Someone recently emailed me with some good questions about my youth group’s vision to go Deep and Wide. Thought I’d share them with you here, along with my responses.

1. What difference has the deep and wide program made to your youth ministry on the ground compared to any program you used before?

Going “deep and wide” is not a program. Taking kids “deep and wide” is our mission statement, purpose statement, core values, strategy, and our philosophy all in one simple vision for teenagers. It directs and determines our programs, the content we teach, the relationships
we build, and every other aspect of our ministry, but it is not a program.

2. What are the positive (and negative) you could share with me about it?

There’s really nothing negative about it. It follows Jesus’ commission to “go into all the world” (go wide) and “teach them to obey everything I have commanded” (grow deep). It’s also the great commandment to “love the Lord your God” (grow deep) and “love your neighbor as yourself” (go wide). Everything is wrapped up in those two inseparable aspects of Christianity: worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism, missions, everything.

If you want to read more about it, Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share Ministries) wrote a thesis on it that goes into more detail.

3. One concern I have about the material is [your] use of the word “push” which could potentially have negative connotations in terms of “pushing” young people to make a commitment. Maybe this is a difference in our theologies but there have been several ministries…over the years (of which I was involved in one as a young person) that have “pushed” young people and for many this has had long term negative fallout. I agree that we ought to be hastily encouraging young people to have relationship with Jesus and to share it, but I am keen for that relationship to be long term. Do you have any thoughts?

I understand your hesitation with the word “push” and I agree with what you’re saying. Too many churches are very passive when it comes to encouraging teens in their faith. We think that if we talk with them once a week at church for an hour about it, then that’s sufficient to help them grow. But in comparison to everything else in their life — academics, athletics, band, family, relationships, whatever — they are definitely pushed. There are expectations and boundaries for each of those things that are much more rigorous than what we expect of teens spiritually. Mormons, for example, expect their kids to go to seminary for classes every day early in the morning before school and the Mormon drop-out rate is almost 0! We barely expect that they show up at youth group.

So, when I use the word “push” I mean we need to raise the standards and expectations of spiritual growth in kids lives. According to my theology, we are all naturally sinful and rebel against the things of God. Pursuing Him does not come natural for any of us. That’s why it requires some gentle, sometimes forceful, pushing. In my experience, never has a kid rebelled against that. In fact, they always rise to the challenge and start seeing Christianity as something more than just a wussy thing on Sunday mornings.

The kids who are spiritually apathetic need to be challenged the most. Jesus said, “teaching them to OBEY everything I have commanded.” Sometimes we have to challenge kids to just try what Jesus commands in an area of their life, and as they see that it really works, that this
is real and not just old Bible stuff, they start to become more interested. As they continue to obey and follow the Lord and see Him at work in their lives, then they move to becoming more excited about their faith and then passionate. That doesn’t mean teens (and even myself) don’t fluctuate spiritually, just that we are striving to obey the Lord in every area of our life.

Ultimately, you’ll have to be sensitive to how much you “push” a kid. It’s different for every teenager. Some need a lot of accountability, challenges, and follow-up. Some only need to be “pushed” once.

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Time Out (by Jerry Schmoyer)

While some are more prone to self pity than others, I guess everyone has had a time or two when they’ve indulged themselves in it. Depression isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy to defeat. While there are various contributing factors, central to victory over depression is a strong faith in God. When we get our eyes off Him we sink emotionally just like Peter sunk in the water when he focused on the waves instead of Jesus in the boat. Elijah was a great man of faith, but when he lost focus he, too, sank.

After experiencing God’s power in a way few ever have, he ran away depressed. Challenging the priests of Baal was a draining experience and Elijah was exhausted when God burnt up Elijah’s altar and sacrifice. The priests of Baal were killed and the people turned back to God. But Jezebel threatened Elijah’s life and he fell apart. He forgot how God had protected and taken care of him when the raven fed him and when he lived with the poor widow. Instead he withdrew from the people and places he knew and told God he was tired of living and wanted to die. He said he was the only one still faithful to God and he was tired of it all. He got into a deep depression, felt sorry for himself, didn’t think God cared about him any more and even wanted to die.

What did God do? Well, God didn’t lecture him, scold him, reject him or punish him. God let him talk, had him eat and sleep, then let him talk again. After eating and sleeping some more told him to get back to work. God reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who had stayed faithful to God, that others had as well. Elijah got his eyes off himself and back on God and went on to continue his fruitful service as a prophet.

