for the love of panic

I was out of town & offline this weekend when everything started breaking loose with swine flu.  I believe it’s tragic that people have lost their lives because of this disease & I hope that people wiser than i are able to quickly and effectively provide treatment and help for those suffering from it.

however, i’m deeply, deeply concerned by the media and general public’s response to this disease outbreak.

Seismos pt. 5 – the 6 inquiries we settled on

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations. We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be. Mark Oestreicher’s “Youth Ministry 3.0” formed the leaping off point for our discussion (many of our thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read it). On this seventh post (intro, first, second, third, highlight video, fourth posts), we’ve (finally) arrived at the point where we were ready to pick some topics to drill into more specifically.  

Seismos pt. 4 – YM 2.0 appreciative inquiry & related thoughts

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations. We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be. Mark Oestreicher’s “Youth Ministry 3.0” formed the leaping off point for our discussion (many of our thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read it).  For this sixth post (intro, first, second, third, highlight video posts), I’m going to outline our appreciative inquiry of Youth Ministry 2.0 & some of the questions that came up related to it.  By the way, sorry about the delay since the last post…I’ve been on spring retreat with my middle schoolers & am finally back & recovered & ready to keep rolling on here.  I’m interested to hear your feedback

seismos – video break

check out this great little video that Tom Roepke put together using animoto (by the way, if you don’t use animoto, you should!):

more notes from our conversations to come over the next few days (week)!

Seismos pt. 3 – initial conversations & YM 1.0 appreciative inquiry

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations.  We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be.  For this fourth post (intro, first, second posts), I’m going to mention a few of the thoughts that were brought up during our first conversation & reflect on them as well as outline our appreciative inquiry of Youth Ministry 1.0.  

seismos pt. 2 – a beginning list of questions

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations.  We’re meeting for three days to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be.  For this third post (you can see the first two here & here), we’ll dive into our first real discussion, which we used to list questions that had been raised the last few weeks as we’d read the book and thought about it.  Some of these questions are very directly connected to material in the book and some are more general questions.  The next several posts after this will include appreciative inquiries of Youth Ministry 1.0 and Youth Ministry 2.0, and then discussions of what we decided our top 6 questions were.

seismos pt. 1 – the future of youth ministry

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations.  We’re meeting for three days to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be.  This is the second post, which will give you a glimpse of who is here participating in the conversation.

Seismos?

This Monday through Wednesday (April 20-22, 2009), a group of 17 youth ministry professionals gathered together for 3 days of dialogue about the future of youth ministry.  Many of us have felt some sort of discontent with where youth ministry is at.  We have great foundations to build on…mentors we’ve learned from, a plethora of material to sort through and use, experience to build on.  But we’re interested in considering together what it means to continue to be as effective as possible in reaching the younger generations for Christ.

We’re using Mark Oestreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0 as the base for our jumping off point.  Marko’s done a great job of creating a very readable and provocative manifesto about where we’ve been in youth ministry and some possibilities about where we could.  While we’re all in different places and agree & disagree with different parts of Marko’s ideas, it’s great for starting the conversation and allowing us to figure out how it applies to our context.  Over the next several days, I’ll be posting notes from our time as I’m able to and hopefully some reflections as well.  Look for the first installment of who’s here to come during lunch time

new newsletter

one of the difficult parts of youth ministry is figuring out how to effectively communicate all of the information that you have to parents.  i think this is even more difficult with middle schoolers (though i’m sure that that’s its own debate), as any paper you give becomes filled with holes or turned into a paper airplane and any announcement, if heard, is promptly forgotten.  anyway…enough complaining : )  last month i started doing a bi-monthly newsletter.  i’ve done newsletters in the past, but hadn’t had one since i started at First Friends, so i took the opportunity to redesign & try and come up with something more compelling than the normal newsletter.  take a look & let me know what you think (i admit it is a little out-of-date now…i’d been intending to post it here for awhile but never got to it).

what other avenues do you use as primary communication options?

(ps. this is the smaller version for easier viewing.  our print copy looks a little crisper.)

magnetic.

Seth Godin recently had a provocative post on the current state of marketing.  the basic gist of it was that marketers have abused their power so much that now, to properly spread a message, you have to go above and beyond and “overwhelm the market with long-term, generous marketing that we (the customer) have no choice but to start paying attention again.”

as i read the post, i couldn’t help but think about the church today.