Cool Text Toy!

Glitter Graphics Maker & MySpace Layouts

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If your students are into Myspace like mine are, you will want to be able to do some cool stuff with Myspace. So here's a cool toy that allows you to create your own glitter text! Fun Stuff.

Enjoy,
-Jeff-

Invite Night pt 4: Sermon

Invite Night occurred October 15th, 2008 and saw 6 new people come to our youth ministry (there were 37 total for the night), with 5 students getting saved or recommitting their lives to Christ. It was such a resounding success that we've decided to detail the process here so others can take this idea and try it in their ministries.

Here are the other parts: Advertising, Games and Schedule.

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Something tragic has occurred. The blog silence for the last two weeks (save for yesterdays post) was for the most part due to the fact that my computer blew up and I was using my outdated laptop for a while. This made doing anything and everything painfully slow. Therefore I tried not to be on the computer as much as possible, which is actually a nice exercise, if you mean to do it and don't have it forced on you.

*End Rant*

I said all of that to say that my actual sermon notes from Invite Night are now missing. If I ever stumble across them I'll post them, but here in a nutshell is what I talked about:

I started by referring to the game Chubby Bunny, and asked them (rhetorically) what they thought the point of a game like that was. After giving them a second to ponder that question, I opened another poll question, asking them their favorite super heroes from their childhood. The best responses were mighty mouse and captain caveman. From there we discussed Jeremiah 29:11 and talked about how God created us with a purpose, like a super hero and unlike Chubby Bunny.

At Youth Conference, the speaker Jeremy Johnson gave a great illustration about how a sponge in it's packaging has all the potential in the world to absorb water, which is it's purpose. However, a sponge can only absorb water when it's placed in water. I talked then about how we were created to be in fellowship with God, that's our purpose, and only in God can we be fulfilled.

That's the night in a nutshell, it was amazing, and even more encouraging is that some of the students are coming back, and they're getting plugged in to their purpose. I would highly recommend doing an Invite Night, in fact, we've got another one planned for January.

Did you do an Invite Night? Leave me a comment.
-Jeff-

Invite Night pt 3: Schedule

Invite Night occurred October 15th, 2008 and saw 6 new people come to our youth ministry (there were 37 total for the night), with 5 students getting saved or recommitting their lives to Christ. It was such a resounding success that we've decided to detail the process here so others can take this idea and try it in their ministries.

Here are the other parts: Advertising, Games and Sermon.

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Here is the schedule for how the evening went down. Check out my other posts for a description of the games we used.

5:45-6:15- Pizza and Poll Questions. We also used this time for visitor registration. For the first time using Polleverywhere.com you have to take time to show them how to do it, and you have to be patient with the ones that aren't catching on.

6:15-6:18- Butterfly Man- A Video Clip that we got from Bluefish TV. You can view it by clicking here.

6:18-6:30- Wii Sports Boxing Tournament. Tournament is too strong a word, there wasn't a bracket. We let students challenge each other based on age and opposing genders. You can read more about the set up by clicking over to part two.

6:30-6:35- Another Poll Question- And a convenient excuse to get the students participating in Atomic Twinkies out of the room while we told everyone else what to expect.

6:35-6:45- Atomic Twinkies- I apologize for not posting pictures, my camera didn't do this game justice. I'm not sure that the students will ever trust an eating game again.

6:45-6:48- SWAT- Another Bluefish video while we cleaned up the mess left behind by the last game and set up for the next one.

6:48-6:57- Chubby Bunny. If you don't know what this game is, you must not be in youth ministry. We ran out of ideas at the last moment (just kidding, it actually segued into the sermon I preached that night).

6:57-7:00- One more Poll Question, some hangout time and a chance to use the restroom before service.

7:00-7:30- Worship. Our youth band rocked that night!

7:30-7:40- Give a ways and announcements.

7:40-8:15- Sermon. But that's a post all to itself.

Is this helpful? Leave a comment.

-Jeff-

Invite Night pt 2: Games

Invite Night occurred October 15th, 2008 and saw 6 new people come to our youth ministry (there were 37 total for the night), with 5 students getting saved or recommitting their lives to Christ. It was such a resounding success that we've decided to detail the process here so others can take this idea and try it in their ministries.

Here are the other parts: Advertising, Schedule and Sermon

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An hour before service started we opened the doors and unleashed all sorts of fun and craziness. We played three games specifically that I feel went over really well:

1. Atomic Twinkies. Not sure what the actual name of this would be, but it's hilarious. It's a normal food eating contest, except we spiked the twinkies with Tabasco sauce! You can imagine the look on their faces when they dove in face first (no hands of course) and were chewing along happily only to discover their mouth was on fire!!! We prepped the audience ahead of time so they knew what to be looking for, which added to the fun.
2. Wii Boxing. By placing a TV monitor on stage and running a LONG RCA cable to the projector, we were able to play the Wii while everyone watched from their seats. The best part was doing Jr High Guy vs Girl and Sr High Guy vs Girl. I think the girls won both matches. Then my five year old schooled a freshman in high school. It's great sitting in the audience and just watching the people box on stage, arms flailing everywhere. We wanted to use it more, but ran out of time.
3. Polleverywhere.com. I blogged about this right after the event, so you can click here to read about it. It was really fun, although it does take sometime to explain to everyone the first time through. As a side note, I learned that no one in my group with texting capabilities is interested in High School Musical 3? Is that more of a tween thing?

