Category Archives: Announcements

Announcements

Connect with Youth Online During Home Quarantine or Social Distancing

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In this time of social distancing due to Covid-19, it is important to connect with youth online using the available social platforms. You may not be able to meet in person for Church Worship, Bible Lessons, Sunday School or youth group meetings, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose contact with your youth. In fact, in this time of uncertainty, they need your guidance and care more than ever!

With today’s technology, meeting online is easier than it has ever been before. Most youth will have access to a mobile phone, a tablet, or a computer. Not only do they have access, but many of today’s youth are already using these devices and platforms to connect with each other. In fact, you might have a few students in your youth group that can give YOU a few lessons on how to effectively connect online.

Best Online Social Platforms for Connecting with Youth Groups

08 PAX – FREE – Google Duo (Mobile App Only)
10 PAX – FREE – Skype.com * (Voice=25 PAX, BIZ $2 per month = 250 PAX)
25 PAX – FREE – u.cyberlink.com (Paid for more users. 30 Minutes Limit)
50 PAX – FREE – Facebook.com (FB Live = 1000’s PAX, Grp Video – 50 PAX)
100 PAX – FREE – Zoom.us (Free for 100 users – 40 min time limit)

* You can’t start a group video call in Skype for mobile devices. You need the computer version. However, you take part in it with audio only.

In the next few posts, I’ll give some ideas of games and activities for video conferencing that you can use with your youth to build relationships. I’ll give you some teaching ideas as well.

Announcements, Humor, Teaching Illustrations

New Year Resolutions from the Dog

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  • Try to understand that the cat is from Venus, and I am from Mars.
  • I will try to leave the cat alone, once in a while.
  • I will no longer be beholden to the sound of the can opener.
  • Call PETA and tell them what that surgical mask-wearing freak does to us when no one is around.
  • Take time from busy schedule to stop and smell the behinds.
  • To always scoot before licking.
  • Grow opposable thumb; break into pantry; decide for MYSELF how much food is *too* much.
  • January 1st: Kill the sock! Must kill the sock! January 2nd – December 31st: Re-live victory over the sock.
  • I will NOT chase the damned stick unless I see it LEAVE HIS HAND.
  • Next time I fart I will not whimper – so that someone else gets the blame
  • I will worry less about things I can’t eat and play with
  • To smell more things that look interesting
  • To pick more fights with shoes and pillows
  • To take more opportunities to forget what I am doing and nap instead
  • Pay more attention to fallen cactus to avoid owies on the walk.
  • To hog the bed; stretch & spread out; hog the covers.
  • Stretch out on the couch in such a way where there’s no room for peoples or the pets
  • Only reserve kisses for times after making a public display of licking my butt or burping.
  • Counter surf more discreetly.
  • Have my way with the roll of toilet paper. Drag and decorate DIY style throughout the house. Martha Stewart would be proud.
  • Greet strangers with gusto. (Notice ME!)
  • Wag more, bark less.
  • Have a torrid one-night stand with a street mutt.
  • I will stay out of the trash, off the counters, and certainly never eat snacks from my boy’s backpack.
Announcements

Book of the Month – Creative Youth Ideas Christmas Collection

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Creative Youth Ideas Christmas Collection - December Book of the Month

 

Christmas is coming soon and many churches are planning Christmas activities.

  • Small Groups or cell groups plan Christmas party fellowships
  • Sunday School classes or Bible Study Members plan Christmas parties
  • Various church groups plan activities as a Christmas Outreach
  • Youth Groups plan Christmas social outings or Christmas Game nights.

Having been in youth ministry for more than 20 years, we’ve done a lot of Christmas events. We’ve done all the above activities and more.

And we’ve done them for a lot of different age groups:

  • Children’s Christmas Parties
  • Middle School or Junior High Christmas Parties
  • High School Christmas Parties
  • College and University Christmas Parties
  • We’ve even done Christmas Parties for Senior Citizens

Looking for New Ideas?

After 20 years, you start to ask yourself what you can do that is new for this Christmas celebration. Obviously if you repeat something there is someone that will say, “We did that last Christmas.” It becomes a bit difficult to reinvent the wheel every year and find new object lessons to connect unchurched kids to the real meaning of Christmas and also to satisfy those that have been hearing the same Christmas Stories and playing the same Christmas games since they were in diapers. I used to spend hours searching from website to website trying to trying to find useful Christmas party ideas.

That was difficult on me, but now it makes it easy for you. I’ve taken all those years of effort and placed the very best ideas, games, activities, lessons, devotions, illustrations, jokes, children’s sermons and even worksheets and put them together into a comprehensive collection that will last you another 20 years as well.

Download it Immediately

And I put it into a downloadable ebook format so that it is easy to scan through the 200+ ideas (that take up more than 350 pages) and find the Christmas Idea that is perfect for your event or activity. They are labeled by locations, energy levels, and resources needed. Many ideas have variations so you can change up the activity if you have used it before. Most also have notes for leaders to help them create some talking points to break the ice, ask probing questions to get a little deeper, and help the youth to not only learn but to apply the lessons learned in their day to day lives.

You can buy your own copy of the Creative Youth Ideas Christmas Collection online right here and download it immediately for less than $25.

You’ll love the ebook format for this Christmas resource:

  • It’s Searchable (do that with a real book).
  • Takes up no space on your crowded book shelf. Imagine a 337 page brick taking up space to use it 1 month a year.
  • Has No shipping costs – download instantly. Try that with Amazon.
  • You can print the game I want, not bend the spine of a physical book to make a copy for my leaders. In fact I allow you to share copies with your leaders.

