Adam Wormann, an old friend who graduated from the youth ministry program at Philadelphia Biblical University with me, sent me today’s Freebie Friday to share with you.

Based on a segment from Jay Leno, the eBay game is where you show a picture of a random item for sale on Ebay. The PowerPoint linked below contains various obscure pictures of items that were sold and the Word document contains information about that auction, including the number of bids and final sale price. You can have players:

• Guess the final sale price (within certain percent)
• Guess the number of bids (within a certain number)
• Give a price/number of bids and play “higher or lower”
• Give points to whoever gets closest
• Be creative and come up with something else!

All of these items were actually on eBay and really sold as indicated.

Download eBay game details

Download eBay PowerPoint game

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There is NO LIVE YM Talk this afternoon. We’re scheduled for next week, though, March 6, 2009, for 2:00 PM as usual. Talk with you all then!

It’s easy to be short-sighted in ministry. We work so hard on the day-to-day tasks that we often lose sight of the bigger picture. We go from program to program, event to event, series to series, and at the end of each one we’re often so close to the ministry, staring at it from 5 inches away, that we unintentionally lose the bird’s eye view. How do we even know if we’re moving in the right direction when we spend the entire journey staring at our feet because they’re in better focus than the distant horizon?

This exercise is a bit morbid, but very insightful for bringing the horizon back in focus for your ministry. You’ll need half an hour or so to do it properly.

1. Write an obituary for your ministry 10 years in the future

Project the ministry forward 10 years. Imagine that the Lord takes you home with Him having accomplished the vision He placed on your heart. Write a short obituary about your ministry as you’d like other people to have experienced it.

Keep in mind that your ministry has been as “successful” as it can be and the Lord calls you home at the peak of its game.

• What do you want people to say about the ministry?
• How do you hope it will be perceived?
• What will people respect about it the most?
• What new ground has it broken for the Kingdom?
• How has it partnered with the Holy Spirit for life-change in people’s lives?

Take some time to write this obituary and dare to dream big.

2. Write an obituary for your ministry as it stands today

Okay, back to the present. Let’s just say that your life on earth ended today. Perhaps you were killed in a car accident, maybe silently in your sleep, or maybe you choked playing Chubby Bunny at youth group – it really doesn’t matter – the exercise remains the same.

Write an obituary for your ministry as you see it now.

• What do others say about it?
• Will it continue without you?
• What difference is it making in people’s lives?
• Is it breaking new ground for the Kingdom?
• Is it a reflection of what a healthy ministry should look like?

The key to it is to look at the two obituaries and compare them. Reflect on the differences.

Once you’ve compared your two obituaries, the next step is to spend a considerable amount of time in prayer, asking the Lord to enable you to move from the present reality to the big dream for the future. These sorts of dreams don’t just happen because you spend more time in the office, invest more money, or try harder. Rather, they are the result of spending time with the Lord, allowing Him to continually work through you, and often taking faith risks that may feel very uncomfortable.

If you’d like to share your obituaries (or at least what you discovered in writing them) in comments below I’d be interested to read what the Lord lays on your heart.

Although February still feels very much like winter in some parts of the states, summer is approaching quickly and it’s almost time to start thinking about ordering those camp and missions trip t-shirts. I had the privilege of interviewing Ryan Crozier of MinistryMonkey.com, a Christian custom apparel company, about that very process. He gave several good tips and ideas about what to look for, how to spark creativity, and more.

Tim: How are youth group t-shirts worth the financial investment for ministry?

Ryan: As a former Youth Pastor, I witnessed first hand how a simple order of t-shirts helped us form community! It was really cool to watch students get excited about wearing our shirts to school and to hang out with friends. Getting Youth Group t-shirts was also a huge help in building our Leadership Team. Our leaders would wear their shirts weekly to help students recognize the leaders. (As if the 50 year-old bald guy didn’t already scream I’M A LEADER!!!!)

Tim: What are some things to look for or keep in mind when ordering shirts from someone?

