More Than Dodgeball is the show for youth pastors by youth pastors. What would happen if two youth pastors with decades of experience created a show with segments that could be stolen for your own youth ministry? Find out in this episode of More Than Dodgeball.
Sidekick just keeps getting better!
The newest update to Sidekick was just pushed live and it includes a TON of things you’re gonna like!
Drag and Drop reordering is hereYou can now reorder and organize any file manually! Change up the order of your Trivia questions, adjust the layout of items in Boxes or the Wheel of Destiny, and order your teams in Leaderboard to make it easier to update the points and announce who’s in the lead!
Hide Next WinnerWe heard you! Seeing the next winner isn’t always what you want. Sometimes you just want the computer to decide and you not know the winner. So now, in all of our ‘picker’ builders (Boxes, PickMe, PhotoFury, Wheel of Destiny) you can now hide the next winner from view.
Improved PerformanceFind more details about the fixes and features AND upgrade to the newest version* by clicking the Gift icon in the top right-hand menu.
When you’re ready, click Update and Restart. The update will happen automatically and you’ll be ready to go in no time! *Be sure you’re connected to the internet before you begin the update!
We hope you enjoy Sidekick as much as we do! As always, if you have any questions, reach out to other users in the DYM Facebook Community OR email us anytime at [email protected].
GREAT NEWS!
We just released a Sidekick update: bug fixes, improved performance, and an ‘Add Bulk Image’ feature in PhotoFury and Pixelate.
NEW! Now, instead of adding images one-by-one, you can select a group of images to add to your Pixelate or PhotoFury files!
To do this:
1) Click [+Bulk] on the Edit Tab.
2) Drag and drop the images you’d like to add to your file and click Add.
It’s that easy! Just a few clicks and you have a full set of images ready to go… imagine the possibilities: add photos of your students and leaders as they walk into the room. Forgot to shop for prizes? No problem! Load photos of whatever you have laying around and make it look that this was the plan all along!
Find more details about the fixes and features AND upgrade to the newest version* by clicking the Gift icon in the top righthand menu.
When you’re ready, click Update and Restart. The update will happen automatically and you’ll be ready to go in no time! *Be sure you’re connected to the internet before you begin the update!
We hope you enjoy Sidekick as much as we do! As always, if you have any questions, reach out to other users in the DYM Facebook Community OR email us anytime at [email protected].
We had some serious fun making announcement time great at #NYWC18 this year. Here are the two announcement videos you loved or may have missed! Enjoy!
Hey friend!
I’ve done Fall planning in youth ministry for more than 20 years. Summer is over and I even managed to sneak in a few days of “staycation” – it’s time for Target “back to school” sales and Old Navy’s endless ads. I’m excited about what God did at summer camp and watched students grow, and I’m now asking God’s Spirit to guide me as I set the course for the Fall.
There’s a lot to process heading into this season—and a lot of opportunities and obstacles to be aware of. Here’s what I feel like learned over the years about heading into Fall:
Back to school means back to Jesus
Many students take off in the summer months or their schedule is just so random with vacations, sports camps and beach days that they can’t always be counted on to be a part of our youth ministry. My own kids experienced summer school, a first job and intense sports camps the past few months making for a crazy, always-running house. But going back to school is the grounding force that brings everyone back and the more formal schedule allows church to be dropped into the mix and a priority once again.
Momentum for the whole year starts in the fall
Momentum is a fickle thing, so the start of the school year with a big Fall Kickoff or Back to School bash feels like a good chance to rally students together and encourage them to make the right friends and participate in the right community. So I carry over any momentum from summer (a great camp, baptisms, etc.) and go right into a big Kickoff event and felt-need series to get everyone back in the groove. I want to launch small groups or mentoring around this time to keep the momentum rolling through Christmas to get to the New Year.
Familiar themes work great in the fall
I like to focus on some familiar themes in the Fall. They’re timeless… Honestly, I can get tired of teaching the same things every year, but they are too important to pass up – so I find a way to “reskin” these themes every year: purpose/identity, relationships and spiritual growth.
So having done this more than 20 times, I thought it might be fun to show you a plan for what the fall could look like, and wrap it up in one sweet bundle if you want to a) get a great deal and b) let me do the planning for you.
FALL KICKOFF
FIRST SERIES OF THE SCHOOL YEAR
Pair it with these games with an easy connection to a biblical truth from a purity/relationships series.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH SERIES
A FEW ADDITIONAL TOOLS:
All of these resources have been written and created by youth pastors and trench-tested. That’s what DYM is all about! This is a great deal–$97 worth of resources for just $50–BUT if you become a yearly DYM Gold Member, you’ll get this bundle for FREE. We already call the Gold Membership ‘The Greatest Deal in the History of Youth Ministry’: (a new game, video, student leadership lesson, and mystery item on the first of the month every month, PLUS monthly store credit and DAILY discounts) but adding an additional $97 of free resources? That’s just too good to pass up! Click here to find out more about becoming a Gold Member.