The ideas are clearly aimed at the youth market, but most of these games would be good ice breakers and discussion starters for children and adults and everyone in between.

  • There are low energy ideas that are gentle enough to use among adults as icebreakers to help develop relationships and get the ball going on helping people think about where they want to grow spiritually.
  • Perhaps you are hosting a Christmas party for your neighbors. Several of these games would fit the bill and provide with a way to help bring forth a Christmas conversation that shares Christ.

There’s a complete table of contents you can take a peek at as well as sample ideas at www.CreativeChristmasIdeas.com

Why not take a look today at December’s Book of the Month.

Get Creative Youth Ideas: "Christmas Collection" ebook Creative Youth Ideas Christmas Collection
Games and Activities helping youth discover the Reason for the Season.

Get more than 200 creative ideas for planning a Youth Christmas celebration or Christmas Party party. You can immediately download my best Christmas Icebreakers, games, illustrations, Christmas activity ideas AND MUCH MORE in a useful ebook!

=> Tell me more about the Christmas Collection

Announcements, Food for Thought

In All Things, Be Thankful

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Back during the dark days of 1929, a group of ministers in the Northeast, all graduates of the Boston School of Theology, gathered to discuss how they should conduct their Thanksgiving Sunday services. Things were about as bad as they could get, with no sign of relief. The bread lines were depressingly long, the stock market had plummeted, and the term Great Depression seemed an apt description for the mood of the country. The ministers thought they should only lightly touch upon the subject Thanksgiving in deference to the human misery all about them. After all, there was little to be thankful for.

But it was Dr. William L. Stiger, pastor of a large congregation in the city that rallied the group. This was not the time, he suggested, to give mere passing mention to Thanksgiving, just the opposite. This was the time for the nation to get matters in perspective and thank God for blessings always present, but perhaps suppressed due to intense hardship.

I suggest to you the ministers struck upon something. The most intense moments of thankfulness are not found in times of plenty, but when difficulties abound. Think of the Pilgrims that first Thanksgiving. Half their number dead, men without a country, but still there was thanksgiving to God. Their gratitude was not for something but in something. It was that same sense of gratitude that lead Abraham Lincoln to formally establish the first Thanksgiving Day in the midst of national civil war, when the butcher’s list of casualties seemed to have no end and the very nation struggled for survival.

Perhaps in your own life, right now, intense hardship. You are experiencing your own personal Great Depression.

In all things, Be Thankful!

1 Thessalonians 5:18
“give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Source: The full text of the sermon is available at www.eSermons.com. Sign-up today at: http://www.esermons.com/signup

Announcements

Fathers Are a Gift from God

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Fathers are a voice of wisdom.

  • My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply. “We’re raising boys.” ~Harmon Killebrew
  • Fathers represent another way of looking at life – the possibility of an alternative dialogue. ~Louise J. Kaplan, Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual, 1978
  • When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain

Fathers are examples for youth

  • He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland
  • I love my father as the stars – he’s a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart. ~Terri Guillemets

Fathers inspire youth to greatness.

  • Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other. ~Joseph Joubert
  • The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity. ~Jean Paul Richter

A Father’s true wealth is found in his children.

  • A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. ~Author Unknown
  • Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance. ~Ruth E. Renkel
  • A father carries pictures where his money used to be. ~Author Unknown
  • Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope. ~Bill Cosby

Fathers are a gift from God

  • The greatest gift I ever had Came from God; I call him Dad! ~Author Unknown

 

 

Announcements

Creative Youth Ideas eBook of the Month

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Book of the Month Special: Creative Holiday ideas
Book of the Month Special: Creative Holiday Ideas

CREATIVE YOUTH IDEAS RECOMMENDED eBOOK OF THE MONTH:

Creative Holiday Ideas

 

319 page e-book Includes more than 200 ideas for common holiday activities.

It Contains:

  • 43 New Year’s Day Ideas
  • 46 Valentine’s Day Ideas
  • 39 Mother’s Day Ideas
  • 33 Father’s Day Ideas
  • 26 Halloween or Fall Festival Ideas
  • 38 Thanksgiving Ideas

It’s targeted to the youth, but children and adults love it too!

Get it NOW at only $24.97

 

Get "Creative Holiday Ideas"

Announcements

Follow Me On Twitter

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twitter.jpghttp://twitter.com/youthideas

I’ve recently created a Twitter account. I’ll be using this twitter account as a “news flash” / “news wire” for information, stories, ideas, and other things I am interested personally as someone who works with youth both in secular and faith based situations. It is something new for me so I am not sure how everything will eventually work out, but I see great potential in this platform to impact youth and those who work with them.

  • If you already have a twitter account you can follow me @youthideas for all the youth related things.
  • If you want to see the wackier side you can also follow @In_the_Fishbowl

If you are new to twitter, it is sort of a free short text message service (140 characters max) where you can update people on anything you want. Some people use it for more esoteric purposes like telling the world what they are doing moment by moment. Others use it to inform people about the things they are reading, the links they find interesting, etc.

You can check out my twitter page and sign up if you are not already signed up at http://twitter.com/youthideas

I won’t promise to tweet (that is what the messaging is called) every day.. but when I find something interesting I’ll let you know using this twitter profile! I also can’t promise I’ll respond to all the direct messages… If I get even a portion of followers on here from the 25,000+ people on the newsletter list it will be impossible to respond to everyone personally.

God Bless you and your ministry!
With YOUth on my heart

Ken