Ryan:

• Not all t-shirts are created equal! Always take note of the brand & weight of the t-shirt quotes you get.
• Watch out for extra fees! Often times the price per shirt will be low, but then you have a $20 charge for each screen or location on the shirt you want to print. So, if you want 3 locations that’s an extra $60! Plus, find out about shipping costs!
• If you’re planning on using shirts for giveaways, always remember that white shirts are cheaper than colors. Don’t blow your budget on black t-shirts with 4 colors on the front & back if you are just giving them away.

Tim: The hardest part is often coming up with a cool idea or logos for the shirt. What are some ways we can spark creativity for the design?

Ryan: I think one of the best things to do is make a special trip with a few students to the mall. Check out Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, the Buckle, Gap, Old Navy. These places spend tons of money guessing what teenagers will like. Why not learn from the best?

We know that not every church has a graphic designer. So, we’ve got an art team that can custom create something just for you. We’ve had people scan and email us napkins with concept design or email us a link to a retailer’s site. Our art guys then turned it into a Vector file and had it printed on their shirts. Our art fees aren’t hundreds of dollars either. We’ve never charged over $75 for custom artwork. This way you will be getting exactly what you want, not a “cookie-cutter” design template that every other youth group is wearing!

Tim: What makes Ministry Monkey unique from all the other t-shirt printing companies out there?

Ryan: We seriously have trained monkeys that do all the work on your shirts. That’s one major thing that sets up apart. Now, if I had to come up with a few more, I’d say that fact that we don’t charge anything for screen fees, set-up fees, or shipping.

Plus, we’ve really tried to make the whole “ordering t-shirts” thing simple. We don’t assume everyone has ordered shirts before. We give you the creative input to make sure your shirts reflect your goals in making them. Once we’ve got the design finished we send you a PDF art-proof so that you can approve and make sure everything is correct before we actually print the shirts.

Tim: How can we get in touch with you if we have more questions?

Ryan: You can snail mail us at…

Just kidding! You can connect with us in a bunch of ways!

• Twitter @MinistryMonkey.com
• Blog @ blog.MinistryMonkey.com
• Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ministry-Monkey-Custom-Apparel/95539525415
• Email me directly at Ryan@MinistryMonkey.com
• And of course our handy website… www.MinistryMonkey.com

Time Out (by Jerry Schmoyer)

Contentment. It’s not standard equipment for human beings! Babies don’t have it – they want what they want when they want it. Learning contentment is a lifelong process and often a very painful one at that. Even Paul said he had to learn patience through the things he suffered (Philippians 4:11-12).

Caleb is one of those unsung heroes in the Bible who never had a movie made about him. But his life is one of devotion and faithfulness under difficult circumstances. Only he and Joshua had faith that God could defeat the giants and give the promised land to the Jews. The other 10 spies influenced the people with their fear and as a result the nation wandered for 40 years until that whole generation dies off. Only Joshua and Caleb remained to enter the land. Caleb had to suffer the consequences of disobedience even though he stayed faithful to God. Imagine having 40 years of your life wasted because of the sin of others?

Then when they entered the land God chose Joshua to replace Moses. Caleb was passed over, but he had a good attitude and helped Joshua any way he could. His faith didn’t waver for when Joshua offered him his choice of the land he picked the very place where the giants were the strongest. Then he and his clan defeated them by themselves (with God’s help). What a story of lifelong devotion, of faithfulness, of willingness to be a support player and help in any way he could. What an example Caleb is for us today.

Scripture
Philippians 4:11-12, “I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”

Numbers 14:23-24, “Not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it. But because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it.”

Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

Philippians 4:19, “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

Reflect

• Do you get jealous when someone else gets more attention than you?
• Are you content in your present situation, or does discontent keep popping up in your heart?
• Are you willing to be a good number two man, supporting others without getting the credit yourself?
• Is you faith stronger now than when you first believed, or has the unfairness and injustice in life caused you to start doubting God?

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Yesterday’s LIVE YM Talk was a bit different. Since I’ve been pretty consumed by the launch of MinistryQuestions.com, I didn’t have a guest or topic lined up, so the conversation was pretty laid-back and relaxed. It turned into a time of sharing prayer requests, actually, which was pretty cool.

