A New Youth Ministry Tradition - Offering Cell Phones

We started a new tradition at our Sunday night youth group Awake event a few months back.  We call it: Cell Phone Offering.

On Sunday nights, we basically offer a program that is church for students.  We have a couple of excellent teen worship bands.  We play games... have a message from God's Word... give out prizes and more.

While we don't take up an offering at our Sunday night crowd program... we do ask them to give an offering.  After our welcome time, we ask them to power down their cell phones, iPods or other electronic devices.  We started doing this as part of a series we were doing called "Focused" where we talked about all the distractions vying for our attention.  During that series, we thought it might be a good learning to power down our phones for the 90 minutes that we meet youth group so that we could practice focus.

The idea has stuck.

We don't force anyone to do it.  We put out these baskets, our Sunday morning adult worship service offering baskets, on each of our tables and ask our students to power down their electronics and put them in the offering basket as an offering of attention and focus to God.  Most of our students do it.  And I think, from what I hear, most of our students really like it.

It's a simple idea that has stuck.  Plus, it gives our students an opportunity to connect with God without the distraction of Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/texts/etc.

Just a thought.

Those of you who know me know that I love technology.  We aren't doing this as anti-technology.  We don't use cell phones officially in our service (all the Scriptures used are printed on their bulletins) so we are just eliminating the distraction.



Jim

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Youth Ministry Tech - Dropbox

I don't think that I've blogged about this... If I have, please forgive me.  But I just really love this tech.

I love the Dropbox program!

I have multiple computers that I use on a regular basis for different things.  My main MacBook pro.  But I also have an iPhone.  Hopefully soon, I have an iPad.  I also have a windows computer that runs slides in the hallway at church.  Additionally, my wife has a MacBook.  I'm always moving files around to different machines or wanting to have some of those files on my phone and will want them on my iPad (when I get it). 

Dropbox is perfect for that. 

It's free.  You can create a free account HERE.  It creates a file folder on the harddrive of your computer.  Whatever documents, pictures, files, etc, that you put into that folder will be available on whatever other computers have access to that folder.  If you want to share a file, document, presentation or whatever with someone else, you can create a shared folder with anyone.  They can upload from anywhere they have internet and "boom!", it's on your computer, iPhone, iPad, iPod or whatever you have it linked to (depending on your network speed and the size of the doc, pic, etc, it might take a couple of minutes to upload).

Easy peazy!!!

I use this program to share documents with folks around the office.  My wife puts documents in there that she wants me to see or that we edit together.  I put mp3s in there of music that I want our student worship band to check out.  I put docs on there that I want to have access to on my phone. Good stuff.
You get a small amount to start out.  But if you jump through a couple of hoops, you get some more.  If folks join based on your usage, you get some more (up to 16gb).  It's not great for moving huge files like 2gb movie files, as it take a while to upload (unless you start it and walk away for a couple of hours) but it still works pretty great! 

Check it out and get started HERE.  Would I steer you wrong?

JC



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iExit (All Stays) - Youth Worker Tips

This blog post falls into the Youth Worker Tips and Technology section. So if you aren't a youth worker, this post may not apply to you. (But if you are a dad taking the family on a vacation this summer... you might wanna keep reading...)

A couple of months ago, I downloaded an app that I thought would be useful. I didn't realize how useful until this weekend.

If you are a youth worker who takes students on trips... any kind of trip or any length of trip... and you have an iPhone, you need this app.

Here's the basic gist of the app and I think you'll see why this is helpful. When you load it up, it uses the GPS in your iPhone to find you. Then it tells you what exits are coming up on the interstate ahead of you (based on your direction) and what restaurants/gas stations/hotels/etc are at that exit. It will also tell you what the nearest rest area is and how far away it is.

We had a couple of situations this weekend when we're traveling along and students needed to go to the bathroom... Boom! I load up the app and I know how far it is to the rest area or whether we should go ahead and stop now. No more "maybe just a few more miles... can you hold on... hoping there's a rest area around the next corner..."

Also, if you want to provide multiple selections for a lunch stop (cause nobody can agree on McDonalds, Taco Bell or Wendy's... why not all three?), it shows you the best exit to stop for that purpose. It also provides you with phone numbers (if you want to warn the restaurant before your posse of 55 middle schoolers and 3 adult leaders is about to descend upon them) and addresses if you need to reprogram your GPS to take you there. You can also... although I haven't done it yet... save certain exits as favorites so you can remember them for the future.

It's a great app. And for $2.99, it's a pretty good buy for those youth workers who are going to travel with students this summer... or any time.

Pick it up HERE. You won't be sorry!

Jim