Most teenagers don’t care about my business card. How many youth pastors actually use their cards anyway? (I have yet to get a free lunch from a restaurant drawing.) Here’s a solution! Check out this video to see how you can finally impress your students with your business card.

(ht Best of YouTube Podcast)

Saw these over on Steve’s blog and thought they were funny! Then I noticed on YouTube that these videos have already circulated and that I’m kinda late with this. Oh well. I also noticed there’s a whole series of The Church Office videos.

Episode #1
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75TtP144fHE[/youtube]

Episode #2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpwR3LpRi8A[/youtube]

Sorry this is so late, guys! I dunno why it didn’t automatically post like it was supposed to. Better late than never, huh?

My brother, Dan Schmoyer, works full-time with at-risk youth in the Minneapolis area through a ministry called Treehouse. Last week he posted his lesson notes and PowerPoint from a talk he gave at one of their youth meetings.

I am posting my notes for my talk tonight titled, “What is that smell?” I am talking about how we “smell” to those around us. No, it’s not a hygiene talk (even though that may not be the worst thing to talk about!) it focus’ on what people see in us as we live. What do people notice about you? Are you different? Are you imitating Jesus? Do you “smell” like Jesus?

DOWNLOAD “WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” NOTES

DOWNLOAD “WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” POWERPOINT

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! ]

It’s been a while since I’ve gone through my RSS reader since I’ve been out of town for a couple weeks, but today I caught up a little and saw a lot of great posts. Check these out!

Free Youth Ministry Materials

• A Lost Lesson (Steve is offering a message and PowerPoint download for free.)
• Matthew Chapter 1:1-17 (CSI Jerusalem) (Another free talk outline from Steve. What a great guy, huh?)
• Communist Church (And again from Steve, he describes how to play one of his favorite youth group games.)
• Stranger Than Fiction — film clip ideas (Nigel gives several great ideas of how to teach spiritual truths from this movie.)
• Evolution and the Simpsons (Nigel posted a Simpsons clip that could be used as an intro to a discussion on evolution.)

Good Reading

• Top Ten Things to get you Fired in Youth Ministry (I’m not sure any one of these things alone would get you fired necessarily, but it’s still good reminders of what not to do.)
• 5 ways to survive summer (I’ve done all of them so far except the last one — I can’t believe I only have 6 weeks left until we launch the Fall ministry! There’s so much prep that needs to be done before then.)
• Five steps toward better student leadership (Good list. Applies to the whole youth group, not just student leaders.)
• A new take on contact ministry (A good reminder from Mark that it’s important to build adult relationships outside of youth group.)
• How to get people to talk about your ministry (Mike summarizes someone else’s list and focuses it on youth ministry.)
• Ten axioms of youth ministry and Ten more axioms of youth ministry and Still 10 more (Not necessarily in any kind of order, just 30 short points about youth ministry.)

Devotionals for Church Leaders

• Capturing a teachable heart (A devotional by Ron Klabunde.)
• Stepping into greatness (A devotional by Ron Klabunde.)

Dana and I are home from vacation and ready to get back into a routine. It was nice to visit her family and old friends of ours in Texas, but it’s also nice to be home again. We’re so tired from traveling so much the past couple weeks that it was nice to just sit last night and do nothing. Tonight youth group Bible studies start up at our house twice a week, though, so the break is over. We took about 700 pictures or so over vacation and put 211 of them online. Check out all the fun!

It looks like I was tagged by Chris at serialyouthpastor.com to list the first 10 songs that come up on shuffle in iTunes. I normally don’t really do these blog tag things (they remind me of lame email forwards from back in the 90s), but for Chris I figured, why not? Here ya go, Chris, just for you:

1. How deep the father’s love — Skillet
2. Mighty good leader — Audio Adrenaline
3. Now I sing — Out of Eden
4. Drunk in tha spirit — T-Bone
5. My hell — Disciple
6. Pressing on — Relient K
7. Blessed be your name — Tree63
8. Readyfuels — Amberlin
9. Bring it on - Steven Curtis Chapman
10. Violently — The Benjamin Gate

If anyone else wants to do it, consider yourself tagged by me.

The drawing
For the next three weeks, send me your Freebie Friday donations and be entered into a drawing to win a $20 iTunes gift certificate. Thanks to a generous donation for making this possible! Here’s how it works:

What to send
1. Send me anything you think will benefit the online youth worker community. That includes Bible lessons, policy handbooks, administrative forms, creative game ideas, whatever. (I reserve the right to screen all entries for quality control and eliminate any submissions.)
2. The only stipulations are that you give me permission to make it available for free on my site and that it’s 100% your own original material.
3. You may submit more than one resource and will be entered into the drawing once for every individual Freebie Friday resource you send. (A teaching series with multiple lessons counts as multiple entries.)

Where to send it
Email all submissions to tim@schmoyer.net. In the email, please include three things:
1. A picture of yourself to be posted with your Freebie Friday material.
2. A summary of your resource to be posted along with your material (please make it brief and skimmable).
3. Your blog or website URL you’d like me to link to (if applicable).

Deadline
All submissions must be received by Tuesday, July 31, 2007.

Grandfathered In
Because of their generosity, all previous donors are automatically entered into the drawing, but, of course, they are free to send more material and increase their chances of winning.

Once again, I dug through the archives on my computer to find something to give away this week and came up with this old lesson titled, “Why Encourage.” It covers four reasons from scripture why we should encourage each other and be careful to use our language to build others up. It has several personal illustrations and examples from my own life, so you’ll need to edit both the lesson and the PowerPoint slide show in order to make it work for you (or just pretend to be me).

“WHY ENCOURAGE” TALK OUTLINE

“WHY ENCOURAGE” POWERPOINT SHOW

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! ]

While flying into Dallas last Saturday, I watched a recent interview on my laptop between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the All Things Digital conference. During the interview, both of them answered a question from a man in the audience who asked for advice about his company. The reply Steve Jobs gave reminded me exactly of youth ministry. I took that video clip and posted it here below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA6_FEKfM7w[/youtube]

[Download the interview in it's entirety via iTunes.]

[tags]Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, D5 conference[/tags]

We’re finally back from our trip to New Jersey where we put on a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children and I have to say, my youth group kids did an absolutely outstanding job of working with the children. They stepped up to the plate during stressful times, handled difficult situations with great wisdom and poured 110% of themselves into the campers. The most encouraging part was that the impact they made on the kids’ lives was visibly evident throughout the week. We could literally see the life-change taking place as some of them heard about God for the first time and experienced love an affection from the nine youth group counselors. I posted several hundred pictures of the trip on my youth group website, for anyone who’s interested.

We returned to Minneapolis Thursday evening and now, after one canceled flight and another delayed two hours, Dana and I are in Oklahoma for her family reunion for a couple days. We’ll also spend some time in Dallas visiting friends and our old church before heading back to Minnesota next week. Until then, it will probably be quiet around my site here. Time for some good ol’ vacation.