We can, too, when we do the same thing. Proper diet, enough rest, good exercise – these are foundational to keep good emotional and spiritual health. But even more important is to keep our eyes on Jesus, trusting Him no matter what happens It is easy to get our eyes off of God and onto ourselves when things get hard and we face difficulties and opposition, especially if we are physically or emotionally drained. God still loves us. He is still there. We are not alone. We need to stop believing those lies. We need to get your eyes off ourselves and back on Him!

Scripture
1 Kings 19:3, “I have had enough, Lord,” Elijah said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

Psalms 42:11, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

1 Peter 5:7, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Reflect

• Are you prone to self-pity and depression?
• What usually triggers it in your life?
• What can you do to help prevent depression from taking over?
• How can you help someone else who is going through depression?

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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!

It’s hard to feature free youth ministry resources every Friday without mentioning Simply Youth Ministry’s freebie page. Simply has tons of free resources available, spanning over the past several years, in categories like small groups, sermons, discipleship, training, games, drama, videos, forms, and a lot more.

If you haven’t recently checked out Simply’s freebie page, it’s be worth your time to do so.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

The idea

As I’ve written before, on overnight youth trips I like to embed my Twitter account’s RSS feed into our youth group website so parents can get the play-by-play action of our trip while we’re gone. They love it for so many reasons!

Now that our new youth group website includes a special LiveStream just for our group’s online social activity, I’m taking the mobile updates to a new level for this summer’s youth group trips. Instead of all the web updates, mobile pictures and videos coming solely from me, I’ve opened it up so all the kids on the trip can contribute to our LiveStream while we’re away. I think there’s a couple benefits of this:

• All the kids feel like they have some ownership in sharing the story with what’s going on.
• Parents can see and read the trip from the perspective of the teenagers.
• Parents feel included and have a lot to talk about with their teen when they get home besides asking, “So how was it?”
• We have an ongoing “digital scrapbook” of pictures, short video clips and updates for every trip. Everyone can contribute to it.

How to set it up

I’ve already explained how to setup the website for collecting all the updates. The rest of it is really quite simple. It basically entails setting up a couple email addresses and passing them on to the kids to send updates, pictures and videos to.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your youth group. Twitter is limited to receiving updates from only one mobile device, so I use TwitterMail.com to setup a special email address for the youth group’s twitter account that can receive messages from anyone. Any message sent to that special email address is automatically posted to our Twitter feed.

2. Set up a TwitPic account for your youth group. TwitPic.com allows users to take a picture with their mobile phone and post it to their Twitter updates. Again, you’ll get a secret email address to send pictures to that will automatically publish the images to Twitter.

3. Set up a YouTube account for your youth group. Then grab the mobile “secret address” for your YouTube account. Any videos that are taken with a cell phone and sent to that address will automatically be added to your YouTube account.

Once all your youth group accounts are setup, plug each one of them in to the Lifestream WordPress Plugin you setup on your youth group’s WordPress website.

Then, right before the trip, give the teenagers the “secret addresses” for Twittermail, TwitPic and YouTube and let ‘em loose (within reason, of course). I recommend encouraging them to add the email addresses to their cell phones as individual contacts for easy access. And it might be best to ensure that you or someone at home has access to moderating the messages through the plugin throughout the trip just in case something inappropriate is posted.

And no, teens do not have to send messages as an email for this to work. Sending a text message, picture message or video message to an email address works just fine for most mobile providers and does not usually require a data plan or incur extra charges beyond their normal messaging plan.

For advanced users

Since I plan on utilizing this for most of our overnight trips, I want the kids to be able to use the same “secret addresses” over and over again without having to update the contacts in their phone for every trip. But neither do I want them to be able to continue updating the LiveStream on our site randomly throughout the year. I want to control when they can and can’t update our youth group website with those addresses.

So I went into our webhost’s control panel and created an email forwarding address for each of the services: one for the TwitterMail address, one for TwitPic address, and one for YouTube address. (For example, trippics@alexandriayouth.com forwards all messages to our secret TwitPic address and tripupdates@alexandriayouth.com forwards all mail to our TwitterMail secret address.) Instead of handing out the original secret addresses, I instead hand out the forwarding addresses to kids so they can use them on every trip. For the time between trips, I will delete the forwarding addresses so no messages pass through to the social stream during that time.

Plus, it just looks cool to use addresses from your own domain.

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Look what I got for FREE!

Six months ago I told you all about how I got a free Xbox 360 Elite, iPod Touch and more for free. I try not to blog about this too often because some of you think this is a scam and some of you just get too envious, but for everyone else, twice a year doesn’t feel like too much to keep you updated on the free stuff I earn and information on how you can get these items for free, too.

