Grahame Knox, a veteran youth worker in the U.K., graciously donates a free ebook he wrote called, 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups. It’s full of great ideas to get the blood pumping, adrenaline flowing and teens interacting with each other. Here’s his description:

40 Icebreakers for Small Groups is an ebook compiled from several previous articles posted on my blog Insight. I thought it might be helpful to put them together in an eBook to download. In addition, I’ve added several extra icebreakers which don’t appear in the articles!

Divided into two sections, “Getting To Know You” and “Group Builders,” these icebreakers encourage sharing, openness, listening, co-operation and discussion, providing a creative foundation for a small group study or teaching time.

40 Icebreakers for Small Groups ebook

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.

Featured Skypecast Guest Today

Adam McLane of Youth Ministry Exchange is gracious to join us for today’s Life In Student Ministry Skypecast. Four youth pastors who are connected with his ministry lost their jobs this month, so he’s going to talk a bit about transitions in youth ministry. He’ll also discuss social networking, blogging, and general technology stuff in youth ministry. Come to hear his thoughts and bounce your questions and ideas off him. It starts at 1:00 PM central time this afternoon. More info here.

A huge thanks to Jake Bouma for donating today’s Freebie Friday! He created an icebreaker called “Pseudonyms” that encourages kids to be pretty creative as they come up with new names for themselves. Be sure to check out Jake’s blog at http://www.jakebouma.com/ and thank him for his contribution to all of our ministries.

Here’s his description:

It’s a single page sheet that asks you to combine words to make funny names for yourself, such as your “Rockstar name”, “Hippie name,” and “Spy name.” I was inspired to put this together by a meme I saw floating around the blogosphere. I used it with both my junior and senior highers and we had a hilarious time reading some of our answers.

Download “Pseudonyms”

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.

This week marks one year since I released my free ebook, 130 Youth Ministry Tips and Ideas. It’s full of mistakes to avoid, possible changes to implement, and ideas to consider. Out of all the youth ministry material I’ve created over the years, this ebook is probably the work I’m most proud of. It’s been downloaded close to 10,000 times, so check it out if you haven’t yet.

130 More Youth Ministry Tips and Ideas

I’m working on a sequel to my original ebook, but I’d love for this one to be more of a community effort since most of you have more wisdom and insights than I’ll ever have. Submit your tips and ideas using this form. You’ll receive full credit next to your tip/idea in the ebook with a link back to your blog.

Submit your tips and ideas for the next one!

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.

Earlier this week I mentioned that I’m currently doing a series with my youth group called, How To Study The Bible. I can’t share my notes or PowerPoint because it’s heavily based on copyrighted material from my Bible college and seminary professors, but my dad wrote a similar series back in 1992. I’ve taken it and changed it into an 8-day devotional series. There are several ways to use this. I’ll probably hand out to my youth group to go through on their own time, but you could also use it for one-on-one discipleship (especially with a new believer), use it as small group curriculum, or even teach from it.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to modify it however you’d like for your non-commercial purposes as long as you freely share it with others and include attribution to me and my dad.

Day 1 - Introduction
Day 2 - Observation
Day 3 - Interpreting History
Day 4 - Application
Day 5 - Interpreting Teaching
Day 6 - Interpreting Poetry & Prophecy
Day 7 - Interpreting Parables
Day 8 - Interpreting Types

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.

Grahame Knox, a veteran youth worker in the U.K., sent me a copy of his Prayer Discussion Starters to check out and share with you guys. It’s actually quite good (as all of Graham’s material is), but you should check out his site to get it. He often releases great youth ministry tools and resources like this as free downloads, so I recommend subscribing to his blog if you want to have it all delivered automatically.

Visit Graham’s site to download the prayer discussion starters:

Talking to God: three youth group discussion starters on prayer

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.

Paul Turner of The Disciple Project Ministries donates this week’s Freebie Friday by providing a 3-part small group study he wrote for one of their Discipleship Camps. These lessons help students get past the surface of spirituality and journey towards the deep end of their faith. The sessions are:

1. Under Authority: Looking At What Lies Beneath
2. Under His Power: Making Decisions With God’s Help
3. Under Obligation: Using Your Gifts As the Giver Intended

Each lesson is packed with interactive ideas, questions and handouts. Paul uses the illustration of a pool to help move students from the shallow end to the deep end of the pool. It also comes with a 21 day follow-up plan called “Coming up for A.I.R.” and a resource page with further ideas and activities for teaching the lessons.

Submerged: Leaders Guide
Submerged: 21-Day Follow-Up Plan

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.

Here’s a resource unlike one I’ve ever offered or mentioned here at Life in Student Ministry. The worship director at my father-in-law’s church, Russell Martin, writes and records a lot of his own worship songs. He’s now branching out to give away some of his music as free downloads along with a chord/lyric sheet for others to use freely in their ministries. If you’re getting tired repeating the same songs over and over again, check out some of Russell’s worship songs because it’s free you don’t need a CCLI to legally use it.

His first worship music giveaway is called, “Lord, Let Your Love.” He explains the story behind the song and then offers links to download the mp3 and chord sheet.

