A friend of mine (Aaron Gutridge) has gone back into youth ministry was looking through the Saddleback Resource Notebook. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but a few things are out dated…the principle wasn’t outdated, but the method definitely is…

The principle is this: in youth ministry, it’s important to work hard at being connected with your volunteer leaders.

Our method, years ago, was to encourage all of them to sign up for free email. (Remember when people didn’t have email? YEESH.)

We sent a letter (below) and a CD to each of our volunteers. The CD had a free email program (now it would be called an “app” I guess) from www.juno.com. I refrained from editing my letter, so you could see the original. As I re-read it, I winced several times. Far be it from me to steal away your chuckles at my expense…

Check out the “system retuirements” below… funny…

Free Email!

Electronic mail is to this decade what the fax machine was to the last: a communication tool that has suddenly become an indispensable part of millions of people’s lives. Some 60 million computer users worldwide are currently estimated to exchange more than a billion e-mail messages each month, and these numbers are growing as explosively as the Internet itself.

Until now, however, if you wanted an e-mail address for your personal use and weren’t already at a university or company that supplied you with one, you had to rent one, usually bundled together with a package of other services, from an Internet access provider or an online service. Such companies typically charge their subscribers more than $200 per year, and if you don’t keep paying, you lose your e-mail account.

Juno aims to change all that. Juno provides e-mail service to anyone with access to a personal computer and a modem, and it provides this service at no cost to its members. To take advantage of the free service, members just have to install on their computers a software package developed by Juno

[Included on the disk, and is available from their website: www.juno.com]. The initial version of this software package runs on PC-compatible computers under Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Juno members do not need to already have any form of Internet access in order to use Juno.

Since the Juno service launched on April 22, 1996, more than 3 million people have created free Internet e-mail accounts through Juno. A new Juno account is created every ten seconds.

Your cost to have an email address is nearly nothing, you pay only for the local phone call to Irvine or Santa Ana.

System Requirements
Please note our minimum system requirements:
You’ll need at least a 386 PC, 4 MB of RAM, 15 MB of free disk space, Windows® 3.1, a 9600-baud modem, and a VGA monitor. Juno does not operate over ISDN, LANs, or network connections, and we do not have DOS or Macintosh versions of the software. (We do not currently plan to develop such versions.)

Installation Instructions
Insert the floppy disk into the drive.

In Windows 95:
click on the “Start” button
click on “Run”
type (without quotes) “a:install.exe”
Follow the on screen instructions

In Windows 3.1:
Within the Program Manager, click on “File”
click on “Run”
type (without quotes) “a:install.exe”
Follow the on screen instructions