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:

Every trip we play a game of “Top Three.”  It’s not even something I have to plan.  Long trips like these, it’s not long before students ask me “When are we going to play top three?”  The rules are as simple as they are straight forward:

• Anyone who wants can play, but if you play you have to listen.
• Someone will make up a question that begins with “What are your top three…”  Then we move in a clockwise circle around the van answering the question.  The asker gets to answer last.
• When everyone has had a chance to answer, the next person around the circle gets to make up the next question.

That’s it.  Simple. No supplies.  No prep.  And no nagging students to turn off their electronics.  It’s usually good for at least an hour of discussion, and students get to know each other much better.  Here are some of the best questions (and my favorite answer) asked on this trip:

• What are your top three favorite movie quotes?
  Asps, very dangerous. You go first?
• What are the top three vehicles you’d like to drive?
  Deep sea submersible
• What are the top three worst ways to die?
  Young
• What are the top three least appetizing jelly bean flavors?
  J-Dub’s left armpit
• What are the top three greatest adventures you’ve ever been on?
  Delivering my second son at home
• What are the top three top three question categories ever asked?
  What are the top three actors to ever play characters with disabilities?
• What are your top three goals you want to achieve by the time you turn 40?
  I was surprised by how many “Get married” answers came from this group of Jr High guys
• What were the top three best years of your life?
  More on that later this week.

Want some good feedback for your youth ministry?

On your turn ask questions like “What are your top three favorite youth group activities?” Or “What are the top three ways this trip could have been better?”

Want to cement memories from your trip?

On the way home from the trip, ask questions like “What are your top three favorite youth group memories of all time?” “What were the top three funniest moments on this trip?” Or “What are the top three inside jokes from this trip we’ll still be telling a year from now?”

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.

The worship team led us in a brief time of worship, followed by the typical announcements and offering.  Then Phil began to preach.  We’re in the third week of a series on Romans chapter 12.  Phil was up to preach a little earlier than normal, but no worries there.  He proceeded to preach for a total of about ten minutes on Romans 12:6-8 on the subject of Spiritual gifts.  The last lines of his sermon notes for the day instructed us “When you get home, break the seal on this folder, read and complete the mission described inside.”  30 minutes after the service started he prayed and told us we were dismissed.

I was stationed in the video booth Sunday morning, and I’m not sure what my favorite part was — listening to the voices in the balcony mutter in confusion when we were dismissed, or the sheer number of my teens asked me on my way out of the sanctuary “Is church really over?”

My response?

“No, I think we’re supposed to take this home and do what it says.”

After getting my herd of kids (including my own five children, two nephews and a pair of my oldest son’s friends) home, we gathered around the dining room table to find out what our mission was.  Here’s what it said inside the folder:

Your Mission:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to take action as soon as possible to use at least one gift God has give you.  You may act alone, as a family, or as  a small group.  If possible complete your assignment today, but it must be completed by the end of the week.  Your mission is complete only after having returned the enclosed response form.

Action Idea Starters

Prophesying: (used in proportion to my faith)

Is there someone you know with whom you need to share your witness?  You’ve known for some time that God has been laying them on your heart, and the time has come for you to, by faith, talk to them about Jesus.  (Remember, success is not measured by the response the person gives, but by your faithfulness as a witness.)  Maybe there is someone you have not seen at church for some time and God is leading yu to call on them and let them know someone cares about them and misses them.

Serving: (let me serve)

Who do you know has need for some help?  Perhaps they are an older person, or a single mom, or a handicapped person.  Take the time to do something that really helps them out.  Maybe it is cleaning their house, raking their leaves, washing or maintaining their car.  Use your imagination!  Don’t ask, just do!

Teaching: (let me teach)

Do you have a skill or an ability that someone else would benefit by learning?  Maybe it is teaching someone to cook, change their oil, grow things.  You may have a hobby or sport you could take time to teach to a child or someone else who would never get to do something if you didn’t take them.

Encouraging (let me encourage)

Are you aware of anyone that you know who may be discouraged, sad or lonely?  Perhaps you know of someone who is ill, shut-in, or in a nursing home.  You may even want to consider taking some time and just go to the nursing home and visiting with perfect strangers.  Consider asking the staff for the names of any patients who rarely receive visitors.  You can encourage by taking them something special, visiting and talking with them.  Get to know their stories.  Give them the most precious thing you have, your time.

Contributing to the needs of others (let me give generously)

Do you know of anyone who is going through really hard times right now?  Perhaps they are unemployed, or have experienced an illness.  You may know of a single mom who is having a hard time making it.  This may be the time God will lay on your heart to give to them out of the generosity of your heart.  Perhaps you can take them some food, pay a bill, or just give them some money.