Of course, in addition to this we did standard raffles with CD's and things to give a way, but the games were the best part of the preshow.

Have questions or comments? Leave me a comment and let me know!

-Jeff-

Invite Night pt 1: Advertising

Wednesday the 15th of October we held our first Invite Night at Lake Stevens AG. It was a great night, filled with fun and faith. I thought I'd post our schedule for the night and let you in on a couple ideas we had to make the night fun. Feel free to steal these ideas (because I stole them from someone else). If you end up taking something, leave me a comment and let me know how your night went.

I'll break this up into four parts, advertising, games, schedule and sermon. Hopefully this will give you a picture of what we did, and you can take it from there.

Advertising:

1. The most important form of advertising you can have is Word of Mouth, and for this event we relied on that exclusively (not on purpose though). When coming back from a conference or retreat, you NEED to do one of these nights. I took our students aside at the end of our trip, handed them an envelope with cards in it and gave them some quick instructions. I told them that when they got to school Monday, they should tell their friends about their weekend and then they should hand them one of these cards. I got several good reports from students who did this, it gave them the opportunity to share with their friends about something exciting in their lives, and they also were able to follow up by giving them an invite to our event.
2. Here are the cards we used, they're nothing too special, but they were effective.
3. One thing I wanted to try was to take this invite and put it on myspace, along with the code so the students could copy it to their own pages, but I couldn't figure out how to disable the html code until this afternoon. So here it is for you, I'm sure it will be a hit even though I haven't been able to try it out yet. Put your html code inside a textarea command. This displays the text as is, instead of implementing the instructions from the code. I will do this in the future and let you know how it works out.

Well, that was more about advertising than I was planning on writing, check back next week to hear about what we did for our games and stuff.

-Jeff-

Youth Ministry Tools: Polleverywhere.com

Last night I tried something out for the first time, and it worked so well I had to come and blog about it. Polleverywhere.com is a website that allows you to not only poll your students, but to embed the poll in PowerPoint and display the results in real time. Here is a sample poll so you can get the idea:

The one tricky part to this whole thing is that you have to remind the students to type the word "cast" then the number. If you don't type cast, it won't go through. So go ahead and try it out, it works great and is free for the first 30 responses (which is probably good for 75-100 students depending on how many text).

They also have a feature that allows students to text in questions, and those questions update in real time. I asked the teens last night who their favorite superhero was, and they gave all sorts of responses, including captain caveman and batman. Several students had fun just putting their own names or the names of their friends up there. For some reason I can't embed the poll here, or I'd show it to you, but it was great fun.

All in all, it's a very well done, easy to use site. I would highly recommend that you check it out.

-Jeff-

Tools I use in Ministry pt3: Pinnacle Dazzle

Last time I posted about how I display powerpoint on a tv during youth group, today I want to talk about one way to get video files onto your computer in the first place. Have you ever wondered how clips from sporting events or tv shows end up on Youtube? For a long time I did. I have satellite tv, a DVR and a DVD burner, but I still couldn't get videos onto my computer that were editable. Enter the Dazzle from Pinnacle:

This handy device allows you to plug RCA cables into your computer via a USB port. Therefore I can now take things saved to my DVR and transfer them to my computer, edit them and then show them as I feel like it. Here is a video that I edited using this process:



There are enormous possibilities with something like this, here's a short list of the ways I've made use of it:

1. Video Advertisements
2. For showing funny clips during church
3. Capturing video from a camera that doesn't have firewire
4. transferring VHS movies to DVD

A great product and a good value, it has saved me several times when I couldn't think of a clever video on my own.

-Jeff-

Tools I use in Ministry pt2: PC to Video EZ

Back in January I had every intention of making this a continuing series, but with a pastoral transition and a few other things cropping up, it just hasn't happened. Well, I'm gonna rectify that problem right now. So, without any further ado, here's tool number two¹.

PC to Video EZ
If you are blessed to have your own room to decorate and minister to students in at your church, rejoice! We are, and I love not having to set things up every week. However, in order to get in there, we had to give up all the cool toys the sanctuary has to offer. One of those that was sorely missed was the video projector. We love doing powerpoint to help reinforce the messages but normal tv's don't have VGA inputs. Then I discovered this nifty little device:
All you do is plug a VGA cable in and it converts it to RCA or S-video. It works great for smaller youth rooms where a projector just isn't practical. If you're in that situation, you can pick one of these up by clicking the link here: http://store.grandtec.com/ultimateez.html It retails for $49.99 and is well worth the cost.

¹Hey, I'm a poet and I didn't even think about it very much (HaHa).