Last year I shared with you some of the ways my youth ministry communicates with teens and parents throughout the week, and last week I posted the entire video of my seminar on the subject, too.

If you watched the seminar video, these points will sound familiar to you. Here are five things to remember about your youth group announcements and how you communicate them.

1. Communication is a fine art that always seems to be morphing.

Each year when I present the seminar, “Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week,” at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference and I have to significantly update the content. It’s shocking how quickly it becomes outdated! Communication methods change so quickly as technology changes, new tools are introduced, and existing tools evolve.

It’s easy to look at communication over the span of decades and see how the printed word transitioned to the telegraph, which transitioned to the telephone and now how the Internet and social media play a role in all that, but we often fail to see the small subtle shifts that happen between them from year to year that slowly outdate our communication methods and morph into new or enhanced methods.

Because it’s always changing, the next tip is cruicial.

2. We must always evaluate our communication methods.

I’ll confess I’ve only been evaluating our ministry’s communication methods for a couple years now. I used to just take other people’s successful ideas and copy them in my own ministry expecting the same outstanding results, but that rarely happens because culture varies from one part of the country to another, even from church to church in the same community.

When I worked at a church in Texas, email worked perfect for us because almost everyone had Blackberrys. If I sent a message out, I had responses back from almost all my leaders within an hour. But when I moved to Minnesota, not only did most people not have smartphones, but they only checked email about once a week. Some people didn’t use email at all.

So I started tracking what works and doesn’t work in my youth group and came up with some very surprising results.

3. On some level, your audience must take some initiative.

You can be the best communicator in the world, but at some point your audience has the responsibility to receive your message. You can’t embed your youth group announcements into someone’s brain, or make the updated event information somehow post itself on everyone’s refrigerator.

While I know many of our churches expect us to spoon-feed them all the information they want in the way they want it, that’s an unrealistic expectation, especially as your group grows. So, relieve yourself of that expectation right now. It’s unrealistic.

You can and should do everything you can to make the information readily available in a format that easy for them to consume, but they still need to take the initiative to get the information and put it on their own calendars.

I serve a group of about 200 weekly active teenagers and every once in a while I get a parent who says, “We prefer if you could just call us each week and update Johnny about what’s going on with the youth group.” My response is always, “No.” All the information is readily available in multiple formats. Pick which one works best for you and go with that.

Which leads to the fourth tip:

4. Communication methods may take some training.

This is especially true if you’ve done some evaluating and determined that you need to eliminate one of your communication methods in place for something else.

For example, maybe the amount of time you were putting into postcard mailings just wasn’t worth the time and expense anymore, but you have three very vocal families in your ministry who demand that you continue the postcards. Maybe you continue the postcards for a pre-defined period of time while transitioning to bulletin inserts. Then you cut off the postcards because they’re just not working like they used to. You have to start training people to look to the bulletins instead. Sometimes that takes time, but training is a very necessary part of communicating well.

Communicating well includes three things:

• You must continually reinforce where people can find information. Repeat it over and over again, especially when you change something about how you communicate mid-week information.
• Be consistent with where you put information. You can’t publish it on Facebook one week, in the bulletin the next, and on your blog another week. Don’t make people play a guessing game.
• Publish information on a regular schedule so people learn when to expect it. I try to get all our youth group’s information published on Tuesdays so they know when to check the website, email, and Facebook for news and announcements. It becomes a part of their weekly routine.

5. Communication is credibility.

This is perhaps the most important part of why good communication is so essential to youth ministries. Way too many ministries miss this.

A youth worker can be a great person, loved by all the kids and teach God’s Word effectively, but if he communicates poorly with the parents and other church staff members throughout the week, there’s an unspoken level of weak credibility because no one’s quite sure what’s going on. When people feel lost and disconnected, they tend to loose trust in their leader.

Conversely, a youth leader may not be a hero to the students and maybe just an average teacher, but if he/she communicates effectively and consistently with parents and church staff throughout the week, there’s a greater level of perceived credibility and trust just because people feel like they’re included and know what’s going on.

Whether you like it or not, how well you communicate really does impact the perceived level of credibility people have of you and your ministry.

What else?

What other tips and reminders have you found to be true for your ministry? Let’s dialog about them in the comments below.

