The Power of Stories

We have incredible small group leaders in LifeLine.  Our volunteers are simply the best.  One of the things we are doing this year is highlighting our leaders by sharing their stories. I’m a big believer in stories, whether students or leaders. We, as people are captivated and moved by stories. We’ve done our best to leverage this phenomenon in our ministry.

Here’s a story video of Katie Turner who is one of our top notch volunteers.  Props to Ryan Humm for shooting, Al Shepard for editing this and Lindsey Bandy’s apartment for uh…hosting the shoot.

Katie Turners Story from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

New LifeLine Video: Mission Trips Reveal

This week we revealed our summer mission trips to our student and volunteers with a ridiculous video.  I mean, how else would you do it?

Announcement: Knapp & Cascade Mission Trips from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

This year we are hoping to send 270 students on mission trips.  That’s way too much paper! Have you noticed that some mission organizations require a tree’s worth of paperwork?  Thankfully, our resident web genius, Jon VerLee designed this registration page for us which streamlines the process and saves the rainforest.

LifeLine Missions Registrations

 

If you are a youth worker, when and how do you reveal your mission trips?  Also, how do you do registrations and collect paperwork?

 

How Love Overthrew an Empire

A few weeks ago we finished up a series on influence that we called Wakes.  I loved the imagery that Al, our production coordinator used for this series.  We borrowed (with permission) footage from a friend’s wake boarding Vimeo page and added text and music to it.  The combination of Johnny Cash and wake boarding ended up being pretty boss.  I was really happy with how the entire series turned out.

Wakes Bumper from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

 

One of my favorite teachings from this series was on love and how the early Christians essentially overthrew a repressive empire without the use of force.  Check it out:

 

Wakes – Love from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

Getting Students into the Bible

For years we’ve been bothered by the reality that our students are largely Bible ignorant.  Most of them don’t read the Bible regularly or even have a strong grasp of how to navigate it’s pages.  Part of this is is due to the fact that students don’t read much of anything in our culture and part of this is probably due to the fact that we as parents and youth workers are dropping the ball.

Our student ministry team is making an effort to think creatively on how we can get students into the Bible.  Our first idea is embedded in our Wakes teaching series.

Wakes Bumper from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

This is a four week teaching series on influence from the book of Acts.  As part of the experience we invited our volunteers and students to read through the book of Acts together.  We sent this bookmark home with each student and built this website: lifelinestudents.org/wakes. We built the website because students usually only read physical books if there is a grade dependent on it but they will often read voluntarily on their phones.

Wakes_Bookmark

 

The beautiful thing about this project is that it cost us basically nothing–only printing and shipping for the bookmarks.  Through a couple announcement videos and encouraging students to post to instagram and twitter with  #lifelinewakes we’ve created a little buzz.  So far so good.  We’d love to hear your ideas on how you are getting students into the Bible.

Wakes – Acts Reading Plan from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

Introducing the LifeLine Team

I am pumped to announce that the LifeLine Team is complete.  It took us quite a while to hire everyone but the work has been worth the effort.  Our team is set and I’m confident that God has brought us the right people.  Here’s our announcement video from this past week which unveils our team.

 

Announcements / September 15 & 18 from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

The verdict is still out on the pronunciation of “Chipotle” but if you’re curious, here is what we all do:

LifeLine @ the Kentwood Campus

  • Jon VerLee, Campus Youth Pastor
  • Jason Magnusun, Middle School

LifeLine @ the Knapp Street Campus

  • Kirk Bierens, High School
  • Steve Carigon, Middle School

LifeLine @ the Cascade Campus

  • Tom Skilling, High School Groups
  • Jake Houf, Middle School Groups
  • Elisa Talmage, Female Small Groups
  • Christian Stevens, LifeLine Weekends

LifeLine Central Support

  • Al Shepard, Production
  • Molly Rayman, LifeLine Admin
  • Jon Grunden, Middle School Director
  • Aaron Buer, High School Director

Welcome Back to LifeLine!

It’s that time of year again.  LifeLine, our student ministry, is back in action.  We had a great kickoff week with close to 700 students and over 100 volunteers.  It was an absolute riot.  Here’s the announcement video we kicked the year off with.

 

Lifeline Welcome from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

Also, we’ve started something new.  We’re posting our teachings to soundcloud.com.  Here’s my first teaching of the year:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/110079017″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]