Really liked this article over on pdymcommunity.com called The Message Rut. It gave some tips for message prep when your talks all start sounding familiar. Good stuff, here’s a clip of it:

Change up your Prep Routine
If you do the same thing week in and week out you get set on a routine for getting everything accomplished on time.  My typical routine is 100% on my computer.  Sometimes the place it happens changes, the exact day it happens changes, but my laptop is always involved, from beginning to end, no matter what.  Last week, instead of starting my message staring at a blank document on the screen, I sat down with a yellow pad, a pen, and my thoughts.  It definitely took a little longer to get the end result of a printed outline and finished PowerPoint, but the change in routine was refreshing.

Surprise the Audience
This is similar to mixing up the illustrations, but different.  Once people (students and adults) have been attending church for a while, it seems that when someone steps on stage to speak, they check out.  They go into the ‘I have heard it all before’ trance and don’t hear anything you say.  Your message, no matter how good or creative it is, will have no impact if they don’t hear it.  If you do things that they aren’t expecting, they will listen.  A few weeks ago, part way through the message I walked off the stage and walked around in the audience.  I just kept talking like normal but just walked around.  Then I finished the rest of the message from the back of the room.  It definitely got their attention.

JG

Had a fun 4-hour niche event this weekend playing “Halo”ween. Here’s a video of the setup taken by one of our volunteers, and we even had a guest appearance of another as Master Chief. So much fun!

JG

Weekend Teaching Series: none, between series
Sermon in a Sentence: Biblical leadership requires serving.
Service Length: 77 minutes
Bible: John 13

Understandable Message: This weekend Jason Petty (HSM discipleship pastor) taught the passage about Jesus washing the disciples feet. He asked a strong question: What do you do when you’re the most powerful person in the room? He talked about Jesus’ serving as a model for us to serve, and how so many use their influence for their own gain. He also announced the start of Student Leadership this year, too.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: Students made up the band and ran lights, camera, sound and the control room. We had a volunteer help run one of the games on Sunday morning, and other volunteers positioned themselves as greeters and helped everyone feel welcome.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: We had a costume contest on Saturday night that had some good energy (Sunday not so much) - the kids dressed as John and Kate + 8 did very well, I might add. We also played a “throw it on the ground game” called Smashing Pumpkins where we tossed the PumpkinFest decorations toward targets and watched them splatter. Fun shooting a live bit outside of the High School room, too.

Music Playlist: Everything, You’ll Come, Center

Favorite Moment: This weekend was the last weekend for HSM team member Zack Barker. He’s a great music/worship leader and is asking God what is next for him. He’s praying about leading music and letting God lead. Great dude, happy for him heading toward where God is leading, but very sad to see him go.

Up Next: A new 3-week series called “Do Something” starts next weekend!

Silly video for this weekend’s service featuring some of the HSM staff.

JG

One of the things I LOVE about our church is that we really try to get out in to our community and do our best to share the love of Jesus. One of the things that is said often around here is that, if our church ever moved … would we be missed? So, it’s just part of our DNA to get out and love on people and share Jesus with people. Loving God can be shown by how we love others.

Anyway, above are a few of the logos from outreach events that we’ve done in the past. Below is just a brief explanation of how we try to think through ways to reach our community:

1. Pray. We are always asking God to give us fresh ideas on how to effectively reach people.

2. Notice the needs. We try our best to be in touch with our community and look for what needs really need to be met.

3. Is it being done already? That’s a question we often ask. Sometimes we’ll notice needs, but find out that something is already in place to try to meet those needs. If so, that’s awesome! We’ll often try to support the things already being done. If not, we move to the next step.

4. Be creative. If a need is not being met, we try to then think of creative ways to meet those needs as a church. We come up with a creative plan.

5. Get others on board. We cast vision. We let our people know about the positive effect this outreach will have on our community, and then we challenge them to get on board.
6. Help our people serve. One of the most fulfilling things for us is to see the Church be the Church. We love seeing our people step up and do the good works God has planned in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).

7. Celebrate. After the outreach, we celebrate. We’ll celebrate with testimonies, pictures, worship. We come back “filled with joy” and we love to talk about it and hear others do the same.

8. Repeat. We repeat the process. Sometimes this means we’ll repeat our outreaches in following years if they are still being effective and other times it means we’ll scrap them all together because they’ve lost their effectiveness. We always want to be fresh and relevant and are constantly asking God to help us to be that.

Rich Yauger is the Youth Pastor at Grace Community Church in Indiana and blogs regularly at www.theyaugblog.blogspot.com.