Last weekend at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference I was scheduled to present the same seminar I lead at conference the year before, “Communicating youth group news with teens and parents throughout the week,” except as I was going through my old notes, I was surprised how outdated a lot of it was already. It’s crazy how quickly communication methods can change. So, I updated a lot of my old content, revised many of my points, and added a whole bunch of new stuff.

Thankfully, Simply gave me permission to record a video of the seminar and share it here with you all.

Here’s the link I mention in the beginning of the seminar that contains links to many of the tools, articles, tutorials, and resources discussed throughout the seminar.

You can either watch the seminar in it’s entirety on YouTube in high quality or download it in iTunes in iPod/mobile quality.

Subscribe to LISM media content in iTunes

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This Monday, March 8, we will discuss some of the recent questions and debates from MinistryQuestions.com. Join us and give your input to answering other youth worker’s ministry questions. The live conversation starts at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

Just a quick reminder that that Online Missions Trip starts this Sunday! Greg Stier reminded us about it this morning, too.

If you’re not familiar with the Online Missions Trip, it’s a 2-week campaign to encourage students to engage in spiritual conversations with their unsaved/unchurched friends through mediums where they’re already communicating, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Xbox Live, World of Warcraft, etc.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail. This blog post summarizes it, as well.

And while you’re there, become a fan of the Online Missions Trip on Facebook and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip starting on Sunday.

Also, you have to see this video about this video, which underscores why this outreach campaign comes at such a key moment in history.

[ Visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com ]

Yesterday I posted the general results from the survey I did of this site’s readership, which was really helpful in sharpening the focus of this site for 2010. However, almost everyone left comments and questions in the survey, too.

Since the survey was anonymous, I have no way of responding directly to people, let alone knowing who they are. Here are a couple questions and feedback that was asked by several people and my answers. NOTE: I edited and summarized a lot of this feedback for the sake of brevity.)

I’d like to see more product reviews. We know what saves a young person, but what is the right camera to buy? What is the right program or mac to purchase? This is something that would be helpful and also a good use of God’s money.

While I’m glad to hear you’re like me and like to research products before you buy them, I doubt this will be an area I’ll dive into anytime soon. I’m happy to mention the electronics I’ve purchased for my ministry and make recommendations accordingly, but there are many other websites that do a much better job of offering reviews and advice in this area than I can. I usually use sites like Amazon.com and Epinions.com to check out user-reviews of products.

Of course, you can always ask for recommendations and input on a product at MinistryQuestions.com before you buy something, too. There’s usually a youth worker or two out there who can give great advice on just about anything.

Please carefully proofread your writing. I think the frequent errors detract from the professionalism that you promote otherwise.

YES! I know! It bugs me, too! lol I type about 87 words per minute, but that’s still not fast enough to keep up with my thought process. I notice I often skip entire words as I type because my mind is already several words ahead of what I’m typing. Thanks for this reminder, though. I do need to do this more.

Unfortunately, I’ve watched very few of your videos. When I skim through my emails, I can read text very quickly. When I encounter a video, I don’t know how much time you’ll be taking away from me. If I can’t tell how long the video it, I’ll just skip it.

Great input! Just thought I’d point out that you can see how long each video is ahead of time by looking at the bottom-right corner of the YouTube video. The time duration is there. Hope that helps!

I listened to one episode of ministryquestions.com and I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t very impressed. A significant chunk of the time was taken up by introductions. I suppose that makes sense at the moment but it is tedious and unnecessary for the archive version.

Hmm… yeah, that makes sense. The reason I include the introductions is because I like LIVE YM Talk to be a place where youth leaders can connect with each other, even if it’s just by knowing someone’s name and having a frame of reference for their input throughout the recorded discussion.

I’m interested to hear what everyone else thinks about this. QUESTION: Should I include introductions in the podcast recording of LIVE YM Talk or not?

I’ll admit, the current website/theme is getting a bit old and is appearing “stale.” All my love to you, but after seeing some of your videos, video bumpers, etc. maybe an upgrade is in order?

I definitely agree. I’ve been discontent with it for a long time now. Since this site has kinda evolved on me, a lot of it needs to change. For example, when I made the logo of me in the goofy pose with the yellow lei around my hat, I just thought it was funny and didn’t expect too may other people to visit the site and see it. But now I know the branding of this site is very inconsistent and the design, while functional, is cluttered and busy.

