Million Miles Film Contest
April 22, 2010 | Category: The Closet, Videos | Leave a Comment
Hey we are entered in author Don Miller’s Million Miles short film contest, and I’m asking for your help. Here’s how you can help, Vote!!! You can vote once a day from each computer you can get access to (ie. your home, your work, your iPhone). Please click the link below and click on the thumbs up! Then if you don’t mind please let your friends know to vote too. Post it on your facebook, twitter it out, call your friends, mass email, whatever ways you can think of. It will be deeply appreciated:
Here’s the link to the video: http://bit.yl/9DeruK
Tags: crazy, extras, funny, Help, humor, matt rothacher, odd, random, unconventional, Video, Videos
Strategy in Staffing Volunteers
April 19, 2010 | Category: Stuff you should steal, The Closet | Leave a Comment
Several years ago I was looking for wisdom on how to restructure our ministry to be prepared to handle ministering to hundreds of teenagers, I took my wife, pastor, and at that time our lone volunteer to Indian Springs Baptist Church in Bryant Arkansas the ministry that Mark Cox now heads up. I learned a lot during that visit and rather than tell you how I handle adults I asked Mark to share how he does it:
I didn’t get into youth ministry because I’m organized.
God called me.
He equipped me to start.
He’s been equipping me ever since.
That means I wasn’t a genius right out of college.
Have you ever taken a spiritual gift inventory multiple times over the course of a couple years and seen different responses each time?
I have. The crazy thing is that as I grow, I can see God changing my desires and gifts. For example, I’m not a natural speaker. The first ten talks I gave should’ve been video taped and kept on hand for entertainment purposes. Seriously, you’d laugh. Things have changed over the years as I learn what works and what doesn’t in that arena, as well as many others.
This change is especially happening in me in the area of organization. Let me pause for a moment to issue a quick disclaimer. I’m not what most people would call organized. If my youth workers are reading this, they’re most likely laughing to themselves, knowing that this is definitely not where my gifts lie. And I would agree! But since I started in full-time ministry five years ago, I’ve really grown in this area.
One of the key areas that demand organization in youth ministry is volunteer staffing. It’s probably not a surprise to you that youth ministry happens largely on the backs of committed volunteers that make the thing happen week in and week out.
One of the major pitfalls of youth pastors is to recruit volunteers into standing around on Wednesday nights. The excitement usually dies after about a month, when the volunteer usually ends up feeling like they aren’t really helping with anything. And in most cases, they’re not. But it’s not their fault. It is the job of the youth pastor to invite volunteers into the youth ministry for two main purposes:
- To provide an environment for teenagers in which they can experience God in a real way.
- To give the volunteer a vehicle for spiritual growth in their own life (serving = growth)
Sadly, a bunch of volunteers end up dropping out because they don’t feel like they’re making a difference (read: they’re not growing). If we’re not leading adults into an organized vehicle for serving, they will drop out.
Our strategy for staffing volunteers goes a little something like this (before I go on, you should know this article isn’t about recruiting volunteers; it’s about what you do with them once you get them).
- Only do what only you can do. I stole this line from Andy Stanley because it’s genius. If you’re the one person in your church that can communicate God’s love to teenagers, why are you spending all your time running a vacuum or picking up the pizza? Invest most of your time into preparing excellent messages! Before you start recruiting volunteers, you need to know what you’re great at. Start with the three things that you’re great at. These are the things that make you super-valuable to your church. These things are why you got hired. Focus on these things and have volunteers help you with the rest.
- Define the needs of your student ministry. What do you offer to your students each week? Do you serve food? Do you play games? Does your room need to be clean? Each of these areas need to be covered. Decide from the beginning that you’re not going to get involved in these areas, other than providing leadership and resources to those who will.
- Save yourself time by delegating authority. This is simple, but dangerous. Some of your volunteers have gifts in the area of leadership. Put the volunteers that you would trust with your children over the other volunteers. To do this, separate the major areas of service into departments, and staff each one of them with a volunteer leader. For example, our student ministry contains five major areas (Inside Operations, Outside Operations, Crowd Control, Service Programming, and Counseling. Everything that we do is broken down under these five areas of service. For instance, the café that we open each week falls under the leadership of Inside Operations. The parking lot attendants fall under the leadership of Outside Operations. I don’t ever need to be worried about having enough counselors at the end of a talk, because my Counseling Director has that taken care of. In order to do this, it takes two strong elements: leadership and organization. If you want to expect people to be strong in their area of leadership each week, it takes continual direction. Also, instead of offering the eternally-coveted “stand outside and make sure no one dies, is making out, or making pipe bombs in the parking lot” task, you give your volunteers authority. You can usually make this change pretty simply. It’s all about the words you use to achieve the same result. Instead of asking someone to watch the students in the parking lot (boring), invite them to ensure that each and every student is able to enjoy their experience while they’re outside. That takes care of a lot of simple tasks (welcoming, keeping it safe, hanging with them). The difference isn’t in the tasks that need to be taken care of. It’s all in inviting someone into a greater responsibility than just a watchman. After all, are you in youth ministry because you like to supervise kids? I’m guessing not.
