I’ve been disappointed by the lack of quality youth ministry podcasts available. Most seem to just push products and services or ramble on and on about unrelated issues, so I thought I’d start one myself. My idea is to release an episode of about 15-20 minutes in length on a weekly basis containing discussions/interviews with teenagers on issues in their culture. The target audience will be parents and other youth workers, so these discussions with teens will pertain mostly to how adults can understand them and best help other students in those areas. Topics that come to mind include depression, MySpace, values, stress, cutting, eating disorders, faith/spirituality, sexuality, divorce, dating, suicide, abuse, etc, etc, etc. Hopefully the podcast will be insightful, give ideas for effective youth ministry, open windows into youth culture and prompt thoughts for youth workers to discuss with their students.

Bill Scott, a friend of mine, life-long radio veteran and president of Zjam Youth Ministries and Teenhopeline.com, is helping with some of the initial production. He also wants to include the podcast on Zjam’s new huge website that will release in about a month. So it looks like the Lord has some plans for this podcast that extend beyond the scope of my blog. I’m excited and looking forward to what He wants to do.

Here’s a good page that contains many good tips and reminders for small group leaders and anyone in ministry. I tell the small group leaders at my church that they should always listen more than they talk.

http://www.studygs.net/listening.htm

The last two weeks of my life have been spent focusing on rebuilding my youth group’s website, like 10 hours a day! The old site was just a bunch of HTML content that was very difficult and time consuming to update. Well, my skills and understanding of Content Management Systems have improved dramatically since I first built it two years ago so, with the prodding of the youth group, I’ve totally rebuilt a new site that’s mostly interactive. Check it out here: www.redeemercrew.com

And then today I read Church Marketing Sucks’s blog recommending an audio presentation by Rick Klau, Vice President at Feedburner, a service I use here for my own blog. I intended to listen to the audio stream while working in my office at church, but quickly stopped what I was doing to take notes. Three typed pages later, I’m rethinking my idea of the online youth group community I’ve sought to build these past two weeks.

For anyone in ministry, I highly recommend taking the hour and fourteen minutes to listen to Rick’s presentation. Maybe not entirely surprising information, but definitely good insights. Here are some of my notes:

We need to find our community, learn to engage them and seek to communicate with them. Just being on the Internet doesn’t not mean we’re reaching our audience. We need to go to where they are. Just having a website doesn’t reach people. Our potential to reach an audience online is no different than that of any big company out there.

Give people a voice in our community. Give them a place to interact. This works perfectly in the context of the church. People will be more attracted to us as an organization.

A funny dance video online makes 30 million views in 4 months not from big marketing campaigns but from people telling friends and sharing it online.

For people under 20 years old, two-thirds of their communication is done through instant messaging. Publish your pastor’s IM screen name on your website.

MySpace is overtaking Google for the most traffic on the Internet. People spend more time interacting with friends on MySpace than they do looking for information.

One hundred million people watch YouTube every day. That’s more than how many people are watching TV.

Blogs are Google’s drug of choice. Blogs have fresh content and lots of links. Church websites don’t have content that other people will link to. If someone is traveling to our church, then the info might be helpful, but if we don’t create incoming links to our site and give reason for returning visits then our site will be buried in the Internet and unlikely to be found.

If all we did was post sermons on our site every week, it will increase value on the Internet because now it’s being updated. It tells Google that you have a site that’s more relevant to someone else. Blogs are the single best then you can do to make your site more relevant and more findable.

Sermons from church posted as podcasts allows others to hear the message when they have time to focus. In this sense, the church goes to the audience wherever they are instead of assuming they will always make it to church.

In April 2006 Feedburner managed more podcasts than there are radio stations in the world. Podcasts are not the same as radio stations, and that’s the point! Radio stations are limited to geographical locations and are very expensive. Podcasts go anywhere in the world for free. It’s powerful for our ability to find an audience that wants to hear our message.

Churches are putting their sermons videos online. It’s not hard. More should be doing this. Most of us already have the means to do it. A video camera, computer, Internet connection. Takes about 10-20 minutes to upload to YouTube [Google video doesn’t have the 10 minute length limitation] and you’re done.

Get your site started with the content you already have.

Discussion forums exist to closed communities that demand people come to your site to contribute content. Blogs encourage contributing from various places with less limitations.

That last point came from a question in the audience, but it’s the most valid to me. Should my youth group’s website and forum be a source that’s open to the Internet at large or should it be private to those in our group? Before hearing Rich’s presentation I probably would’ve sided with the later, but now I’m not so sure.

What does a youth group website need in order to be an effective ministry tool? Obviously it’s more than just a way of communicating news and necessary information. How can it be used to build relationships, promote spiritual growth, and reach the unsaved community at large? And how can I give everyone a voice besides little forms for comments and a forum used by a minority of the youth group? Please, your ideas and input.

I’ve never done this before, but a short little blog post by CPYU’s College Transition Initiative just sparked so many thoughts that I had to copy it here for future reference.

Youth Exodus from Church: What Are We Doing Wrong?
Matt Friedeman, professor at Wesley Biblical Seminary, responds to a new report revealing that 88% of children from evangelical homes are leaving the church shortly after they graduate from high school. Friedeman offers three reasons for why this is the case:

First, we give students what they want, instead of what they need.