None of the premium pay-for themes out there really fit what I have in mind, so just last week I finally finished saving up enough cash for a custom design and mailed in a check for the first deposit to a designer I hired. Within the next month or two, LISM will undergo the second phase of my site’s relaunch with new a new design and branding. (The first phase was moving to StudentMinistry.org, the final phase will be to upgrade some things with the videos and LIVE YM Talk recordings, but it all costs money, so it’ll take a while.)

Maybe giving away free tech gear, iPhones, or Wii’s? ;)

If someone wants to donate some gear to give away on my site, I’m totally up for that! In the meantime, I’ve showed you how to get those items and more for free, just like I have multiple times.

I appreciate not having to sort through the ads.

Yeah, this is a delicate balance. On one hand, I need to generate an income through the site so I can not only maintain it, but also improve it and upgrade it to keep up with growth. Plus, I love launching new projects like MinistryQuestions.com, which was not only costly to pull off, but is spendy to keep online due to the integrated video recording and streaming. It’s not even close to supporting itself, so I keep it online and maintained with the surplus funds from LISM advertising revenues.

But I also am firmly in your camp where I hate lots of advertising on a site. It annoys me to no end when I see it on other websites. I hate having to sift through the ads to find the content I want. Often I just leave a site altogether and never bother with it again if it’s cluttered with ads. While it’s necessary that this site generates an income, I plan on experimenting with fewer ads and charging more for them when the new design launches in a month or two. Not sure if that’ll work or not, but it’s worth a shot.

I really liked your “big rocks” video post. I have thought of four or five similar videos I would like to make but just haven’t had the time. Do you plan on adding more of these maybe for a small fee or even for free?

Yeah, the “big rocks” video was fun to do! It’s the only video I’ve done like that and, while it’s cool and all, personally I enjoy talking with other youth workers even more. As I mentioned yesterday, the tagline for LISM is, “Conversations among those who are passionate for teenagers.” The interview/discussion format of my videos is more enjoyable for me and fits the direction I’m going with this site better than the inspirational reminders. That said, however, I’m sure I’ll end up doing more videos like “big rocks” again in the future, because they still are fun to do from time to time.

Sometimes when I ask a question on MinistryQuestions.com, after a few answers come in, I’d like the chance to interact with the answers, which I don’t believe is possible right now.

I’ve wrestled back and forth with this question a lot. On one hand, I really do value the interaction and dialog that can take place from something like that, but on the other hand, I don’t want MinistryQuestions.com to just turn into another youth ministry forum. I want MQ to be distinctly unique. Sometime in the future I may pay the developers to build a feature that lets the question owner ask only one follow-up question to each response, but for now the best solution is to send a private message to the person who answered your question, as I talked about on the MinistryQuestions.com blog.

I don’t have the time to listen to all of the podcasts, but there are often topics discussed that I would love to learn more about. Is there anyway to get a text copy of the conversation or a summary of them?

Many people ask for this and, unfortunately, there is no easy way to do it at this point. Transcribing the each conversation would take hours and hours and does not sound even remotely fun. Maybe there’s someone else who would be up for doing that, or even writing a solid summary post about the discussion, but it’s definitely not me. Sorry! There may be some services out there that could do it, but I haven’t looked into them. My guess is that they won’t be too accurate with transcribing anyway.

Anyone else up for doing it?

Other general comments

Technology posts: There were a lot of comments about how you appreciate the articles about using technology in youth ministry, which makes sense, I guess — if you subscribe to a blog you’re probably more technologically inclined and interested about those kinds of things. Since I also enjoy technology, I don’t think writing more about this will be a problem. :)

My transparency: There were also many comments about how you all appreciate my transparency and authenticity on the site. Personally, I don’t think I’m being transparent enough! In 2010 I’m looking forward to sharing even more about my own life and ministry, lessons I’m learning and struggling through.

Networking with LISM readers: Another popular request was something I had never thought of before: a map of the US for LISM readers to use to find other LISM readers in their area. Apparently a lot of you want to connect with other readers of this site on a more personal level than what MinistryQuestions.com or LIVE YM Talk can provide. My initial thought is to refer you all to the National Network of Youth Ministers. They do an excellent job at forming local youth pastor networks and connecting youth workers together in face-to-face communities. But for those who want to connect specifically with other LISM readers, let me give more thought to that and see where it goes. Good idea!

