Overview
This week I wanna give a shout out to my man Greg Stier and his ministry, Dare 2 Share. Some may think that Dare2Share.org is only a promo for Greg’s student conferences, but it is actually so much more than that. Dare2Share.org is loaded with so many free youth ministry resources that I can’t even go through them all. Every time I visit their site, there’s more stuff added. They generate material like a factory on steroids! And it’s not like it’s just lots of little articles or something — it’s all solid stuff that I can actually use.

Here’s a summary of what Greg and Dare 2 Share provide for free:

• Weekly Bible studies for students that address core truths of Christianity. They provide separate discussion guides for parents and youth leaders.
• Reviews on the latest movies, music and culture trends.
• Several years worth of daily devotionals.
• Monthly newsletters for youth workers containing curriculum, outreach meeting plans, and ideas for increasing effectiveness in youth ministry.
• FAQs about the critical areas of Christianity.
• Insights on how to witness to friends of other beliefs.
• Basic Belief Bible study series for new believers.
• Various DVD discussion guides.

According to the site, there’s 968 free resources currently available, but knowing these guys, by the time you read this the number will probably go up. Seriously, this is like the largest goldmine of free youth ministry materials you’ll ever find.

FREE YOUTH MINISTRY RESOURCES AT DARE2SHARE.ORG

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

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[tags]Dare2Share, Greg Stier, freebies[/tags]

A little bit ago a high school student stopped by my office at church wanting information about our youth group and how she can get involved. I’ve never seen this girl before, so we started talking. Turns out she’s been wanting to come to church for a long time, but her parents wouldn’t let her until a recent turn of events in their family. When she was in jr. high some Christian friends told her about Christ, but she more or less rejected it. Although she lost touch with those friends, the message sunk in a couple years later and she’s been itching to attend church ever since. She said she doesn’t know much about Jesus, but over and over again with a huge smile on her face, she said, “I just love Jesus!” I’ve never seen a teenager so excited to be in a church! Her excitement for wanting to know God is so contagious. I left that conversation thinking, “Wow.”

A bunch of questions are running through my mind:

• Why is it that some of our church kids could be banned from church and not miss a second of it, while others who are not permitted to attend church want to be here so badly?
• Why are people who are filled with knowledge about God often not nearly as passionate about Him as this girl? Kinda like the reaction of those Jesus healed as opposed to the Pharisees.
• This story proves that the fruit of our evangelism efforts are totally up to God. Who knows when His story will finally sink in. Those Christian jr. high girls may never know the difference their conversation made with this girl.
• Why don’t more students share their faith with friends? This girl seemed like she was beaming to tell everyone she knew.

I read Ezekiel 33 this morning and was pretty convicted:

Once again a message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, give your people this message: ‘When I bring an army against a country, the people of that land choose one of their own to be a watchman. When the watchman sees the enemy coming, he sounds the alarm to warn the people. Then if those who hear the alarm refuse to take action, it is their own fault if they die. They heard the alarm but ignored it, so the responsibility is theirs. If they had listened to the warning, they could have saved their lives. But if the watchman sees the enemy coming and doesn’t sound the alarm to warn the people, he is responsible for their captivity. They will die in their sins, but I will hold the watchman responsible for their deaths.’

“Now, son of man, I am making you a watchman for the people of Israel. Therefore, listen to what I say and warn them for me. If I announce that some wicked people are sure to die and you fail to tell them to change their ways, then they will die in their sins, and I will hold you responsible for their deaths. But if you warn them to repent and they don’t repent, they will die in their sins, but you will have saved yourself.” Ezekiel 33:1-8 (NLT)

I’m surrounded by Christian subculture! I can probably count on one hand the number of unsaved people I regularly spend time with. That’s pathetic. This needs to change…

One of the cool things about the lake house we’re renting is that half of the other houses on our lake are owned by people in our church. Dana and I don’t have any big water toys, but most of them do. Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that our neighbors took me, Dana and Katelin, my 13-year old sister-in-law, out on the lake to have some fun. It was Katelin’s first time out on a motor boat and first time to do any type of water sports, so her eyes were either wide with terror or wide with excitement the whole time.

Every Sunday throughout the summer my youth group is doing an event called “Wake ‘n Ski” where we take kids out water skiing, tubing, knee boarding and wake boarding, stop for a cookout and an evangelistic message, and then maybe ski a little more or wrap up depending on how everyone feels. We pray many students will come to know Christ through this outreach.

Here’s a video clip of Katelin’s first time water tubing.

Rethinking Youth Ministry posted about a resource called Reactee that prints t-shirts like this:

This is a great idea! Looks to me like Reactee is just using TextMarks, though, a free text messaging info service, which means that anyone can take this idea and make their own youth group shirts with it.