- After you’re done coaching your volunteers, coach them some more. This is hard for me to talk about because it’s a personal weakness of mine. It’s natural for me to think that the initial direction was enough to inspire people to commit to excellence for an entire year of weekly service. This just isn’t the case. Everyone needs to be reminded why they serve, and what’s expected of them. The easiest way to do this is to creatively show them the effect they have on what happens. As I said before, it’s inevitable for volunteers to fall into the “I’m not making a difference” trap. Murphy’s Law applies to everyone. Fight this! One of my volunteers once told me something that changed the way I looked at youth workers for the rest of my life. She said, “Mark, you just need to treat us like we’re 3rd graders.” I immediately reassured her that I had too much respect for them to do that. She then helped me to understand that everyone needs reminders; even the most committed youth workers. Think about all the things a 3rd grade teacher has to remind her students of. How many times do they need to be reminded that they have homework to do, or to turn in permission slips? Exactly.
It’s all pretty simple once you recognize a couple important goals:
- What am I really good at?
- What are the things that I would ruin if I got involved?
- What services do we want to offer our students each week?
- How many people is it going to take to pull all of this off each week?
The beautiful thing about learning how to organize your volunteers in the environments is that it frees you up to focus on what you do best – the thing you got into youth ministry for, to see teenagers’ lives changed!
You can download Mark’s Volunteer application: YW Application (Final)
And the Remix Job Descriptions here: Remix Positions Packet
-Mark Cox is one of the premier youth pastors in the state of Arkansas and his passionate and sincere heart is still serving the people at Indian Springs Baptist Church in Bryant Arkansas. To get more from Mark check out his blog www.thinknextnow.com, and be sure to get his insights via twitter, and catch up with him on facebook.
Tags: adults, awesome, discipline, extras, great ideas, How To, ideas, volunteers, Wednesday night, youth ministry
Announcements: Video Style
April 8, 2010 | Category: Stuff you should steal, Videos, You do what? | Leave a Comment
So we’ve all been there in front of the room of teenagers trying to remind them of the deadline for Summer Camp or the cost of bowling, and we all know the difficulty in actually relaying the information. I’ve seen it done a variety of ways and I’ve even done it multiple ways myself. I have however found that in my opinion the video announcements have been the most effective. Why? Because for some reason we’re trained to watch whats on the screen as if its more important than the people around us. I say let’s take advantage of this poor culture shift and at minimum relay your important information. Like when the “Listening to other people class” begins.
I’ve always called our video announcements the News (FBC NEWS, Underground NEWS, etc.) but feel free to call it whatever “Update” “Info” whatever sounds catchy to you. In my nearly six years here at Parkers Chapel I’ve done the news three distinct yet similar ways, and I wanted to share them with you to give you an example of what I’m talking about.
2004/2005
When I first started back in the fall 2004 and into through the 2005 school year and summer I found student volunteers to use as news anchors.
Advantages: I believe that this way is probably the most effective way to get your teens to pay attention. They are more likely to listen to their classmate than you or something else.
Disadvantages: You totally have to compete with the competitive lives of your students. Which makes it extremely difficult to get both of your anchors there at the same time. Also, it relies on the fact that you have some charismatic teens to deliver your announcements. Its also another one of the those areas where you should hold your students to a higher level of accountability spiritually if your going to frequently have them in front of their peers.
Note* I have found that the best way to deal with the scheduling is to plan out your announcements several weeks in advance have your students bring multiple outfits and then film for an hour or two and do several months worth of announcements. You might miss the impromptu announcement but you’ll nail the majority which is better than not having news at all one week cause you couldn’t work out the scheduling.
Bonus: This video contains another great way to captivate your teens, show them footage of themselves. The fear factor montage was shot at our weekly games and then we simply plugged it in the video.
2006/2007
For the majority of 2006 & 2007 I was pressed for time and scheduling with my news anchors after moving between several I became desperate to find actors with schedules that were wide open in fact they didn’t even have to be breathing or move for that matter. I have some random toys on my shelves in my office so I grabbed Smokey the Bear & Yoda and shot a few different angles of them on my desk with some blue construction paper behind them and then went in and added voices. Please forgive the sound, its sloppy I know.
Advantages: The obvious advantage here is that after the initial filming unless you just have a desire to change the background you don’t have to ever film again which brings the time it takes to produce an announcement clip way down. Obvious plus, who couldn’t use more time. As well it lets you wait until the night before or morning of to finalize your video giving you the most up to date announcements (None slide through).