QUESTION: How many other people would be interested in a LISM networking too like this?

On New Year’s Eve I asked how I can make LISM more valuable for you in 2010 and I’m glad I did because 70 of you gave me a lot of very helpful feedback!

Here’s an overview of some of your input, my responses, and reader demographics on this site. I would love to hear your response to all of these items in the comments below!

Overview

I asked this question to see if there were any trends in how questions were answered among newer subscribers as opposed to those who have been around for a while. The answers and comments were all pretty diverse, so nothing really to report there. The number of newer people who responded to the survey compared to the number of long-time subscribers is pretty reflective on how the site has grown over the past several years (i.e. there weren’t many subscribers 2 and 3 years ago).

Both of these surprised me! The main demographic of youth workers I have in mind when I generate content is the new youth worker (2 years or less) who is the main volunteer at a church with no paid youth worker. The secondary demographic I have in mind are paid youth workers who are new to youth ministry. To see that 64% of you are paid full-time and that 65% of you have been in youth ministry for 6 years or more makes me scratch my head a bit. I wasn’t writing for you! lol I feel like my content is a bit remedial for people who have been serving in that kind of a capacity for that long.

But regardless of what I had in mind, it is what it is. QUESTION: Should I start gearing my content more for you youth ministry veterans who have been doing this for 10+ years? I’m humbled you would even consider this site worth reading! Wow.

This site has a lot of international visitors thanks to some decent Google rankings, so I was curious to know if I should start focusing more on youth ministry from a global perspective. To be honest, I’m glad the large majority of readers are from the US because I know almost nothing about international youth ministry. How to work with teens in India, Africa and the Philippines is something I’d definitely have to outsource to someone more knowledgeable than myself.

This chart shows me that, while I have a decent amount of international traffic, almost none of it converts into subscribers, probably because the content is geared solely toward American teens? While it would be cool to help our international brothers and sisters in youth ministry, I feel that mixing international content in with the normal LISM stuff would dilute the focus here too much, but doing a separate youth ministry blog that focuses on that un-resourced demographic would be cool, maybe as a subdomain here or something. QUESTION: Anyone know someone abroad who would be excited and qualified to blog here about international youth ministry?

Aww man, I was hoping video would be much higher because it’s so much fun! Plus, I don’t have to worry about spelling, grammer, punctuation, and all that crud. Oh well. Good ol’ text it is, then… for now.

Freebie Friday and my normal blog posts are out front pretty strong together, twice as far as everything else, which are all somewhat close. It appears that there is value in it all, but that I should focus more on writing content than continuing the different features and series here. My tension is that I try to limit my posts to one a day, which only leaves 2, sometimes 3, days to publish unique “featured” posts.

Right now I have 56 blog drafts waiting to be published eventually. Some of them have been there for over a year and are probably out of date and irrelevant by now. QUESTION: I have enough that I could publish two posts a day for a while, which would be fine for you RSS subscribers, but might feel like spam for you email subscribers. What do you think?

Looks like I could write about anything and someone somewhere would be happy. I appreciate the flexibility! Although, I definitely am more excited about guest posts here at LISM than the rest of you are. I’m probably gonna push that direction a bit more than you guys indicated just because I really value having other voices and perspectives on this site. The tagline for LISM is, “Conversations among those passionate for teenagers,” hence LIVE YM Talk and the youth ministry mentorships. Guest blog posts fit right in with that focus. (If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, check out my guidelines and tips for how to make that happen.)

Tomorrow, answers to your questions and comments

There were several common questions that you all asked in the comments section of the survey. Tomorrow I’ll do my best to respond to a lot of your anonymous feedback and the future of Life In Student Ministry.

Just as many of us are becoming familiar with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, here come two more big contenders that some tech sites are claiming will be the next big wave of social interaction. In fact, CNN calls them “next year’s Twitter.” True to my prediction about why teens will leave Facebook within the next two years, both of these services fall under the categories I suggested would characterize what’s next in the social media industry: It will not be tethered to a computer, and it will still enhance and lead to face-to-face socializing.