Some of the issues we shared were:

• Helping a high school senior who was once a solid believer start rejecting her faith
• Helping kids keep the “camp high” going even after camp
• Setting priorities for all that’s expected of us
• Having babies and parenthood
• A youth group that’s starting to ask deep questions about God
• and some other fun topics.

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

February 27: Next week there is NO LIVE YM Talk. I’ll be out at the National Youth Ministry Conference, so our next LIVE YM Talk will be on March 6.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Shift Creative just updated their library of free online stock photography for you to use for your ministries. If you need a good image for a lesson series logo, an illustration, or maybe to use as a PowerPoint background, check them out, grab the images you want, and tweak them as needed for your purposes.

Use the link below to visit their stock photography library, recently updated just for Life In Student Ministry readers. Enjoy!

Royalty-free stock photography from Shift Creative

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk! Info on the LIVE YM Talk page.

Later this month I’m speaking at the National Youth Ministry Conference on this very topic. It also came up at MinistryQuestions.com as “Best form of communication.” Here’s a quick summary of how I communicate with my parents and teens in my youth group during the week, including my method of evaluating each one’s effectiveness. Some of the results may be more surprising than you think.

NOTE: The findings below are from my own youth group only. Every youth group and every area of the country will have different results. It’s important that you test your methods with your group and not just adopt my own because what works for my kids may not work with yours.

From worst to best:

6. Mass Facebook messages

Primary Audience: High school students

It surprised me to find that mass Facebook messages are absolutely the worst form of communication I have with my kids. I have a typical Facebook group set up and every week I send an update out of information that pertains mostly to high school kids even though almost every single one of them are active there. I try to keep the messages brief, to-the-point, and very skimmable thinking that would help kids actually get the information they need. However, I wanted to track how many kids were actually opening the messages, so I started sending just the main headings of the announcements and included a link to more details on our website. I found that the click-through rate was about 2%.

I used a self-hosted URL shortner scripture called Get Shorty to track the number of times my links were clicked, but you could just as easily use something like bit.ly, too, which is what I use for Twitter, actually.

If only 2% of the kids actually click the link in Facebook to get the info they want, that method is pretty much worthless for us.

5. Mass email

Primary Audience: Parents

Most kids here don’t use email, so this is mostly for the few kids who do use it and all the parents. When I write up our weekly youth group news and announcements, I publish it to the front page of our youth group website and shortly thereafter a service called Feedblitz automatically sends it as an email to everyone on the mailing list.

Fortunately, Feedblitz has some tracking tools that show that the open rate of my emails are about 20%. I know that sounds good compared to the Facebook messages, but that still means that 80% of the parents are not even opening my weekly email messages! And of the 20% that actually open the email (either accidentally or on purpose), an even smaller number of them actually click through anything to get more information.

So, email doesn’t seem to be a great solution for us either.

4. Bulletin insert/Youth kiosk

Primary Audience: Church visitors

Since every newcomer to our church services takes a bulletin, we include a youth group news insert that gives an overview that pertains mostly to someone who is a first-time visitor and wants to know more about the youth ministry.

We also have a youth kiosk right outside the main doors of our Worship Center (sanctuary) with more handouts and serves as the hub of our information center at church. That’s where we keep handouts, flyers, contact forms, sign-up sheets, and more. It also has that week’s youth group news video playing in a loop (see below). See a picture of it here.

Unfortunately, there’s no real way to track the effectiveness of bulletin inserts or our youth kiosk, but using them is very low maintenance, so we continue to use them anyway. The insert is mostly a tweaked copy and paste of the email update I posted to our website earlier that week, so it’s not a lot of extra work.

3. Website

Primary Audience: Parents and jr. high

Not really sure why the high school kids don’t seem to utilize our website too much, but regardless, they don’t.

Our site’s traffic statistics show that the site is getting over 100 visitors and about 1,500 page loads every day. That means that the average visitor clicks through approximately 15 pages on the site before leaving. That’s very high click- through rate for any website! (This blog, by contrast, gets about 2 clicks from each visitor.) People are definitely visiting our site and looking for information there. In fact, whenever there’s a typo or an incorrect calendar date, we hear about it pretty quickly.