Praying for an incredible fall!
Josh Griffin
20+ years youth pastor
Co-founder, Download Youth Ministry
P.S. – ADDED BONUS: Fall is also THE key time to train your volunteers, so I’m tossing in a $25 off code to unlimited, on-demand video training courses for you and your team on Download Youth Ministry University. It’ll revolutionize the way you train your leaders! https://www.dymuniversity.com/ (Psst! If you go Gold, you’ll save $50 on DYMU!)
I have decided to make this a series of posts as I look back and reflect on the culture of inviting our group seems to have and look at how we have gotten to this point. Check out:
Creating An Inviting Culture: Take A Good, Hard Look At Your Service
We are gearing up for our student lead series called YOU OWN THE NIGHT next month. For 4 weeks in a row, we have no adults on stage. Everything is planned by and for students. Each a week a different high school takes over the night and gears the service to something they believe their school needs to hear. I’m not going to lie, it’s a lot of hard work to make this happen but it’s always one of my favorite series we do all year long.
You can check out a very detailed way to pull this off in the DYM store HERE.
I believe this has fast-tracked the initing culture of our ministry. Our motto for this series is, “Every student on campus gets an invite.” We know not all students will come through CCV Students but we will make sure they know what it is. I have given you some main reasons why a student lead series will help with an inviting culture below:
Students take ownership and pride in ministry. Schools have rallies and big rivalries for sports and students own it all. They make posters, sport their colors and logos and go nuts for school. Why? Because they own it. Allowing students to take over, does the same thing.
Students reach is far greater than yours (youth pastor). I can go around campus and interact with the students I know and meet a few of their friends in the process. When students take ownership of a service, they want to invite friends and have them be a part of the service in some way and their friends come to see. We have had students who would have never stepped foot on a church campus come, hear the Gospel, accepted Jesus and now are some of our core students. All because students owned the night.
It allows your leaders to connect with brand new students…. who don’t go to church. Nights like this, leaders get to be strictly relational and meet brand new students. They get to be cheerleaders to the students they know and are involved with the service. They get to have fun and support what the students have had planned for that night.
Students pay WAY more attention to their peers than you. The selfish side of me wishes this was not true. What did your senior pastor teach 7 weeks ago? Students listen to students better. Students teach better to their peers. We have students write out their whole testimonies and they read it straight from the paper and it’s way more powerful and engaging than if I were to memorize and give to most epic sermon ever. When they see someone like them on stage, they are brought in and God can grab their attention in a way that you as an adult cannot. Students teach students better.
When students say “me too” it’s powerful – When students have the opportunity to share, they can hear the story of one of their own and have the opportunity to say “me too”, and that is powerful. When a student can hear another student’s story and hear about the sin, addictions, struggles of those students and say “me too” it’s memorable. Then they God hear what God does when lives are fully given to Him and then they can say, “I want that too”. It gives hope that God can move in their lives too.
Over the last year since we have been tracking it, we have not had one service where there was at least one student who was not invited and came for the first time. I know, crazy. Not saying this to brag but saying this because this is the culture in which we have been striving for the last 3 years.
How?
There are quite a few reasons, to be honest. But one of them has come from taking a good, hard look at our services and asking some very tough questions about them. Questions in which could hurt your heart if you do not come to these questions with a humble heart.
These questions are not to be mean, but to be honest with how your service operates if you really want an inviting culture with your group. These are questions we asked and worked through ourselves.
Ready?
These are just a few questions we have asked over the past few years in order to have an intentional inviting to new people service. I’m sure there are more so I would love love to hear some of the hard questions you have asked when creating an inviting culture for your group.
You heard it correct.
Every event we do is attached to a Wednesday Night service. No more Friday night, random event. No more event that a few friends of students who don’t come to service that won’t come to your youth gathering. No more wasted budget.
Truth is, we did this for a long time. This is what I have grown up doing in my own youth group and when I first started almost every event was a stand alone one. We made the switch a few years ago to only doing events that are attached to our Wednesday night program and it has been so fun to see.
**Side note: Is this the only way to do this? No. Do I think you should not do any event outside your service night? Maybe not. I know plenty of ministries who do really well with separate events and in their culture, it works really well with outreach. In our context, we found it did not.
Instead of having an event in hopes students would invite a friend to and then hope that new friend might come check out a service, we have both on the same night. This way, one of our students can invite a friend to an event where they come to a service first and then stay after to be at the event. This way new students are exposed to what a church service is like, they can see our worship, see our culture, our teaching and then have some fun with friends after services.
All events are free for students to attend.