About the games

Imagine that the entire world is a giant game board. As you travel from place to place around town or around the world, you receive points via your GPS enabled cell phone for the places you visit and how you interact there. At some venues, you can pick up virtual items left there by other players, leave one of your own items behind for others who visit in the future, and view a log of how each item was picked up and passed along from place to place around the world, like a virtual geocache. If you visit a venue more than anyone else, you could become mayor of that place and earn a reputation with everyone else who visits it in the future as long as you retain your mayorship. (Some restaurants and stores now offer perks to the mayors of their venue, such as free drinks or special coupons.) Race to earn the most points among your friends, see their last location and choose to join them (no more calling everyone to see where they are, just check your friends list and drive over), and also race to earn both a local and global reputation as you travel your community and the rest of the world. There are leaderboards to climb, fun badges to earn, pins to unlock, collectable items to find, new venues to be the first to discover, and so much more. You can also leave notes for other visitors who check-in at that spot later (i.e. “I definitely recommend the chicken sandwich”) or leave notes for yourself that pop-up the next time you visit that venue (i.e. “Try the house salad next time instead of the caesar salad”). It’s a local game combined with a global game with both your friends and everyone else in the world.

The game names

The two big services in this mobile location-based game market are Foursquare and Gowalla. I’ve been playing both of their games for a couple weeks with my Motorola Droid and love it! As a guy who loves role-playing video games, the idea of being able to unlock badges, find items, rank up, and interact with other locals as I do my normal every-day activities around town is quite addicting.

GPS enabled phones with data plans are becoming more and more mainstream (Blackberry, iPhone, Android-based phones, etc.), which will lead to see a rise in the popularity of these mobile location-based games, first with the young-professionals 20-somethings, but then with teenagers. Within the next year or two, the mobile social networking games will become more robust, more competitive, more social and much more helpful and valuable as you travel to new places.

These services are still very new and there’s not much on the web that explains what they are or how they work in really simplistic terms. Foursquare as a half-decent explanation on their site, but Gowalla doesn’t have an explanation save for a brief video on the front page of their website that really doesn’t do it justice. This YouTube video is the best I could find if you want another (better) explanation of the two services side-by-side.

To see Foursquare and Gowalla compared, Mashable has a slightly out-dated chart of the two since Foursquare recently changed the game to be both global and local instead of just local. Now you play not only with your friends, but you’re also ranked again people who are within a 25 mile radius of you.

Another big player in the location-based mobile gaming industry is MyTown. It looks really sweet because it allows users to earn virtual currency, buy venues they frequently visit and charge rent to other players who check-in there, kinda like a big monopoly game in real-life. Unfortunately, I can’t play because it’s limited to the iPhone. Grrr…

Yelp.com recently got in the action by adding location-based gaming to their existing user-review community, and it’s only a matter of time until Facebook gets in the game, taking their millions of users with them to immediately dominate the industry (thereby somewhat negating my previous prediction).

The implications for the future of youth ministry are numerous

• At a glance on your phone, see where your youth group kids are all hanging out and go join them.
• Not familiar with the venue the teens are at? Check with the mayor, or read some of the notes posted about it.
• Know who your youth group kids are spending time with every day.
• Running some errands? Make your trail available so a kid can catch you if you’re nearby.
• Notice that a new visitor who checked in to your church’s venue last Sunday is working at the check-out lane in the grocery store. Go do some shopping there and make sure you check-out on their isle to introduce yourself.
• Leave virtual notes for kids at a venue for the next time they visit. (“Hey John, I talked with the store manager and I already pre-paid your next coffee here. Surprise! This one’s on me. Love ya, man!” Or, “Welcome to school today! Praying for your test, Jill!”)
• Track attendance at youth group. If someone’s missing, see where they are. Notice the youth group guy is with a girl, probably on a date? Take the entire youth group over there and crash it!
• Become mayor of your church to interact with guests, visitors, and even regulars who check in.
• Thinking about grabbing dinner at Taco Bell, but see a couple kids just checked in at Subway across the street? Eat over there instead. (Plus, it’s healthier for you.)
• A visitor comes to church and you notice they’re the mayor of a local bar. Great piece of info and background as you spark a conversations. Or maybe you notice that this person checked into 5 different churches each Sunday for the past 5 weeks. Again, helpful info. Maybe they’re searching for a church home. Drop a cool virtual item for them to take as a souvenir of their visit along with a note.