Leadership (let me govern diligently)

What needs are you aware of in our church and community that are not being met?  Are you aware of anything that someone just needs to take the initiative to do?  Leadership is not telling someone else what to do, it is empowering and enabling things to be done.  Our greatest tool for leadership is the leadership we model.

Showing mercy (let me do it cheerfully)

Who do you know that has hurt you or someone you know?  Do you know someone who has made some big mistake and is suffering consequences.  God may want you to be his instrument of His grace, love and mercy.  Perhaps God wants you to be the one who will reach out to them and let them know someone still cares for them.   Remember, showing mercy to someone does not imply approval, but rather the possibility of forgiveness and restoration.

I had the chance to talk with my kids about what each of the gifts meant, and then we discussed what we could possibly do.  After a good group discussion we finally decided to head to the house of some of our friends who, because of kidney dialysis and some pretty severe allergies have a problem raking leaves.  Our mission was to use the gift of serving and rake their yard for them.  After borrowing some rakes from J-Dubs to supplement our own supply we headed out to fulfill our mission.

The yard wasn’t too big.  It really didn’t take us too long.  In just a couple hours we had it completed.  But it was great all the way around.

We had a blast.  It was something the whole family could get in on.  Even our youngest (Mackenzie and her cousin Timmy, age 4) could hold the lawn bags as we gathered up the leaves.  And not only were there enough hands to make for light work, there weren’t enough rakes, so everyone got a chance to relax and watch from time to time.  It was one of the best Sundays our family has had together, and we got to learn about our spiritual gifts by putting them to work.

But we’re not quite done.  We haven’t turned in our mission report yet.  The kids are off at Bible Quiz practice right now.  But they’ll work on it when they get home.  We’ve already told them it’s their responsibility to fill out the paper work.  That means we get yet another chance to think and talk about what we learned today.

Now, I realize this is nothing revolutionary.  There’s even a whole prepackaged campaign you can purchase for your church to do something similar.  (I know, we purchased it, and then decided it wasn’t quite right for us.)  But this was more our speed, more our style.  Part of an expository preaching series, rising out of the text, not for the publicity, but simply for the kingdom — this might be something we’ve never done before, but it’s exactly the kind of thing we do.

And I love being a part of this kind of church…

So, I know that some of you reading this are Middletowers too.

So, what did you do?

Haven’t done it yet?

You still have time.

What are you going to do?

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.

1. Cell Phone Picture Challenge: Tim Schmoyer at studentministry.org recently blogged about an in-house picture scavenger hunt game they played with cell phones at their youth ministry.  (An idea that was itself inspired by a suggestion from Jonathan McKee on the Youth Specialties podcast.)

2. Macro Middletown: We did a photographic scavenger hunt of a different sort.  We took close up pictures from several locations in town, and then challenged students to send us pix messages of themselves in those locations. Each day we added more pictures and student got bonus points for getting the pictures in the same day the new locations were posted.

3. YouVersion Live: This one is beyond the scope of our youth ministry right now — it requires a web enabled phone to work, rather than simply relying on SMS or MMS, and most of our students don’t have data packages yet.  However, we can’t talk about leveraging cell phone technology for ministry without mentioning the exciting things the digerati at Lifechurch are doing.  YouVersion Live brings a whole new level of interaction to preaching and teaching.  Check out the link to see all it can do.

4. Prayer Hotline: This is actually a revision of an idea I used way back before cell phones when I was still carrying a pager.  Back then I gave each student a unique id code and a list of numbers assigned to typical prayer needs and told them they could page me any time and know I’d be praying for them.  Now days we use cell phones to take in prayer requests.  A Ping.fm account with a unique email address that students can text allows them to send in prayer requests that show up in an rss feed on a special prayer request website.  There’s no moderation involved with Ping.fm, so the email address can’t be passed out to the whole world, but with the moderation available with Presenter plan from Poll Everywhere you could do the same thing and still have some control over what gets posted to your site.

5. Instant Evangelism: I hesitate to call this evangelism, because evangelism is so much more than just  inviting people to come to church with you, but with cell phones you can encourage your teens to instantly reach out to their friends.  Rather than relying on them to remember to invite a friend for next week’s service, why not tell them “Next week we’re going to be talking about xxxxxx and maybe you have a friend that could really use this.  Go ahead, take out your phones and text them right now to invite them to next week’s service.”

6. Instant Feedback: Whether your teens know they can tweet an @reply to you that will show up on your iPhone while you speak on the stage, or you set up a Poll Everywhere feedback keyword to solicit responses, providing means to ask questions or make comments while you are teaching can help you respond to audience questions or confusion without interrupting the flow of teaching with a question from the audience.