Met this week with the weekend program team to talk through the process of creating a strong service. For us, our main visible program is on the weekend, so here is what we’re now calling The Weekend Tornado. Some weeks it is an F5, others not much more than some whipping wind, but never just a gentle breeze. Here’s how the process works each week:

Collect
This is the brainstorming stage, where ideas are thrown up on a whiteboard and randomly bantered and tossed around. There are no bad ideas. Some of the best ideas each week come from students, who gather every Tuesday in my office to do just this. Don’t worry if they are possible, and don’t worry about the size of the idea. Big ideas are little ideas that no one killed to soon. If we were really good, we could be doing this several weeks in advance, like the -2, 5, 12, 19 meetings.

Compile
This is where we turn the ideas into an order of service called a program sheet. The program sheet gives a framework from which to work for the week, and proposed idea of the emotional arc/tone of the service.

Assign
Using the program sheet as a guide, assign tasks and projects to various volunteers or students. Who is making the bumper video, creating announcement slides, etc. You can also begin asking people to help on stage as well, figuring out who is giving announcements or running the game, too.

Manage
If you’re going to survive the weekend tornado, you have to follow-up on the projects that have been assigned. Talk to the students or volunteers who are owning tasks, help them fight through roadblocks or adjust the idea so that it can be accomplished by the service time. You might have to cut bits at this stage, but it is better than being surprised/dissapointed a few hours before the service starts.

Execute
This is the step of actually holding services. We do 4 student services a weekend, so execute actually takes two days. Making sure each service improves and is as good or better than the last is always a challenge. Execute with excellence is tough, especially when you’ve seen/given the message, songs or game 3 times already.

Debrief
After the first service we gather the main players together and talk through what happened. We make tons of adjustments and tweaks to the next service. Sometimes it is small, sometimes we almost start over with the order (like last week). There is also a weekly debrief focusing on big picture thoughts, major changes, and adding to the list of things we’ll never do again.

Archive
At the end of a series, everything gets archived. MP3s of the talk, outlines, handouts, videos – everything ends up on the team network drive to be stored permanently. We post a ton of elements online as well.

When it’s all done – get ready for the next weekend tornado to hit – it’ll be here in  days!

JG

Matt’s amazing testimony from the series finale of the Happy weekend series. Matt is part of the security team on campus, but so much more than that. He’s a great pastor and small group leader, too.

JG

Awesome performance of Coldplay’s Fix You at the end of our Happy series.

JG

I hope you’ll join us at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference this February in Chicago – it is going to be something else! Jake and I are just finishing up Round 1 of the programming ideas for the event, and here’s a copy of last year’s “I’ve Seen It All” music video we did. Don’t miss out – you can save $40 this week if you hit the early bird deadline. Do it! See you there … and use the promocode EATSTEAK to get a chance to win a steak dinner with the SYM Podcast crew, too!

JG

This week we make the big transition into homes from the first 5 weeks of the small group year in The Refinery. Here are a few ideas to help create a great small group environment and work with host homes:

1. Get the host home ground rules
Once you find the perfect host home, schedule a quick visit with the people who will be hosting the group. Many times they will be gone when you and your group are there, but it would be wise to find out their expectations first-hand.  What in the house is off limits?  Which bathrooms should we use?  Where can/can’t they bring food? Ask about parking to make sure students are parking in the right place.

2. Clearly communicate expectations to your students.
What you discover in your meeting with the host home, be sure to share clearly with students. The better you are at setting expectations and honoring the host home ground rules, the stronger your relationship with the host home will become. It will also give you something to hold your students to when the cross the line.

3. Look for potential distractions.
Your first night in the host home, take a good look around. You’ve settled on the perfect place, now make sure your group will be free of distractions. Eliminate what you can – if the house has pets make sure they’re out of the area, unplug any house phones in the area, quarantine random siblings and make sure any fancy “adult” art is off the walls. Trust us, that’s happened before.

4. Clean up your students’ mess.
You had a great night, and left a little too much evidence behind. While we want you to have a great time at small group, make sure you reset the room and clean up whatever mess you’ve created.

5. If anything goes wrong or gets broken, let us know.
HSM is absolutely responsible for what happens in your host home environment during small group time. If you knock over a vase or two students wrestling destroys the coffee table, please let us know so we can swing into action. You may want to have the small group guys pay it back in some way, but either way keep us in the loop. Especially if a student carves their name in the furniture during prayer. Yes, that has happened, too.

6. Continue communicating with the host home.
Get the small group calender for the year and give a copy to the hosts so they know when they have a week off. The more communication and less surprises between you and the hosts, the better.

7. Encourage “thank-yous” and simple gifts.
Encourage your students to thank the host home mom every night, maybe even consider leaving a little card for them. If possible, a small amount gift card might be super meaningful, or even a nice candle to help rid the family room of the “teenage boy” smell would be a super gesture.

JG

Heard something cool in our team meeting this week – Phil, our intern who has become an event specialist – has this weekend’s PumpkinFest planned out in such a way that over the course of the 3-hour event, parts of the event close down.