[tags]Reactee, TextMarks[/tags]

This week guest blogger Brett Hetherington, of Confessions of a Human Being, graciously supplies this fantabulous resource. Seriously, this guy made a huge donation for us all. Check out his blog and say, “Thank you!” Here’s his review:

Evangelism is an integral part of any student ministry, but how do you teach your teens to evangelize when they don’t even know what the word means?

Description
Evangelism for My Life is a 5-part series on this very topic that is designed to give teens a primer for how to share their faith with their friends. It is not exhaustive (as if any 5-part series could be), but here is what you will experience as you teach this series:

Lesson Aims

• Students will discover what Evangelism is, and the difference between group evangelism and one-on-one evangelism.
• Students will explore the idea that we are living in God’s story, and share His story through sharing our story.
• Students will be given the opportunity to write their own story (testimony) of God’s interaction in their life.
• Students will be given the opportunity to ask questions about evangelism (part 5 are the questions my group asked).
• Students will discover that there are several types of “lost people.”

What’s Included
The series includes editable Power Point, Word and Publisher documents, JPEG images, as well as Adobe PDF files of just about everything. It calls for several resources that you can use, but you can find other options that will work just as well. This is a great series to get teens thinking outside the box about sharing God’s story with their friends.

Download “Evangelism for My Life” teaching series (25.2 MB)

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

[ Sign-up for other freebies and content added to this site! ]

[tags]evangelism, teaching series[/tags]

I started writing this as a reply to Courtney’s comment on my previous post about my youth group’s website, but it got pretty long and I thought others might want this info, too, so here it is as a blog post instead. Courtney asked,

“Do you mind sharing who you developed your website with? or was it completely on your own?”

I put the site together, but I certainly didn’t code the entire site from scratch. I took free open source web software that other’s have made available and made them all work together like a big puzzle. Here are the “puzzle pieces” for my youth group’s site:

Web Hosting:
Weeding through the thousands of webhosts out there is difficult, but I selected BuyHttp.com. So far my experience with them has been great. Quick and helpful support team and a responsive site. The main reason I went with BuyHttp.com is because they specifically configure their servers to work with Joomla, the content management system I’m using and they don’t oversell their servers (like hosts who give 100 GB of space for $5/month).

Content Management System:
Joomla is the content management system (CMS) I’m using. In case you don’t know what a CMS is, any blog works like a CMS — you login to an administrative section of the website and configure the whole site from there. With my youth group website, I log in to the admin section and set all the parameters, write the content, adjust settings, arrange the layout, etc. I can also install, uninstall and administer all my components from there, too, like the forum, user profiles, photo albums, and everything else.

Template theme:
The template is from YooTheme. Although their themes look pretty slick, they’re a pain in the neck to set up. Fortunately there’s support forums, which I definitely abused.

My main Joomla components
Here are the main components (kinda like plugins) I’m using for the site:

• Private messaging: Clexus
• User profiles: Community Builder
• Download manager: DocMan
• RSS Feeds: DS-Syndicate
• Forum: Fireboard
• Google mapping system: GMaps
• Submit news to front page for youth leaders: JA Submit
• Calendar: JCal Pro
• Comment system: Jom Comment
• Site statistics: JoomaStats
• Photo album: RSGallery2
• Videos manager: Seyret
• Live chat: SMO AJAX Shoutbox
• Event sign-ups: Attend Events
• Streaming music library: Jinzora (not a Joomla component)

There are some other little modules, too, but those are the main parts. You can browse a library of Joomla add-ons like this from the Joomla Extension Directory.

Free Alternatives
Everything here is free except YooTheme, Clexus, and Jom Comment, but there are excellent free alternatives to each of these components.

1. Instead of YooTheme, Google “Joomla templates” and you’ll find an overwhelming number of free ones available. I chose YooTheme mostly because I wanted to have a more unique identity on the web.

2. Instead of Clexus, browse through these free private messaging systems. I chose Clexus just because I had a little budget for the site and thought that Clexus was worth the money. Plus, it integrates well with Fireboard forum and Community Builder.

3. And instead of Jom Comment, use the free AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition or JoomlaComment. I’m using Jom Comment because it was the only commenting system compatible with Seyret, the video manager. Otherwise I’d use AkoComment.

Automatically email front page news
As I mentioned in my previous post, all news posted to the front page of the site by me or a youth leader is automatically emailed to our entire youth group mailing list. The trick for this really isn’t that complicated. In fact, it’s the same process I use here for email subscribers to Life in Student Ministry. I plugged the front page’s RSS feed into Feedburner, registered an account at Feedblitz and imported all my mailing lists.