Yes, we budget knowing all events are free, but it’s strategic when we ask for budgets for the year.
We get 100% participation for events so we know we are getting our money’s worth.
Students have something to invite a friend to on top of service. It makes it a little easier for students to gain confidence to ask a friend to come.
Yes, the events are shorter because we don’t want to go super late (especially during the school year) but if you do them well it won’t matter. There is nothing worse than an event that should have ended 20 minutes ago anyways. End it on a high note…early. Leave them wanting more.
Every friend that gets invited comes to service in hopes to start a relationship with Jesus. They are exposed to the Gospel and a loving church community and we don’t need to worry about if they show up for an event and never seeing them again.
It helps students invite friends to service even when we don’t have an event because it’s now a part of our culture. This is what it’s about.
We don’t do it every week. We have events certain times of the year. Strategically placed, every year so students know when they can invite those friends they know would never step foot on a church campus otherwise.
We (I’m talking about me here too) can get so down when students do not invite friends. We wonder why they don’t but we don’t ask ourselves if they even feel comfortable what they are inviting their friends to. We can’t assume what is happening now is something our students want to invite friends too…especially those who have no idea what church-life is and what to expect. In a culture where more and more students are growing up in homes where their parents are not churched, helping students engaging their friends is up to us.
If you have something your students would want to attend then your students will want their friends to attend as well.
For us, getting rid of stand alone events has been key to developing a culture where students invite their friends to our service.
PS: Have you checked out the new DYM Podcast Network? If not, you need to.
GAME: Cell Phone Shoot Out – Truth or Dare:
LEADER TRAINING: The Power of Encouraging Words
SERIES: THAT’S WHAT HE SAID
GAME: What Would You Do For A Klondike Bar?
EVENT: Extreme Bingo
SERIES: ROMANS IN 5
• In a world where students are Biblically illiterate, I think we ought to make it a priority to teach students the importance of scripture. This series is great because the outlines are just that: outlines. They are not manuscripts, but instead some main points to help you dive into Scripture yourself and then help your students understand it as well.
GAME: Impossibler 4 Corners:
• The game prompts students to move around the room to the corners marked A, B, C, or D. When the question is presented, students must move to a respective corner, but here’s the catch: they’re trying to get the answer WRONG. Whatever corner answers correctly is out. If you want to add even more fun and twists, add a dodgeball element to it. As students are switching corners, have leaders play dodgeball. If a student gets hit by the ball, they are out!
I recently asked my student leaders to evaluate who our ministry talks about most: God the Creator, Jesus the Savior, or the Holy Spirit.
My student leaders waffled between God the Creator and Jesus the Savior before one eventually suggested, “I think we talk about God more but you emphasize Jesus most.”
When I asked this student leader to explain what she meant, she described how whenever I ask a question, she and her peers almost always answer it with a statement about God. I then turn that “God-language” into either a question or statement about Jesus.
She’s right. With annoying frequency, I turn God-language into Jesus-language. Why?
Because in my research about what teens believe about Jesus (published in The Jesus Gap), I found that one thing that contributes to a poor Christology is when we talk about God when we really mean Jesus.
As youth workers, we do this a LOT. Since we know that Jesus is God, we use the two names interchangeably.
However, this is confusing for students. For them, it makes no sense that Jesus can be both fully human and fully God. To them, that belief seems to defy the laws of both biology and reason.
To help teens understand this better, it’s important to address Jesus’ humanity and his divinity rather than to emphasize one over the other. It’s also important to talk about Jesus – and not just God – when we mean Jesus.
After all, Jesus is what Christianity is based upon. Jesus is the heart of our faith. Jesus is also what distinguishes the Christian faith from all other religions.
Because he is, Jesus is also the hardest part of the Trinity for students to talk about. They fear that in doing so, they’ll stand out, be made fun of, or be labeled intolerant. Since teens are far more likely to talk about God than Jesus outside our church buildings, unless we’re careful, this God-language will make its way inside our youth rooms as well. And when it does, that can be dangerous.
Because even though it sounds good, when students talk about God, they don’t necessarily mean Jesus, which is problematic since Christianity rises and falls on Jesus.
As youth workers, it’s our job to help students understand who Jesus is, what he did, and why he matters – not just to their faiths but to their lives.
You cannot do that unless you actually talk about Jesus. And you cannot talk about Jesus by just talking about God.
So, youth workers, don’t replace Jesus with generic God-language. Be intentional about talking about Jesus. Then challenge your students to do the same.
Doing so will enable teens to better understand Jesus.
And when teens know and understand Jesus better, lives change. Both their own and others.
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To help your students better understand Jesus, check out Jen’s student devotional, The Real Jesus, which includes 50 short devotionals that address the gaps found in the research published in The Jesus Gap.