Text Messaging Service for North Terrace Youth!!!

Texting is the way to go. Most communicate via text... especially students. So we are in the process of gearing up a texting service for our students through Simply Youth Ministry Texting. The texts will be updates about upcoming events, sign up sheets and important information about current happenings of the youth ministry.

Students, we are passing out green colored cards over the weekend for you to sign up on if you would like to join the service.

If you don't want to wait, you can sign yourself up. Follow these simple links and you'll be set up and ready to roll with the texting service as it gets started. (You can opt out on down the road if you decide you don't want the updates.)

Don't worry parents... we haven't forgotten about you. You can sign up too so we can let you know important information and trip return ETAs. You can sign up below as well.

High School Students sign up here:
Sign up for our TXT message alerts!

Middle School Students sign up here:
Sign up for our TXT message alerts!

Parents sign up here:
Sign up for our TXT message alerts!

Let me know if you have any questions!
Jim

TXTing in church...

I saw THIS on TONY STEWARDS' BLOG:

Here's a couple of snipets:
"The spotlight shone on the Rev. Mike Schreiner on Sunday as he preached about who goes to heaven and how earthly relationships will translate in the hereafter. Off to Schreiner's right, the steady glow of dozens of cell phones lit up the section where the teens of Morning Star Church sat listening to the sermon, thumbs furiously working little keyboards. High above the 700-seat sanctuary, Amie Haskins, 27, the director of worship, sat in the church's control booth receiving their text messages on the church's cell phone. She screened out some (most were about whether pets would be in heaven — a point she knew Schreiner would be addressing later in the sermon), and typed others into a computer that was connected to Schreiner's laptop next to him. During Schreiner's 30-minute sermon, Haskins received 35 questions.
Schreiner answered just three of them, but the church's embrace of texting — this was the third week of its experiment — has already improved the dialogue, according to Schreiner, and energized many of Morning Star's younger members. "I love it," said 14-year-old Kailey Elfstrum, who had her text all ready to go even before Schreiner's sermon began. "You get to ask the pastor anything you want while he's talking." Her friend Maddie Howard, also 14, agreed. "You don't want to admit your sins to the rest of the church, but this way you can still ask something important," she said."

Its an interesting way to engage the culture. But as someone who teaches occasionally in adult worship and almost every weekend in student worship, I don't know if I would be agile enough on my feet to adjust my message to address questions.

Currently at FVCC, we do have text message updates for high school students (if you are an FVCC high school student, click HERE) and middle school students (if you are an FVCC middle school student, click HERE), but we don't have any current technology to put this into play. But I would love to see firsthand someone who is doing it.

As technology increases, the church needs to figure out what part of it is good and that we can use and what part isn't useful and should be discarded. But the more time that passes, it seems that texting is something that is useful and is here to stay.

What do you think?

Jim