7. Sermon Notes to Go: We have a twitter account and tweet our outlines to our Senior High students as we teach every week. For those that are present, it gives them an outline and scripture references they can take home with them.  For those that have to miss a week, they can still see what we’re talking about even though they aren’t there in person.  And getting people signed up is as easy as telling them “Send a text message with the words “Follow Watersedgeyouth” to 40404 and you’re good to go.”  (Of course, you’ll want to substitute your own username…

Chances are, some of you out there are seeking to leverage technology too.  How are you using cell phones to enhance your ministry?

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.

First, istockphoto.com has some decent countdowns over green backgrounds perfect for chroma keying, assuming you have a video editor capable of chroma keying.  Don’t know what chroma keying is?  It’s a way to combine two videos, one over another.  The chroma key selects a color and makes all areas of the top video which are that color transparent so the background shows through.  You might have heard it called shooting in front of a greenscreen or a bluescreen and it’s how meteorologists show up in front of their weather maps on the news.  With a chroma key countdown from istockphoto, you can do the same thing to put a timer over your video.

Of course, that may not be the most cost effective way of making your own countdown, especially when you can buy the Countdown Creator for $34.95.  Countdown Creator is a program that will allow you to take your own photos or video and add a countdown clock over the top.  You can even customize the soundtrack and font of the countdown.  It’s quick.  It’s really easy.  And the final product is great.

And no, I didn’t receive any perks for this endorsement – I had to buy my own copy just like the rest of the world.  But for the same cost of two countdown video from sermonspice.com, I figure it may be one of the best video purchases I ever made.

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.

First, sign up for an account.  With a free account you can make as many free 30-second clips as you would like.  Want a longer video?  That’s easy.  For $3 you can buy an upgrade credit and make a full-length video.  Even better, in my opinion, is to upgrade to an all-access pass for $30 and for a whole year you can make as many videos as you want.  (As easy as Animoto is, you’ll make a lot.)

Or you can even go to the next step up, and for $249 you can not only make as many videos as you want for a year, you can make as many Hi-Res videos as you want.  (Hi-Res upgrade credits for all-access pass holders is $5 per video and with one you can download a hi-res mp4 video as well as .iso files for easy burning to DVD.)  What’s more, with the $249 professional account you can make videos for commercial use, access a wider range of soundtracks licensed for commercial use, add buttons to your video that drive viewers to your website and strip the Animoto logo from the end of your video so the focus is on you and your organization rather than on Animoto.

Once you have your account, making your first video is just three easy steps. 

First, upload your photos. You can either upload them directly to Animoto, or retrieve them from your own Flickr, Facebook or Picasa account.  (Since I use Flickr I know you can even retrieve the photos by photoset, so creating a video from a specific event is fast and easy.)  Or, if you want a montage of video clips you can upload them directly to Animoto (there are currently no retrieval services available for videos.)  Then you can adjust the order of the elements and even add some text.

Once you’ve chosen your photos, you pick your soundtrack.  The program will tell you how long your final video will probably be and you can search Animoto’s collection of soundtracks for tracks of similar length.  (The even have a nice collection of music from Christian artists.)  Don’t like what they offer? Upload your own audio (keeping in mind to respect copyrights as you do so).  Is the track too long? Don’t worry; Animoto will let you set start and stop points, or, if you prefer, trim the audio automatically to match your video length.

Finally, give your video a title and optional description (which appears on the Animoto site), and your video’s ready to render.

When it’s done rendering the video, Animoto will notify you by email with a link to your final video.  From there, if you don’t like it, you can remix it or fine tune it.  Or if you do like it, you can use the video toolbox to share it with your friends by sending it as a video email, embedding it into your website, or exporting it directly to YouTube.  The YouTube export can take a while to complete, but once you set it to export, you don’t need to babysit the process and in the end, you expose your video to the world’s second most used search engine.

As is so often the case here, I’ve received nothing from Animoto in exchange for this review.  It’s just a great web service that has made my life easier and created some great quality content.  Go ahead, try it out. It’s free.

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.

The idea’s pretty simple.  Last week I went out and took some close up pictures of public places around town.  Each day I post a few on the website.  Students then head out around town and try to get someone to take a picture of them at the places portrayed in macro.

For example, here’s a photo I took to use to demonstrate the contest to our teens:

And here’s a picture of me at the super-secret location:

Students can take the pictures and turn them in anytime before our next youth service.  However, to incentivise coming to the site every day, we only post a few pics each day. And if students turn in the photos (either by sending an email or sending a pix message to an email address) by 11:59 pm on the day they are posted, they get double points.  Winner takes home $20.

All photos were taken in public places so no one has to go onto private property to compete.  Likewise, all pictures were taken outside so students don’t get kicked out of establishments around town.  You can visit the contest site for more examples and the official rules.

But no answers.  I’ve still got students out looking.

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.