Yesterday I wrote about why I’m abandoning outreach events and gave several reasons why “outreach campaigns” may be a more effective solution.

For several months now I’ve been planning an outreach campaign for my own youth group and am excited to have other youth groups join us! The best part is that it’s completely FREE! We’ll be going all over the world, sharing the gospel with friends both in our local neighborhoods and friends far away. It’s an online missions trip, a “missions trip to Facebook,” if you will.

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 about things that don’t really matter in light of eternity, let’s train them to share their faith and push 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 whatever-31, 2009

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.

February 1-14, 2009

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 15-whenever, 2009

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, a Facebook app you can use, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, join the OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Group and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you in February.

———————————————————————————

Thanks to YouthBytes, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and Xtreme Youth Alliance for their support, promotion, and free resources for the Online Missions Trip! Thank you Brian Ford and Michael Rothermel for all your help in creating content and tools for this missions trip that will bring teenagers to Christ! And thanks Janelle Painter for designing the Online Mission Trip logo!

My dream for providing content and online community for youth workers is growing like crazy! It honestly is gets a bit frustrating to have all these ideas from the Lord while having no budget to pull it all off. Sure, I could litter this site with advertising and product reviews that often aren’t really worth your money; I could create a members area and charge for “premium” access; I could even just ask for financial donations. But all of those options are directly opposed to why I make youth ministry resources available for free in the first place, or they suck up what little time I have and leave no time for working on the projects they’re supposed to fund.

What kind of projects do I have in mind? Without revealing too much too quickly, how about a free missions trip this winter with your students and many other youth groups all over the country? (Yes, that’s right, a free missions trip sponsored by ministries like Dare 2 Share, YouthBytes and Xtreme Youth Alliance! Your kids will not pay a dime.) Two other big ideas are still in early development stages and one is in queue to be released within a couple weeks.

So, I’m excited to launch MinistryWebsites.biz, a small business that provides state-of-the-art websites to ministries using one of the most cutting-edge and user-friendly management systems I have ever seen. Seriously, this commercial system makes it so easy and simple to create and manage a slick website that your grandmother could figure it out in less than 5 minutes.

My hope is that this side-project will generate enough income to support all the youth ministry projects here at Life In Student Ministry and allow my time to be focused on development instead of fund raising.

If your ministry wants to establish a web presence for communication, MinistryWebsites.biz is the perfect solution. Check out the features, the free web designs, and the pricing. While you’re there, sign up for a FREE 3-page website.

P.S. If you’re a professional web designer or a php/mysql programmer and are willing to donate some time toward these upcoming youth ministry projects, please contact me. I need your help!

As some of you know, I’m heading up the daily email Bible studies for Xtreme Youth Alliance, Bill Scott’s new ministry. The ministry just launched a couple weeks ago, so it’s still pretty new, but teenagers are signing up for the Bible studies every day. The part I love most is that my own youth group students (both present and former) are writing the lessons for their peers and they’re doing an outstanding job!

Bill Scott is also podcasting Bible studies every day so students can listen to the Word on the bus, working out at the gym, riding their bike or whenever else they listen to their iPods.

XTREME DAILY BIBLE STUDY BY EMAIL

XTREME DAILY BIBLE STUDY BY PODCAST (iTunes link)

The resource part of all this is that you can post links to these Bible studies on your youth group’s website as an extra encouragement for them to stay in the Word on a daily basis. For example, here’s what I did with my own youth group’s site.

Better yet, here’s the code you need to integrate these daily Bible study tools directly into your youth group’s website, MySpace or whatever else you use.
 

For the EMAIL BIBLE STUDY sign-up box that looks like this:

Copy and paste this code into your youth group’s website or MySpace:
<div align="center">
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="border:2px solid #000000;">
<tr>
<td align="center" style="font-weight: bold; font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000000;">Xtreme Daily Bible Study by Email</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center" style="border-top:2px solid #000000">
<form name="ccoptin" action="http://visitor.constantcontact.com/d.jsp" target="_blank" method="post" style="margin-bottom:2;">
<input type="hidden" name="m" value="1101687881433">
<input type="hidden" name="p" value="oi">
<font style="font-weight: normal; font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000000;">Email:</font> <input type="text" name="ea" size="20" value="" style="font-size:10pt; border:1px solid #999999;">
<input type="submit" name="go" value="Go" class="submit" style="font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:10pt;">
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
 

For the PODCAST BIBLE STUDY box that looks like this:

Copy and paste this code into your youth group’s website or MySpace:
<div align="center">
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="border:2px solid #000000;">
<tr>
<td align="center" style="font-weight: bold; font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000000;">Xtreme Daily Bible Study by Podcast</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center" style="border-top:2px solid #000000">
<font style="font-weight: normal; font-family:Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000000;"><a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=258910527">Subscribe in iTunes</a></font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
 

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[tags]Bible study, Bill Scott, youth group[/tags]

Some of you may remember back to my post that tried to help a friend of mine, Bill Scott, come up with a name for his new ministry. Well, he settled on Xtreme Youth Alliance and it launches tomorrow (Sunday) night on over 80 radio stations around the country. If it does not yet air on a station near you, you can always listen to it live at SpiritFM.com, 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM ET.

The show will be somewhat like his previous ministry’s radio show, ZJAM, featuring the latest in Christian music, interviews, teen discussions, prizes, and more. The online ministry will also be similar, providing live chat with prayer partners, daily Bible studies, forums, one-year mentorship program and podcasts. However, with the backing of the American Association of Christian Counselors, this is only the beginning of a totally unique ministry. With the AACC’s support, Xtreme Youth Alliance has the ability to grow bigger, become more effective, take more risks and reach more teenagers than ZJAM could ever have dreamed.

For now, my part in the ministry is organizing and sending out the daily Bible studies. I did this for ZJAM for three years, but I’m taking a different approach to it this time. Rather than writing all the Bible studies myself, I’ve recruited a team of teenagers from my past several youth groups who are mature believers and have a desire for God’s Word. Together, they’ll be writing the daily Bible studies for their peers, more like a Bible study by teenagers for teenagers. Any gaps that arise I’ll fill in with my own studies. So far these students have written excellent material. By the end of the show Sunday night, Bill expects to have several hundred students signed up for the Bible study and by the end of the year, I anticipate several thousand will be on the mailing list. I’m really excited to see the spiritual impact these teenagers are going to make on students around the world.

[tags]ZJAM, XTRLive, Bill Scott[/tags]