During that time, you clean up and lock up that part of the building. Another section finishes an hour later, so that gets cleaned up and locked down. Then when the event ends at midnight, instead of a couple hours of cleaning, you just have a little left to go and you and the volunteers get to bed an hour early … or go out to celebrate for that hour at Dennys with some boneless buffalo wings.

Love the idea … clean up and shut down the event as you go!

JG

Fun little video of Simply Youth Ministry’s Spooky Bundle sale. $280 worth of stuff for $69 – including 99 Thoughts for Youth Workers. There are still 50 bundles left in the big sale, it all ends Saturday.

JG

We’re just about to move from The Refinery into homes – tonight and tomorrow night are the last nights we’re meeting at church and heading back into the preferred homes. Here’s what I’m sharing with our leaders this week about finding the right host home to meet your needs:

The perfect host home has great meeting space to gather
Space is a critical concern of small groups – you want enough space for your style. For some, a kitchen table is the perfect place for a small group to meet. For others, you’ll want a casual living room style and comfort. In some cases, which are less than ideal, you might just have to make due. Know that God will work in your group this year, if you’re in a mansion or a shack, a garage or a family room. If you don’t know “your style” yet, ask people around your table and see what they prefer.

The perfect host home is free of distractions
This is the most important aspect of a small groups meeting place. If you’re meeting in a busy house with kids running around, phones ringing, the game going on the TV and internet just a step away … small groups can tend to be just a little bit distracted. When you’re looking for the perfect small group space, make sure there’s not just enough space, but minimize distractions, too.

The perfect host home isn’t too far away from where the group lives
Proximity is a big deal – if what is inconvenient for you is best for the group, sacrifice your gas tank and take the group to them. We definitely try to put groups together by schools so geography plays to our advantage, but some groups will have a straggler that has to drive or the straggler might be the leader. Either way, choose the perfect host home that is perfect for most, if it can’t be all.

The perfect host home always has amazing snacks
Yup, amazing snacks should factor in which host home you choose. Can Billy’s mom cook? Do they have ample ice to keep the beverages cold?

If we get 2 out of 3 of these (snacks are non-negotiable – ha!), we’re thrilled because that’s a GREAT host home for your small group.

JG

Another (here’s the first if you missed it) quick little promo video for our new HSM message hooks.

JG

For the finale of the Happy series, we gave students a simple button of a smiley face to remind them of the 6-week series on the Beatitudes. Our goal is to provide a trigger to help them think about the choices they are making and to remember God’s path to finding lasting happiness. We also sent them a link to download some HAPPY graphics for their phone or computer and hoped they would put them there as another reminder of the series’ teaching.

JG

Easily the best of the HAPPY public service announcement videos from the series. Random … and funny! See all of them here.

JG

Weekend Teaching Series: Happy Series Finale (week 6 of 6)
Sermon in a Sentence: True happiness comes from following God’s ways, despite persecution and the challenges that are in the journey ahead.
Service Length: 80 minutes
Bible: Matthew 5:10-13

Understandable Message: This weekend we focused on the last of The Beatitudes  – that Jesus calls us to be perscuted for His name’s sake. It was a challenging message, because I was afraid the talk would end on a downer note, and as always we try to think about non-believing students in the audience as well. The message focused on standing alone, and responding correctly to persecution.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: Students made up the band, created one of the videos, did announcements, and ran all of the lights, camera, sound and control room. We’ve been blessed with great volunteers as well, and our new prayer and connect right before eah service is helping bond the team together and maximize their involvement in the services. 

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: We played a great new game called Ninjas4Christ.com, a hilarious game of breaking boards and spinning the Wheel of Destiny. Very clever stuff – and the website is a hilarious if you haven’t checked it out. We had a couple of videos, too, including the best of the HAPPY Public Service Announcements, too.

Music Playlist: Sing Sing  Sing, Hosanna, Fix You, Overcome

Favorite Moment: Matt Reynolds, part of the security team in the Refinery on the weekends, shared his amazing story through his teenage years and his heart for students today.It was about how after losing his parent - drugs, and alcohol claimed his group of friends. The 5 friends became 4 … then 3 … then 2 … then he was alone. Powerful message of hope and a challenge to follow God’s ways.

Up Next: 1-off (TBA)

Here’s a sneak preview of the new fall calendar from Simply Youth Ministry. Check it out!

JG

Zack shared his story of committing to follow Christ 6 months ago during Mission Viejo’s You Own the Weekend series. This weekend at the conclusion of the HAPPY series we talked about persecution and the challenges you’ll face when following Christ. We did a follow-up with Zack this week on video to use as an illustration of that point.

JG

Fun little random promo video for our big PumpkinFest this Friday night.

JG