for “Name that Tune.”  That  alone would have made it a 7 out of 10.  But what knocked this one out of the park difficulty-wise was an incredible headache, intensified exponentially by our stage lights.  After struggling through the game and music, I had to go to house lights for the teaching time and even then the headache was so bad I couldn’t think straight.  We made it through the night, but I know my teaching was adversely affected.

Message Summary:

We’re in week four of our Heroes series for Junior High. We’re working our way through the Old Testament book of Judges, seeing what we can learn from the people God chose to change their world.  As always we started with a “where we left off” review.  I was impressed at how well my students remembered the heroes from the first three weeks of the series; they even remembered Othaniel, a guy who played only a minor part in week one of the series.

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So, you’re fresh back from your youth retreat with a digital camera full of stunning photos and you want to know the best way to show your church all the great things that happened while you were away, but you don’t have the time to spend all day editing a video together.  What do you do?

If you’ve been reading this site recently, you know what I’d do.

Head to Animoto.com.

Animoto is a web-based service that takes your photos and video clips and edits them into a montage, complete with a tightly synced soundtrack.  It is, quite honestly, amazing what this software can do.

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I really don’t intend for this to become a series, but there’s lots of cool stuff happening in Middletown, and I just can’t help but celebrate some of the great people involved in these huge successes.

Yesterday, my family attended the Luray  Harvest Festival, affectionately known as “Luray Day.”  But to fully appreciate what that means, we need to give you some back story.

First, there’s the town.  Luray is officially a “unincorporated community” in north central Henry County, in Indiana.  In other words, it’s a road, along which you can find about ten houses and one small church.  And just outside town there’s a 600 acre gravel pit.  That’s about it.  You can take a virtual tour of the town using Google’s Streetview.  (That’s right, streetview has even been to Luray.)

Back in it’s heyday it was a little bit more.  I hear on good authority that there used to be a blacksmith shop, a general store, a hotel, and a public livestock pen so people driving their herds down highway three could stop, corral their livestock, and rest comfortably in the hotel.  But that was a long time ago.  Luray hasn’t seen that much business since . . . well, since you went to town to look for a blacksmith’s shop.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, By the time the Senior High service rolled around, most of the glitches were worked out of the system and everything went pretty smoothly.

Message Summary: This was week three for our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Tent-Peg Killer

Sermon in a Sentence: Don’t let fear keep you from being the Hero God is looking for.

Text(s): Judges 4

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 out of 10, I guess the easy weeks had to come to an end.  This was a Murphy’s Law kind of Tuesday night.  Fortunately, with the exception of a slightly late start due to a guitar malfunction, I don’t think any of the chaos effected the service itself.

Message Summary:

We’re in week three of our Heroes series for Junior High. You’ll remember from last week this series is taking a look at the book of Judges. We started with a quick “Where we left off…” review which reminded students of the judges cycle (Rebellion, Retribution, Repentance, Redeemer, Rescue) and of the two judges of whom we spoke so far: Othaniel and Ehud.

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Ever wonder why I love my church?

Probably not, but I’m going to show you anyway.  Here’s the video:

This last Sunday our church had what we call “Imagine Ministries Sunday” when we hand off our Sunday services to our Children’s ministries. Our children’s pastor, Rev. Jill Waltz, plans the sermon and presents the message. Our Imagine Praise Team who minister each week in children’s church take a turn leading us in worship. The kids fill the choir loft and take part in other aspects of the service.

The video is a compilation of the pictures I took during worship Sunday morning. It shows, at least in part, why I love my church so much.

It has nothing to do with my youth ministry – though I have some of the best teens on the planet.

It has nothing to do with how well the church takes care of me and supports my ministry – though they do an outstanding job.

It has everything to do with how my church ministers to my family. I know my children are growing up under the care of a great pastor and team.

After the jump I’ve picked out my five favorite pictures from yesterday which show exactly what I love about our church’s children’s ministry. You can see all the pictures I took on my flickr account here.

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Info visualization site Information is Beautiful recently released this visual comparison on how the world spends money called “The Billion Dollar Gram.”

The visual comparisons between what we spend a year on things like, say, Facebook and Erectile Dysfunction medication compared to things like what it would take to feed all the world’s children for a year, or preserving the Amazon Rain forest is rather telling.

Likewise, it’s fascinating to compare things like Walmart’s gross revenues and their annual profits, or the total amount spent on advertising worldwide, compared with the amount spent on online advertising.  It’s both interesting and thought provoking.  Click on the image on the right to see the full picture, or check it out after the jump to see what is, in my opinion, the most disturbing comparison. Oh, and while you’re at Information is beautiful, check out some of their other fascinating visualizations like surface area required to power the world on solar power alone, twitter stats, or music sales by medium.

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OK, so maybe he’s not talking specifically about youth ministry, but I think there might be some applications we can draw.

Yesterday, Tim Sanders, author, speaker and former Chief Solutions Officer for Yahoo!, published a post on his blog entitled The Recovery is On!  In it he summarizes a speech he delivered recently to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s CEO Forum.  During that speech he gave advice to business leaders about how to lead their companies out of the recession, based on research on what made the difference between successful and average companies coming out of previous recessions.

Granted, it’s not your typical youth ministry blog fare, but I strongly suggest you head on over and check it out.

I couldn’t help but wonder what applications his advice has for churches in general and youth ministry in particular.

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