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-

Moving, plus Saw news

Well, we're moving into our house this week, and as such, some activities are going to have to be put off, like thrilling you with details of our Invite Night activities. But I wanted to hear your thoughts on this article from Plugged in.

According to MTV News, theaters "all over the country" hosted Saw marathons to mark the arrival of the fifth entry in the torture/horror franchise. MTV sent two female interns to sit through the 10 hours of Saw and to record their observations. "The doctor begins to saw his foot off," Kristen Freethy writes during the first movie. "Meanwhile, I'm thinking I have eight more hours of Saw movies." During Saw II, Summer Barry notes, "An hour into the movie, I am finding myself bored. The sequel isn't keeping me on my toes quite as much, and the novelty of blood is wearing off." A few hours later, she says, "Saw IV opens with an autopsy of a naked Jigsaw [the franchise's torture-inflicting mastermind]. ... They rip his face off, then cut him open—I assume they're going for shock value here. Oddly, I discover it's not working on me. I suddenly realize I'm becoming immune to blood, gore and torture. This can't be good." As the fifth installment rolls, Barry says, "The movie opens with a guy being chopped in half. This does not surprise me, but what does surprise me is that the theater erupts with cheers. The question goes from 'What have I become?' to 'Who are these people I'm surrounded by?'" [mtv.com, 10/24/08]

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-