If you decide to go this route with Joomla, I can save you from a big headache: don’t use Joomla’s default RSS feed. It strips all HTML content, including links and images. Either follow this solution or use the DS-Syndicate component. The advantage of DS-Syndicate is that you can also publish different RSS feeds for different news categories. So, if you post an announcement in the Sr. High category and have that category’s RSS feed linked to a Sr. High mailing list in Feedblitz, the news will only be sent to the Sr. High. A great solution to avoid spamming everyone with irrelevant news every time you update.

The easiest solution for a youth group website
Of course, a simple solution for a youth group website is just to use a blog like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. It’s less interactive and there’s no logins, personalization or profiles, but commenting on updates might be all you want.

An idea to get this setup for your youth group
I’ve considered starting a little side business of hosting and building youth group websites like mine because the competition is just so expensive. My entire youth group site cost a little over $200, but in my research before building AlexandriaYouth.com I found that most youth group website companies charge into the thousands for sites not nearly as interactive or as flexible. How many normal churches can afford that?! I don’t mind building sites, but offering tech support could become a little overwhelming. Plus, I don’t know what the demand is for a service like this. So, maybe you can help me with the decision:

• Is this a service you’d consider using for your own youth group if a site cost around $300-$500/year (depending on web space and features)?
• Are you a Joomla fan that’s passionate about youth ministry and has time to help me support Joomla-based sites (for pay, of course)?

Post in the comments and let me know.

Whew! I’ve built a lot of websites, but none quite this interactive and intricate. After 6 weeks of coding, there’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s finished enough for my youth group to start playing around on it. Here it is: www.AlexandriaYouth.com

Some of the features include the normal stuff:

• Photo albums
• Videos
• Forums
• Downloads
• ParentLink Newsletter
• News announcements
• Youth group calendar

I suspect that once the students register an account and start crawling around they’ll notice a lot of cool little features all over the place.

The best part is that I worked hard to make the site as interactive as possible, a little online community where we can hang out and communicate throughout the week. Students can post comments on almost anything: announcements, news updates, videos, pictures, not to mention private messaging between friends or even groups of friends. A live shoutbox is enabled on every page, too, for easy chat between users on the site. I’m sure that’ll be a great way for kids to get to know other people in the youth group.

Adult youth leaders will have their accounts upgraded to be able to post front page news (thereby automatically emailing our entire youth ministry mailing list), access a private youth leader forum, add calendar events and more. Student leaders will also have extra privileges enabled for their accounts.

Although the site is open to the public now, I plans to add a couple more features as time permits:

• Private forums for girls, guys, and small groups.
• Event and trip sign-ups.
• The entire youth group music library made available as streaming audio. Instead of borrowing the CDs from the youth group CD collection, students will be able to listen to “check them out” online, create playlists, rate favorite songs, and more. (This feature will be available only to verified youth group members.)

I’m looking forward to interacting with all the students online! www.AlexandriaYouth.com

A couple days ago I announced that I was planning to migrate my blog to virtual private server. It took me Friday night and all day Saturday and it’s done. Administering a VPS is a much higher learning curve than I thought, but it’s worth it.

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING ME!
Thanks to the two people who generously donated through the PayPal link posted on my a previous blog post to help cover some of my hosting expenses. It’s so unbelievable encouraging to know that some people out there believe in this site and benefit from it enough to feel compelled to help support it financially. God bless you guys! For those still thinking about contributing, check out the “ChipIn” widget in my sidebar.

NEW FEATURE
In the transition, I added Gravatars to my comments section to make it a little more personalized. Sign up for a free Gravatar account, add a picture and whenever you post a comment here using the email address you registered at Gravatar, your picture will appear in the comment. Cool, huh? Check out any blog post here with comments to see an example. Gravatars are quickly making their way to blogs all over the Internet, so you’ll probably want an account soon anyway.

I’ve heard this comment several times from students: “Church just isn’t for me.” In my mind, my immediate response is, “You’re right! It’s not for you.” Church worship services are generally focused on the working middle-class adults, not students or children.

I’d really like to address this issue with my church’s leadership and I know they’ll be open to it, but their first question will be, “What do we need to do? Where do we start?” and I don’t really have an answer for that yet. It’s definitely has to be more than just inviting students to help lead worship or take the offering — it has to be a total reset of the whole approach and mentality of church. The mentality needs to be all-inclusive. The problem with that, though, is that the “target” becomes a wide range of people and instead of intentionally hitting the bull’s eye for one age group, now it’s a more buck-shot approach. We hit everyone a little, but no one enough to make an impact. However, if we’re really honest, we could probably stand to evaluate even our adult-oriented church services and ask, “Is this really making a spiritual impact on those who attend?” If the answer is anywhere between “no” and “kinda,” then the service needs to be overhauled anyway.

Is it even possible to create church services that are intergenerational and effective for every age group represented? I’m kinda thinking it’s not, at least not with our current approach to church.