program | More Than Dodgeball

Geoff StewartMore Posts Changing Things Up: 7 NIGHT

The summer this year flew by and I can’t believe we are going to kick off our new school year of Journey in just a few days. Over the summer, I spent a lot of time praying and thinking about what we needed to change this year and set out a few goals and one of them being:

We need to break up the year so that our youth gather wouldn’t continue to be a replacement for Church.

The reality was that with worship, preaching, small groups and community, it ticks off most of the boxes as far as what life in the Church is like. There is huge value in all of those things, but we discerned that we needed to make some adjustments to break up our year to help students connect more on Sundays and from that came 7 Night

We have Journey (our youth group) Thursday nights with Jr High from 6:30 to 8:30 and Sr High from 7:30 to 9:30 with them overlapping for worship. It has been a great model for us, but we have been finding that especially in the long stretch after Christmas, we would lose momentum, as the program was similar week in and week out. Not only that, but few students are attending on Sunday services but since we are not “Church” we are free to rejig to help alleviate these challenges we have noticed.

So this year we have decided to work in 6-week teaching modules with the 7^th week being something totally different called 7 Night. The start time for 7 Night is 30 mins later for the Jr High and 30 mins earlier for Sr High. If we do an event that night, we are committing to the cost being only $7

7 Night happens every 7^th Week @ 7:00pm and cost $7

The first 7 Night is the week of Halloween, the second is 2 weeks out from Christmas, the third is Valentines day, the fourth right after March break and the last on is near the May long weekend (Canada). So far we are planning a student run talent show, 5 minute film festival, Inner-city missions night, and are working on finding a youth group to crash one night.

Our student leaders and volunteers are pumped about it. Ask me in June if it was a success but with buy-in like we have, I think its going to be a huge success.

-Geoff (Twitter)

2 View Comments September 12, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Program, People, Placement and Promise

Enjoyed stumbling across this old blog post from Ron Merrell (he was our camp speaker this past summer) about the 4 P’s of Church Stickyness. Program, People, Placement and Promise. Here’s a clip of his thoughts on one of them – head there for the rest:

PEOPLE – Friendly. Welcoming. Diverse. Kind. Warm. Knowledgeable. Genuine. Sincere. Safe. Compassionate. Able to listen. Loving. Respectful. Gentle. Energetic. If these words described everyone in your church, you’d be the most magnetic place in town. And I’m not just thinking about your “greeters” or “staff.” I’m thinking about your congregation. As the Lord does His work in your people, you hope that it produces the qualities above and more! People. But what can you do to develop the second “P” of church, especially when there is a less-than-friendly vibe to your crowd?

This is a hard one, because as a staff person you can create several things to allow people to connect, get them integrated into relationships, feel welcomed initially, etc. But… there’s a difference between “having a church full of winsome, loving, genuine people who go out of their way to greet others” and creating a “greeting team.” The first is better, but WAY harder to create! Focus hard on this one. You can’t train, teach, emphasize, and value real, Christ-like community enough. People WILL tolerate a subpar Program if the People are amazing. But, over the long haul, People will NOT tolerate subpar relationships even if the Program rocks.

Is your church … your youth ministry … sticky?

JG

1 View Comments October 18, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts Cover Songs to Open Youth Group

From time to time we open our services with a cover song – a song from the radio or in our culture that has a fun element to kick things off. This won’t work in every context, but thought you might like to see what one of them looks like in action. Here’s one of our seniors, Kyle Smith, performing Muse’s Feeling Good at the start of Senior Weekend a couple weeks ago.

JG