Although he hasn’t provided a chord sheet for it, his song, “Don’t Feed the Bears,” is also available on his site and is probably my favorite song of his so far. The analogy he explains about the background of the song paints a funny mental picture in my mind and makes me chuckle each time I listen to the song. What a fun song to use at youth group! I’m sure you could easily come up with a great set of hand motions for it! Maybe he’ll provide a chord sheet or sheet music for this song, too, if you ask nicely.

You can hear more of Russell’s music in the sidebar of his Facebook page.

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.

Ok, so this has nothing to do with basketball or even sports in general, but whatever — that’s still what I call it when I play these four games with my youth group. Each game is played in a mall or shopping center. While in the parking lot, I allow the students to form teams and we synchronize watches. Then I explain the rules and tell them to meet in the food court at a specific time to determine a winner. For every minute they’re late, they lose points. When the winning team is decided in the food court, everyone grabs something to eat. Winners eat free (paid by me).

Mall Madness #1: Cheapskate

Give every team an envelop with $2.00 cash. Whoever buys the most stuff with it wins. Receipts are required to prove they purchased it. No free stuff allowed.

Lest you think there’s nothing for $2.00 in the entire mall, there always is — kids just have to get creative and ask to buy things that aren’t normally for sale, like a drinking straw, crushed Oreos from an ice cream stand, a single eyeglasses screw or someone’s promo brochure.

Mall Madness #2: Professional Prowl

This game takes place inside a department store. Each team has a brief time limit (10 minutes) to pick 10 items from around the store and return to you with their items. Teams then switch baskets and race to be the first team to return the items to their proper places. The first team back with an empty basket wins.

Hint 1: You may want to send an adult leader with each team to make sure items are actually returned to their appropriate shelves and hooks.

Hint 2: Playing this in Home Depot or a large hardware store is only for hardcore groups. Returning individual screws and washers back to their little boxes takes FOREVER.

Hint 3: Let the kids loose before security knows what’s going on. Seriously. lol

Mall Madness #3: Who Am I?

Sometime before the event, walk around the mall and make a list of “scavenger hunt” ideas and assign a point value to each quesiton based on it’s level of difficulty. Make copies of it. The night of the event, hand out the sheets to teams in the parking lot, set a time to meet in the food court and let ‘em loose. The team with the most points wins and eats free.

Download one of my old sheets if you want to see an example.

Hint: Only make questions based on store names, advertisements, window displays and other things found in the mall’s hallways. Otherwise it takes forever and students end up scrounging through every shelf and hanger… and they usually don’t do it in a neat and calm fashion. Make sure kids know not to look inside stores.

Mall Madness #4: Mystery Men

This one is probably the most fun of them all! Arrange for about 8 people to be wandering the mall at your designated event time. Use 4 people the kids know and 4 people they’ve never seen before, like out-of-town friends of yours or something. Encourage these people to dress in a disguise of some sort. For example, one of my characters that the kids didn’t know dressed all Gothic (because he really is Gothic outside of the workplace). One of the guys the kids actually knew wore thick glasses, a goofy hat, grew a beard that he dyed gray, and made himself look about 50 pounds heavier with padding. He also went around the mall in a wheelchair sitting on one leg pretending to be lame.

In the parking lot, give each team a sheet that shows what each person normally looks like. Assign a point value to each person depending on the “difficulty” of their disguise, too. The goal is to find as many of these people as possible within the allotted time limit. Students are to approach these “strangers” and ask if they are the person in the picture. If they are, the mystery person puts their special sticker on the picture of their face and quickly moves on. Encourage students not to linger around the person either so other groups who may be walking by don’t see it. The fun part is watching the kids approach complete strangers and get it wrong!

Tell the mystery people to meet you back at the food court when the game ends so the kids can see who they missed. Let the kids watch them take the disguises off. It’s funny to watch their reactions (and those of the bystanders around you!). Whoever has the most points wins.

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.

Doug Jones is offering a youth ministry resource unlike any I’ve ever offered or linked to here at Life in Student Ministry. It’s called A Journey with Jesus. What’s unique about this journey is that it’s not just a “sit-down and talk” Bible study. It’s an experience of Jesus’ life broken up into 13 scenes/stations, each interactive and meditative. Here’s a little bit of his summary:

It is an active process where I envision groups physically walking through the “scenes” in a manner similar to the Stations of the Cross. It is meant to be done with each station lasting on average of no more than 5 minutes so that you can complete the experience in a little more than an hour or take a bit more time and complete it in two 35-40 minute sessions (you could divide it fairly neatly between the “Public Teaching of Jesus” and “The Lord’s Supper”). You could also use this effectively on a retreat where you were teaching on the life of Jesus.

Visit Doug’s website to read more about it and get the free download. While you’re there, post a quick comment saying thanks for his generosity in sharing this so freely with all of us.

Also, be sure to plug his resource on PlugRug.

[ht Chris]

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.

Dennis Poulette, a youth ministry seminary prof in Mexico, is offering a free PowerPoint trivia game about Peeps. Kinda interesting. If any of your kids actually know all the answers to this game, you probably have reason to be concerned about what they actually do all day.

Download the PowerPoint game directly from Dennis’ site here: Free Easter PowerPoint Game

Be sure to comment on his site and thank him for freely offering his game!

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.