I Twittered last week about the students who gather in my office each week and discuss series ideas and give sermon help – the idea got quite a few responses and some requests for more information on the meeting. Here’s what happens at 4pm each Tuesday in my office!

We started with SHAPE (spiritual gifts, heart, ability, personailty, experience) interviews with a bunch of students last summer – these students were picked based on their results to help craft the series that HSM teaches and mold the weekly messages. The students are wildly diverse – different school, temperments, gender, class – all swirled together make for some great discussion.

Once a series is confirmed/estabilished, I lay out the basic direction and goal for the series, then it’s fair game. We have a huge whiteboard and begin to compile ideas in a bunch of categories – Scripture, possible testimonies, videos ideas, pop culture references to the topic, illustrations from school life and more.

This past week, we were brainstorming the upcoming series “The End” – 2 straightforward weeks on Heaven and Hell. Within the discussion there are a ton of distractions and rabbit trails, some of what is said is incredibly valuable and some of what is said is worthless. But I’ll take it all – I love having the student perspective on the talk in this early form. Everything gets put up on the whiteboard, and when the sermon is done (usually Thursday before the weekend) I’ll even send the manuscript around and ask them to use Word’s “track changes” feature to give feedback. One last thing – they all have “veto” power as well – if they feel strongly enough that something won’t work on the weekend, we gong it and it gets taken off the table. It still encourages risk-taking and fresh ideas, but helps keep them grounded in credibility.

One last key is prayer – one week, we ditched all of the brainstorming and just prayed for the weekend messages and students to be receptive to what God and His Spirit would say to them. Prayer has to be a central part of this team’s heart. The overall goal here is full preparation, not to circumvent God’s voice to the communicator and what God is asking him/her to say. But I’m always amazed by the value in these students’ perspective.

We’ve been doing it since this Fall – we’ve had to take a few breaks for trips and the holidays, but the time is very valuable to me. Maybe it would work in your context, too – if so, great!

JG