(If you’re looking to start a website for your ministry, check out MinistryWebsites.biz and support the on-going work of Life In Student Ministry.)

2. Video announcements

Priamry Audience: Parents, high school and jr. high

Last year I started experimenting with communicating youth group news and announcements through video and made a couple observations:

• If I stood in front of the kids and made an announcement, most of them tune out. However, if I say the exact same thing on a screen, they all listen intently.
• Plugging videos into iTunes makes it simple for kids to sync them to their iPods to watch whenever they want.
• Adding more value to the videos than just news makes it a highlight of youth group for some kids.
• There’s a reason why YouTube and online video is so huge with teens — let’s utilize it!

I blogged about it in more detail here and even gave you a step-by-step tutorial on how I make my weekly videos. Yes, it takes more time than writing a simple email, but if it actually communicates, then it’s worth the time.

The statistics for each video’s views and downloads at YouTube, Blip.tv, and Facebook (although, we can’t track Facebook stats) equals a lot more than the number of kids we have in our youth ministry, which probably means that kids are watching the episodes several times each week and that their parents are watching them, too. In fact, I often hear from people in our community who don’t even attend our church but watch our youth group videos online! So, our message definitely spreads farther via video than any other communication method we have. (Hint: get some of your youth group kids in the video, tag them in it when you post it to Facebook, and it shows up in a lot of their friends’ feed, making it easy to use video to communicate with many more kids than just your youth group.)

For kids who don’t have high-speed Internet at home, I also show the video each week at youth group if there is time for it.

1. Mass text messages

Primary Audience: High school kids

Text messaging is by far our #1 most effective means of communication. Last summer I shared several ideas for using text messaging in youth ministry, so check that out for more details.

I use TxtSignal.com to send mass text messages out at pretty random times, usually as last-minute reminders or event cancelations, but I also love doing contents, asking for feedback, and sharing ideas through it, too. Just last week the kids had a snow day off from school, so I sent a message to everyone saying, “The first 3 people to reply to this message get a free lunch with me and Dana today. We’ll pick you up at 12:30 PM.” Within minutes my reply box in TxtSignal was lit up (which was good for my self-esteem, too!).

The only limitation with text messaging is that I must be very concise, and that not every kid or parent in our group has text messaging available. But for the ones that do have it, it is hands-down the best communication method we have. Fast, quick communication with instant responses.

How about you?

What works best for your group? How have you evaluated it and tracked it’s effectiveness?

Time Out (by Jerry Schmoyer)

Some decisions seem so easy we don’t even give them a second thought. The answer seems obvious. Why even bother God with it? So we made the decision and think nothing more of it – until later we realize that it started us on the wrong path. Think back on your own life, how many major difficulties started with what seemed like a small thing, a little decision that seemed simple at the time.

Joshua had such a time himself. God directed Joshua through the Jordan River and to victory over Jericho. Defeating tiny Ai seemed no problem after watching mighty Jericho crumble, but the Jews were defeated. They didn’t go to God first or they would have learned that there was sin in the camp.

Then when the Gibeonites offered to sign a treaty with the Jews Joshua thought it was a sure thing. At first glance it was evident they had come from a long distance so they couldn’t be part of the people that God said had to be destroyed. After signing the treaty Joshua found out they had fooled him and were really from nearby.

But it even gets worse. The Gibeonite’s neighbors attacked them because they signed the treaty with Israel so Joshua had to come to their assistance. Here he finds himself defending the very people he was supposed to destroy – all because making the treaty seemed like such a simple decision that he didn’t go to God with it. God bailed him out and turned it to good by using the battle to destroy many Canaanite tribes. God even sent hail and kept the sun from setting until they were destroyed.

Now we don’t have to pray and wait for an answer about what color socks to wear in the morning, but we must be careful about quick, simple decisions that seem OK without asking God. Things are not always what they seem, as Joshua discovered. We, too, are open to deception. Be very careful, always run it by God first.

Scripture
John 8:44, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:31-32, “Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Reflect

• What lessons can you learn from times when you didn’t go to God for advice before making a decision? How can you prevent that from happening next time?
• How can you help someone who seems to be making a poor decision and it leaving God out of it?

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!