The list could go on and on, but you get the picture. Some of these location-based features aren’t available yet, like leaving private notes at a venue for a friend, but given some time I’m sure we’ll see this soon. (Remember The Milk already does location-based personal notes and “to do” reminders for GPS enabled phones. Walk into a grocery store and your phone automatically detects where you are and pops up your reminder, “Hey, remember to get cereal while you’re here.” Or, walk into church and your church “to do” list automatically comes up on your phone.)

My take

Personally, I like Foursquare the best because it has a native app for my Droid, the game is easy to learn, and it feels more social than the others. Plus, Foursquare seems to be pioneering the market more aggressively than the competition, which is still pretty limited. However, I really like Gowalla’s “virtual geocaching,” so I’ll probably play them both for now and see what happens.

Feel free to add me as a friend both on Gowalla and Foursquare. If you see that I just checked in somewhere close by you, come over and say HI! This will be especially fun to play with all of you at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference next month!

[ Tim Schmoyer on Foursquare ]

[ Tim Schmoyer on Gowalla ]

Note that there’s no gameplay on the site – you have to be on a GPS-enabled mobile phone for the actual game.

Preempting your criticisms

Before anyone gets too critical about the dangers of location-based services, let me remind you of the cycle of youth culture: everything from Elvis to MySpace is first met with criticism from the older generations before it’s eventually adopted as commonplace just as the new generation is moving on to something else. Since the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over the age of 55, I’d say it’s about time to see the cycle start to repeat itself again very soon. Maybe mobile location-based networking will be where criticism comes next before everyone is eventually doing it, maybe not, but I’m guessing it is.

Yeah, there will be some crazy stalker stories surrounding the games of making your exact location known, and most of us (myself included) still feel a little uncomfortable about giving away that kind of information on a regular basis, but I remember feeling the same way about Twitter and letting everyone know, “What are you doing?” all the time. Now it’s normal. I remember way back when it was a privacy concern to post a picture of yourself online! Given some time and wider acceptance, I expect the same will happen with location-aware social networks, too.

What do you think?

Do you think mobile location based services will catch on? How do you see it impacting youth ministry?

Just a quick note to notify everyone that LIVE YM Talk will now be hosted at BlogTalkRadio.com.

In 2008 LIVE YM Talk was hosted on Skype before we quickly switched to Talkshoe.com, which worked great for a year and a half because it was free and served our needs perfectly. In fact, it still is the perfect solution for LIVE YM Talk, except that a couple months ago it started having a lot of issues with crashing people’s browsers, software incompatibilities, down-time, and more. I’ve been in touch with Talkshoe’s head support rep and, unfortunately, they don’t seem too eager to fix anything, so it’s time for us to move on.

Try joining us again

If you’ve joined us in the past but stopped because of all the technical difficulties with TalkShoe, I’d like to invite you to come back and join us again. Although BlogTalkRadio.com is missing some of the key features we loved at TalkShoe, at least it should be functional — it’d better anyway, I’m paying $39 a month for it!

Each week’s show link will be posted at it’s normal place on the LIVE YM Talk page here at LISM, so check that each Monday for a direct link to listen to the conversation online and access the chat room. We also now have a direct phone number: (646) 721-9140. Or, during the show you can just click a button and connect directly using your computer microphone with no software to install.

Some big upcoming shows!

We have a great lineup of discussions scheduled, including a live conversation and Q&A with Tic Long, the new Executive Director of Youth Specialties, in a couple weeks!

This Monday we’re talking with Eric Iverson, the Multi-Cultural Integrity Director for YouthWorks. He’ll lead us in a discussion about, “What every youth worker can learn from urban youth ministry.”

The Monday after that, on January 25, E.J. Swanson is going to join the conversation about, “How to connect God’s Word with students who appear disconnected, apathetic, and distracted.”

Check out the schedule of other upcoming discussions on the LIVE YM Talk page and join our conversation every Monday at 2:00 PM eastern time!

This past September I announced the dates for the 2010 Online Missions Trip, along with some detailed information about what it is, how it works, and how your youth group can join my groups and thousands of other teens around the world in sharing Christ through social media online.

If you’re not familiar with the Online Missions Trip, here’s what it’s all about:

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online. As youth workers, let’s train them to share their faith and encourage them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January 10-30, 2010

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

January 31 to February 13, 2010

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 14, 2010

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room that will open in 2010, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, become a fan of The OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Page and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you next year as part of fulfilling THE Cause.

[ Visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com ]

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How can I make Life In Student Ministry more valuable for you in 2010? Here is a survey that could give me some valuable insights into you, your ministry, your needs, and thoughts about this site. It should only take about 3-4 minutes to complete. Thanks!

As we enter into 2010, I’ve been thinking a lot about Life In Student Ministry and it’s direction for the future. I’ve been tremendously blessed to create much of the content here, sometimes with you in mind, sometimes just rambling out loud about my own issues and struggles in youth ministry. I presume much of that will stay the same in 2010, but I also want to make some changes that will continue to bless you and your ministry. As you know, evaluation is critically important in preventing something from becoming stale and stagnant, so would you help me with that?

Linked below is a survey that could give me some valuable insights into you, your ministry, your needs, and thoughts about this site. It should only take about 3-4 minutes to complete, so when you have the time, please fill it out and help me serve you.

[ SURVEY: Looking forward to 2010 with LISM ]

All that I ask is that you be honest, courteous and constructive with your feedback.

I pour a lot of time and energy into Life In Student Ministry and the projects that surround it, so criticism can be a little difficult to hear sometimes. However, I think it’s vital to hear it all if this site is going to continue to be a valuable resource for you and your ministry.

I appreciate if you could complete the survey above, but also feel free to leave comments below that could be helpful for LISM in 2010. Give me feedback about topics, types of posts, posting frequency, the site’s design, blog features, MinistryQuestions.com, tools and services, frustrations, ideas, etc. Thank you!

I’m looking forward to an amazing year of blessing you and your “life in student ministry!”

Yesterday I wrote about how new technology becomes a ministry tool and mentioned how that’s happening for Google Wave right now. This post is not intended to explain what Google Wave is or how it works — there are plenty of posts and videos around the web that already explain that. My point here is simply to give an example of how we’ve been using it for personal use until last Sunday night at youth group when it became the most logical solution for ministry use. There are probably other ways to accomplish what we wanted to do besides using Google Wave, like good ol’ pen and paper, but this worked best for our situation.

We just finished up a series with our high school students based on NewSpring’s, “Don’t get married until…” series and wanted to end it with an anonymous conversation between the guys and the girls. The idea was to split the girls and guys into separate rooms and write a list of questions they wanted the opposite gender to answer. We would swap lists, write down answers in our groups for the other gender, and then send the answer sheet back to the other gender to read and discuss.

That sounded good except for the time it would take to run back and forth and the time of writing out all the answers when we could instead be discussing and talking. So, my wife had the idea of using Google Wave to collaborate instead. Here’s what we did:

I went in the room with the guys and my wife went with the girls. We both took our Macbooks, connected to our church’s wifi, and started two Waves, one titled, “Guys questions for the girls,” and another called, “Girls questions for the guys.” We gave each group about 10 or 15 minutes to list their questions in order of highest priority to least (to ensure we addressed their top questions first before we ran out of time). We each listed our group’s questions in the appropriate Wave. Then we switched Waves and started reading the other group’s questions aloud and typed our group’s responses. At that point all the teens really started digging it! In the guy group, after answering some of the girls’ questions, we hopped back to our origional Wave to read how the girls were responding to our questions. We posted our follow-up questions, added other comments, and then went back to answering more girl questions. It was serously a lot of fun!

The guys and girls had a great open and honest “conversation” with each other, feeling safe to ask anything without risk of embarassment or knowing who was saying or asking what.

Since this is a bit hard to explain, especially if you’re not familiar with Google Wave, here’s a screenshot of part of the girls’ Wave and part of the guys’ Wave.

The cool thing about this that I didn’t anticipate was that the teens wanted to continue the conversation online even after youth group ended. So I gave away a bunch of Wave invites to the students and added them to the Wave as soon as they were accepted. It’ll be interesting to see if and how the Waves that started at youth group continue throughout the week. It might be a good follow-up tool or “for further discussion” type of things?

The teens really want to do it again sometime, so I probably will when it’s appropriate for other discussions in the future.

P.S. Speaking of technology, I just wrote yesterdays and today’s entire blog posts on my cell phone, the new Motorola Droid. Who even needs a computer anymore?