Disadvantages: Your dialog has to be pretty captivating. Since there is no actual people on the screen to watch you’ll most likely need a gimmick of some sort (Our students loved Yoda’s backward speech and bluntness towards the bear). The other obvious disadvantage is if you don’t do or are uncomfortable doing voices. In my opinion as is witnessed here, they don’t have to be good. In fact they might actually be funnier if they aren’t so grab a Hulk Hogan pillow or a troll doll (you might wanna put some pants on it) and give it a shot.
Note* Initially we had a mini plot-line between the bear & Yoda where they didn’t like each other and I found random videos like the bear getting on the top of a power pole touches the transformer and is blown off (search youtube a definite must see), or a street performer dressed as Yoda singing Britney Spears (Again Youtube should have it otherwise google it). Also, at the end you’ll notice that Yoda mentions a student (little Austin Collins) and we threw up a pic from Kindergarten). That started as Yoda showing off his ability to use the force, and he made a red dot appear and then disappear and then all of sudden he says Alan Mooney and the picture of one of our seniors popped up. Everyone laughed so hard that the next week I made him bring up Alan Mooney again, and then little Alan Mooney which was his kindergarten picture that I got out of a kids year book. This brought on even more laughter and the next week in anticipation of the end after Yoda says may the force be with you he’d say little so and so and throw up their picture to the surprise of the student and delight of the rest. A perfect example of the gimmick or hook that I mentioned in the Disadvantages section.
Bonus: The special feature is another way to keep their focus. This was around the time that Napoleon Dynamite was big so these Utah State Fair videos were a great example of clean funny stuff. Youtube is a great resource for this. Search for Super Bowl ads, crazy videos, people falling down is always great. Find something you think is funny and around 1 – 2 minutes.
2009/2010
For the later part of 2007 and most 2008 when we did the news I went back to using students (junior highers that were easier to schedule), but in the winter of 2009 I found LT. LT is a freeware program from crowd control games I thoroughly enjoy him.
Advantages: All the simplicity of Yoda & Smokey with the bonus of a moving gimmick built in. LT is very simple to operate, he has multiple one button reactions for example pressing #1 makes him smile goofy, #2 makes him look surprised like he’s saying “OOOOOOHHHH”
Disadvantages: The major disadvantage for using LT as your spokesperson is that he’s designed to be used live. What that means is you most likely will need another program in order to capture his movements and make him available for editing. I use a simple program called Snagit which ran me about $50.00 so while LT is free to use him, this way may not be.
Note* I have found that he has much more possibilities because of being designed to use him live. For instance he could Emcee a conference or awards night or DNOW or whatever you wanted to use him for, plus live he could call out a student thats not paying attention and freak everyone out. However you use him he is worth the download.
Bonus: LT has three preset backgrounds and four shirts as well as the black screen background and the green screen. So if your editing software has green screen capabilities then you can make LT be anywhere.
Well that wraps up this lengthy yet informative post on the art of video announcements. I suggest you try out whatever method will work best for you and get filming! Trust me announcements will neve be the same.
Tags: annoucements, awesome, cheap, crazy, FBC News, fun, funny, great ideas, How To, humor, ideas, News, odd, random, Video, Videos, Wednesday night, youth ministry
What I Learned About Loving People From Robert Pattinson
March 29, 2010 | Category: Students, The Closet, Videos | Leave a Comment
What I learned about loving people from Robert Pattinson
Tags: awesome, great ideas, helpful, ideas, illustration, important, informative, Jesus, Robert Pattinson, unconventional, Video, Videos
Spiritual thoughts from the Chick-Fil-A
March 16, 2010 | Category: Students, The Closet | Leave a Comment
So unfortunately we don’t have a Chick-fil-A in our town, in fact you have to drive about 2hrs to get to one. Needless to say if I happen to be near one come mealtime we stop. Tonight we ate at the Chick-Fil-A in Conway Arkansas, and while we were eating my wife made a neat observation, everything is more pleasant inside the Chick-Fil-A, because the staff of the restaurant is overly polite and helpful.
This was really intriguing to me, when I looked around everyone seemed to be in a great mood, having polite conversations with not only their party but the people seated nearby. Then it hit me: Positive breeds positive. Isn’t that what lots of our churches are missing? I mean can’t that one sour attendee suck the joy out of the whole place? We need to be a people that act like we have something amazing in our lives. Something positive that makes us behave like we’re blessed, joyful even. We should be those folks that are on top of the world, after all Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we could hang out with Him on a daily basis. If that doesn’t make you happy then something is wrong my friend.
So today try and take a page out of the Chick-Fil-A handbook, and be a happy positive person. I bet it rubs off on those around you. Win, win, win.
Tags: ideas, illustration, important, Jesus, random, unique thoughts
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