Since my last post on freebie sites 6 months ago, I’ve earned a free Canon HD video camera, and external microphone for it, and a Macbook for my wife. All for free. Not bad, eh? Here are some proof pictures. (Click an image to see it larger.)

How it works

1. Companies (like Blockbuster, for example) are looking for new potential customers to try out their products and services.

2. Blockbuster goes to the Bonus Network and says, “Hey, we’ll give you $80 for every customer you send our way to try out our online DVD rental service.” (Some advertisers pay Bonus Network $80, some pay them $40.)

3. So Bonus Network comes to you and says, “If you try out Blockbuster’s service and refer other people to try it through us, or one of our other advertising partner’s services, we’ll split the $80 with you for each person you recruit.”

4. You try out Blockbuster’s service and get 6 other people to try it, too (or another product/service offered through Bonus Network’s site) by giving your friends and family a special link that Bonus provides for you to share. (Of course, your friends can then get people to sign-up under their special link so they can work toward a free prize, too, but know that the people they refer have no benefit for you.)

5. After your 6 friends try a product or service, Bonus Network says, “Thanks! We’ll give you $240 ($40/referral x 6 referrals) or an iPod Touch. Which do you want?”

6. About a week later, your prize shows up in the mail, or your money shows up in your PayPal account.

Interview with co-owner of Bonus Network

Last October I interviewed a co-owner of the Bonus Network, Fehz, about his company and how it all works. Watch it below:

List of Bonus Network sites

*The login you create at one Bonus Network site is valid for all the other sites.

Prizes	Sign-up Link	100% Legit
iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, cash	BonusiPod.com
iPhone, Apple gift card, cash	BonusiPhone.com
Wii, Wii Fit, cash	BonusWii.com
Xbox 360, Halo 3 edition, Xbox 360 Elite, cash	BonusXbox360.com
PlayStation 3 (40 GB), PlayStation 3 (80 GB), cash	BonusPS3.com
Laptops from Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, more, cash	BonusLaptops.com
Plasma TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, more, cash	BonusPlasmas.com

Common excuses

Most people would love to earn some of these free prizes, but there’s three common excuses:

1. It’s a scam!
2. I’ll get hit with a ton of spam mail.
3. Completing offers costs more than the prize itself!
4. I don’t think I can get others to complete referrals for me.

For #1, check out my story above and the links below. I’ve done it several times and received several prizes, so I know it’s not a scam.

Concerning #2, I have not received one single shred of spam as a result of completing these trial offers or freebie sites, not via email nor postal mail. These companies actually have pretty aggressive privacy statements.

Number 3 also is not true. I’ve paid about a total of $100 out-of-pocket for all these free things combined. The most I ever paid for a single offer was $24.98 for a sheet of photo stamps. Most offers cost between absolutely nothing and $15. Some of the services I stuck with past the trial because I really liked what they offered. Some of them I didn’t like and canceled when the trial period was over. There’s no commitment either way, except that you complete the offer and give it a fair chance.

And about #4, check out this post I wrote that gives 10 ideas for how to earn referrals for your freebie site. They work for me, anyway. It may take some patience and persistence to get the first prize (especially if you’re going for a big one), but after it shows up on your doorstep and you have physical proof for the skeptics, all the other prizes flow in pretty easily. In fact, after I got my Xbox 360 Elite, I tried for the 16 GB iPod Touch and it took only 5 days to get all the referrals I needed!

My other prizes

For almost two years now I’ve been getting free stuff from freebie sites online. The list of prizes I’ve received is too long to name each item individually, but here’s a start:

• FREE Xbox 360 Elite, 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, Halo 3
• FREE 16 GB iPod Touch
• FREE 32 GB iPod Touch
• Canon HD video camera, external mic for the video camera, Macbook. See above. (I took cash prizes and purchased these items on my own.)
• and thousands of dollars in cash from the iPhone site, PS3 site, Wii site, and more.

If you have any questions about the process, I’ve done it many many times, so feel free to ask in the comments below. Fehz, a co-owner of the Bonus Network, will also be around this post in case you have any questions for him, too.

Time Out (by Jerry Schmoyer)

Greed and foolishness aren’t limited to the young, but young people seem to fall into that trap quite regularly. With age and perspective comes wisdom, at least some of the time. However, without that important asset it is easy to let pride and self-centeredness rule. That’s what happened to the man who replaced Solomon as king, his son Rehoboam.