Second, when Jesus made disciples of young men… he challenged them to “follow me.” Discipleship in Jesus’ day meant spending time with an adult… There was no cool websites, lock-ins, hip-hop bands or youth organizations pulling out the stops to come up with neat, new (actually, frequently gross) games to capture attention before a quick three-point Bible study and pizza.

Third, I wonder if we don’t significantly cheat our kids when we suggest that vital discipleship can exist without a life of evangelism and compassionate service.

You can read the entire article here.

The author welcomes responses here.

There are a lot of tough changes that need to take place in youth ministry, not only strategically, but philosophically.

Last Sunday night Dana wanted to go hear an old college bible study pastor from where she went to school in Abilene, TX. This guy, Matt Chandler, is now the pastor at a local church called The Village Church so we took the time to go hear him speak. As soon as we walked into the sanctuary I was shocked to see that there were almost no “adults” present. The entire demographic was several hundred college-aged and 20-somethings students! I thought, “Wow, what’s going on here? I’ve never seen a church service comprised almost completely of people my age and younger.” It looked like married couples were in the minority. The service wasn’t anything unusually special either — about 30 minutes of worship, a couple announcements, and a 45 minute sermon. No offering, no drama, no entertaining video clips, none of that stuff. And to top off my surprise, there was no strong Sr. High ministry feeding into this group either. In fact, they announced they were starting something that Wednesday night for the high schoolers. So where did all these college kids come from and what attracted them to this church ministry? I don’t really have an answer for that (haven’t really investigated it either) but perhaps some of Matt Friedeman’s insights point us in the right direction for thought and discussion.

Tonight Dana and I splurged by going out to On The Border and splitting a meal. The occasion? Today is our one month wedding anniversary and our three year dating anniversary. I know it sounds corny, but hey, it’s fun. Supposedly this kinda stuff wears off after a while, so we might as well enjoy it while we can. Besides, Dana took a job today through her cousin’s temp agency, so we felt like the $9 meal was affordable for the celebration.

I’ve been wanting to get this video posted for a couple days now, but unfortunately it’s too long for YouTube. So, I’m trying out Google Video here instead even though reports of the two companies show that Google’s video quality seems to be poor compared to YouTube’s. If I’m approved for YouTube’s Director account, I’ll update this video then, but for now, here it is from Google:

I quickly put together some of our honeymoon video footage to the old 90’s rock song Dana and I used as the recessional at our wedding, “You and I” by Guardian. We didn’t get much of our honeymoon on video, but we took a lot of photos. Most are on my photo album.

Two days ago I updated my youth group’s online forum to the latest version and man, I had more errors than a screendoor has holes, but resolving them sure did teach me a lot. Reminds me of life: I learn a lot more from my problems than I do when everything goes smoothly. Almost makes me thankful for problems… almost.

Dana’s search for an elementary teaching position has turned up void and I’m only working part-time at the church, which obviously makes for a pretty tight budget right now. Although this sounds like reason for concern (and it is), there’s a benefit in all this that Dana and I originally overlooked: we have lots of time for each other! Since I only work at the church every other day, we have Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays just for us. Granted, there’s not much we can go out and do on a free budget, but even just sitting on the couch together is a great way for us to start the first couple weeks of our marriage.

Sometimes God’s blessings come in disguise.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about anything nerdy. Time to end the streak!

My Web Host Turned NetDrive
I have 100 GB of storage with my new web host, more than I think I could ever possibly use on websites. So, with the help of Novell’s free utility, NetDrive, I set up a folder on my web host and mapped it via FTP as X: drive to my computer. Saving documents and files to this drive works exactly the same way as saving to my local hard drive except files are saved securely to my web folder online. After setting up PHP File Navigator 2.0 on my web host, I have easy access to my files from any computer connected to the Internet. Works great for sharing files between my church computer and home computer.

SyncBack Backup
I really don’t wanna wait until after my data is destroyed to wish I had backed it up, so I finally have a backup system in place. Using the freeware version of SyncBack, my system now automatically backs up the important files I need to a folder on my home-made TiVo. Once I build Dana a computer with something other than Windows 98 our “TiVo” will double as a file server, giving us shared access to all our music and digital pictures. (Man, ya gotta love Linux.)

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1
After reading some great reviews of all the new features in Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 I decided to proceed with the upgrade and try it out. With the help of an extension, Nightly Tester Tools, all my previous extensions and themes work perfectly with the new version of Firefox. The new features are all very nice: integrated spell checker, controls for individual tabs, better RSS options, options to re-open accidentally closed tabs, protection against phishing sites, and more.

Google’s Firefox Synchronization
With the help of this handy extension from Google, my Firefox browsers on both Windows at home and on Ubuntu Linux at church are always in sync. All my bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, etc., sync to each other with no effort on my part.

New RSS Reader
I previously was using a free PHP aggregator I set up on my web host called Feed On Feeds. It served me very well until I decided I needed to organize my 50-some feeds to make for more selective reading at times. Now everything is switched over to the free version of NewsGator and so far I’m very happy with the decision.

Higher PC Security
There’s too much junk online not to be too careful about your system’s security. So, I’m now running multiple firewalls at home, the newest being the free version of ZoneAlarm. And, after reading this article from PC World, I scanned my Windows system for rootkits with the free program RootkitRevealer. Unfortunately it picked up some suspicious activity. Before I remove RootkitRevealer’s findings, though, I think I need to learn a little more about what it found.

Okay, that’s enough nerdy stuff for now. Back to my youth pastor face…