From Sampler to Sower

Two weeks ago I wrote about a new way we were seeking to help our students learn to pray. We’re encouraging students to learn to pray in much the same way they learned to speak, not by talking about prayer, but simply by praying.  We’ve passed out daily prayer cards which have a simple question or instruction for each day, designed to help them open up a conversation with God.

Here is the second set of 16 prayer cards: one daily prayer card and one weekly memory verse card for two weeks.

We’re starting a new series at our midweek youth service, Water’s Edge, tonight.  The goal is to help our students learn to pray.  (Watch later in the week for a full summary of our service.)

We realize that it’s one thing to talk about prayer.  But learning to pray is like learning how to talk.  You don’t learn to talk by listening to lessons about talking.  You learn to talk by doing it.

So to help our students not just learn about prayer, but actually learn to pray, we’re preparing daily prayer cards.  They include a simple prayer prompt from one of the four types of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. It’s a way to give students something to talk to God about, and then turn them loose to do it.

Here are the first two weeks cards, along with a weekly Bible verse card for memorization.  They are in no particular order, in fact we plan to shuffle them up before we give them to students so no one has the cards in the same order.

Update: Here is the second, two-week set.

Yesterday we returned from our annual ski trip to southern Michigan where for the eighth year in a row we skied Bittersweet. And once again we spent the weekend at Indian Lake Nazarene Camp & Conference Center.  Their hospitality and facilities make them the perfect option for youth groups skiing in the Kalamazoo area.

Of course, driving from central Indiana to southern Michigan means we got to spend some quality time together in a church van.  Often trips like result in students sleeping, texting and cocooned in their iPod playlists.  I know some youth ministries even ban cell phones and iPods in an attempt to get students to break out of their technological ghettos and socialize on trips.  We’ve never had that problem, and here’s why:

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A few years back I stumbled across an online game by Grant Robinson called Guess-the-Google. The idea behind the game is simple: the game shows players 20 pictures, all results of a Google image search for a common word.  The player gets 20 seconds to guess the word.  There’s no limit on guesses, only on time.  Points are determined by a combination of how quickly the correct answer was guess, and how many wrong answers you give before you get to the right one.

Go ahead, give it a try.  It’s a fun game, and a bit addictive.

Recently, I adapted the game for use as an upfront game during our weekly youth service. I prepared 12 slides, each with 16 pictures taken from a Google search for a common word.  (The sample above were results from a search for “white.”) Unlike the flash game, I was a little selective in my choices, prioritizing both variety and modesty.  Unlike the online game, we played head to head.  Two students came up front and were shown a slide.  The first to give the correct answer won, and stayed to face the next challenger.  The more rounds they won, the better the prize we gave.

If you’d like to try it on your own, here is a compressed folder with all 12 slides.  The name of each jpg gives you the answer.

The Title Slide from Sunday's Message

This Sunday our church tried something different.  That in and of itself would be enough for me to love our church — we have no problem at all trying something new.  However, in the famous words of Ed Valenti, “But wait. There’s more!”

Pastor Phil Rogers spent all week telling people they did not want to be late for church this Sunday because something was in the works that has never happened at our church.  And we could tell something was different from the first moment we entered the sanctuary.  The customary greeters met us at the doors and handed us a packet of sermon notes that had been sealed, along with a stern warning not to open the folder until we were instructed to do so.

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I saw a post the other day on the Swerve blog from Lifechurch’s innovation leader (and fellow former Decaturian) Bobby Gruenewald about a time when the Presbyterian Church took official action against the dangers of riding your bicycle on Sunday.  Bobby sees in this bit of arcane Americana a reflection of how the church often responds to innovation.  He writes:

It speaks volumes about how the Church reacts to innovation at times. Instead of embracing it and looking for ways to leverage it, we feel threatened.

Obviously, this kind of reaction reminds us of cell phones in church.  But that is beginning to change.

After years of slides, videos and announcements asking people to turn off their cell phones and pagers, we’re seeing more and more stories these days about churches that are telling people to turn on their cell phones.  From encouraging people to tweet about their worship experience to using SMS polls to solicit instant responses from the congregation, to the creation of YouVersion Live, a fascinating mashup of Scripture and Social Media, the signs of a turning in the tide are everywhere.

It’s no secret our youth ministry has been asking the question “How can we leverage SMS and MMS technology for the kingdom?“  Last Lent we started asking the question “How can we make sure the next time one of our students pulls out their cell phone to tell a friend ‘Hey check this out’ that the content they are sharing comes from Water’s Edge?”  We’re still asking that question.  Our You Decide series is also trying to leverage SMS technology to engage students in community and conversation.  But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Here are some ideas we and others have used to try to leverage the ubiquitous cell phone technology rather than try to fight it.  Some of them are just for fun, to get people talking. “You wouldn’t believe what we did at Water’s Edge this week.”  Others are more directly related to our attempts to minister to our teens or reach out to others.

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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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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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As you know if you followed this blog before we fell off the map for a month, our youth group is currently running a series called mybrandnewlife.org.  A core component of this series is seeking to get into the Word through daily devotions which we provide on the website.  An essential objective for us, then, is to find a way to bring students back to the site every day.  As a result, we’re running some web-based contests.

To be honest, Water’s Edge’s Funniest Videos didn’t work so well, and we even extended it’s run an extra week to try to get more submissions in.  However, our current contest is a little more fun

We called it Macro-Middletown.

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So maybe I’m liking ths idea just becasue it gives me the opportunity to use my new digital camera. But as I was watching the Christmas concert for our local school system I was inspired with an idea to demonstrate to teens and their parents that I was thinking about them. I started shooting not only pictures of the choir and band as a whole, but I also pulled out the telephoto and started snapping shots of individual teens from our youth ministry. My idea is to send each student a card to let them know how much I appreciated their performance, and to include a print or two of them from the pictures I took. Granted, not very profound as ideas go, but it is cheap, practical, and very personal.