When Rehoboam took the throne the people demanded a remission in the severe financial burden that Solomon had imposed to carry on his building activities. Rehoboam said he’d give them an answer in three days. That was a smart move for there is always time to make a good decision. Forced reactions seldom turn out well. Take time to thoroughly think and pray about important decisions.

During this time Rehoboam talked to his father’s advisers who advised him to give in to the people and lesson the burden so the nation would continue strong and whole. But instead of taking this advice Rehoboam consulted the young men who grew up in the palace with him. They didn’t have the maturity, wisdom or perspective to make a good decision about this, but they were his friends. Perhaps peer pressure had something to do with it, but obviously Rehoboam liked their advise better for it boosted his ego and would increase his wealth. Their advice was to actually increase taxes and show the people who was boss. “Don’t let them tell you what to do, show them you are tougher than your father was. Show them who is the king!” Unfortunately, Rehoboam liked this advice for he took it. The consequence, though, was disastrous. The northern 10 tribes broke away and he was left with Judah and Benjamin. The 12 tribes would never again rejoin to form a united nation. The days of Israel’s glory were over and her decline was swift.

It’s so easy for us today to think we know what is best and not realize pride and/or greed are motivating us. We want to do what impresses our peers and feel we know better than those who are older. Then we later regret our choices. This is true of everyone, from youth pastors to university presidents. Be careful of searching out those who will give you advise you want to hear. Learn to listen to those who disagree with you and would point you in a different direction. If they are wise, godly mature people pay close attention to what they say and don’t dismiss it lightly. Peers are great to enjoy, but outside perspective can offer a lot of good sense. Learn from Rheoboam – take godly advice.

Scripture
Proverbs 12:5, “The plans of the righteous are just, but the advice of the wicked is deceitful.”

Proverbs 12:15, “The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice.”

Proverbs 19:20, “Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.”

Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Reflect

• When was the last time you made a decision you regretted? What made it so bad?
• Was there greed or self-centeredness involved?
• Are you aware of the limits of your age and perspective when you make a decision, or do you feel you know better than those you might consult?
• Who do you go to for advice and guidance? Are they will qualified to direct you?
• What do you do if you don’t like the suggestions they make?
• What major decision are you making now? Who are you going to for advice?

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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!

Today in our LIVE YM Talk, Rob Kashow talked with us about teaching theology in youth ministry. We didn’t get into any theological debates, but we did cover a lot of ground.

Some of the things we talked about:

• Ideas for integrating theology into our teaching
• Some misconceptions about theology
• Why theology is important
• Evaluating who should teach and who shouldn’t
• And a lot more…

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

June 26: Next week’s topic and guest is still to be determined. Keep your eye on the LIVE YM Talk page and Twitter for details as they’re released this week. for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Each month our church comes together for an evening of worship that’s intended to be open, flexible, experiential and interactive. It’s always a great time!

Last week everyone was given a little rock as they entered the room and we used it for a couple symbolism things throughout the evening. I led the prayer time using the following meditative prayer outline I put together below. Feel free to use it with your groups as a way of breaking the prayer ruts we often fall into.

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The rock can represent a number of different things. Let’s prayerfully reflect on it together.
If you want to move to another place in the room for more privacy, kneel, feel free.

• Feel the stone. Study it. How is it unique from every other rock in existence? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• How are you unique from every other person created by God? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: Psalm 139:1-18, 23-24

Rocks can also causes us to slip and stumble, to loose traction in our walk.

• What’s causing you to slip and stumble in your walk with the Lord? What are you tripping over? Pray about it. (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: 1 Corinthians 10:6-13

The rock can also represent our burdens, the things that weigh us down.

• As you look and feel your rock, what burdens does it represent in your life? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• How is God using that burden to teach you something? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: 1 Peter 5:3; Matthew 11:28-30
• Place your stone on the floor in front of you, symbolizing that you’ve laid it at the feet of Jesus.

But most importantly, the rock represents Jesus. He’s the only one who can help us, grant us victory, and be the solid, firm foundation that our lives were intended to have in Him.

• In what areas of your life do you need Jesus to be your rock? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: Psalm 27:1-8, 13-14; Psalm 28:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 18:1-3
• Think about what it means for Jesus to be “the rock of your salvation.” Praise Him, thank Him, and worship Him for that in prayer.
• Pick your rock up again and hold on to it as a reminder of Jesus being your rock.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Rob Kashow who will talk with us about teaching theology in youth ministry. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.