Category: YMX

  • Managing a virtual community

    Designing_online_community
    Or congregation for that matter.

    I’m trying to sort out the meaning of three things I’ve read this week. All three have to do with the big question, "What is community?" and "How do you help people form balance in an online community?" From a 10,000 foot perspective the question doesn’t really become "What is it?" or "How do people find balance?" It becomes "How do I manage to maintain an community in a healthy, productive way to become something enduring and profitable?"

    Here are the three articles/posts I’ve read that have me trying to connect the dots.
    Virtual Reality = Virtual Community = Virtual Relationships by David Garrison
    Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer by Seth Godin
    Second Life and Multiverse by Bobby Grunewald

    On one side of the discussion Garrison, a youth pastor, is questioning the value of virtual relationships in comparison to online relationships.     He says that online communities are morally neutral, yet are often being used in unhealthy ways. That’s a good point but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all online relationships are somehow more or less dysfunctional that real world ones. My experience in more than 13 years of using online community is that it’s just as possible to form real relationships online as offline. You can be just as fake in real life, you can block people out of your life just as effectively, and dysfunctions in your personality will always evidence themselves in all areas of our lives.

    Lifechurch
    From the perspective of Lifechurch.tv, Grunewald lives out an attitude that online relationships are not only "real," but they can also be redemptive to reaching people for Christ.      That’s why Lifechurch.tv, one of the most innovative churches on the planet, operates a campus on Second Life. As the article mentions, a lot of "virtual people" who experience church at their internet campus, eventually reach out and make one-on-one connections with a local church or even one of their locations. In my experience with online communities this is a natural outgrowth. A sign of a healthy online communities is the "meet-up." Converting online friends into offline friendship has been an amazing experience for me. Online communication has some limitations as it fails to capture many of the nuances of language. After all, how much of our communication is non-verbal? How much depends on you knowing me personally so that when you read my words your brain says, "I can see Adam saying that, I know what he means despite his ability to articulate it clearly in writing." And in my role with Youth Ministry Exchange I can verify that nearly 100% of disagreements that occur in that online community have to do with misunderstood context and things that wouldn’t have caused conflict when combined with non-verbal communication.

    Sethgodin
    I had all of this swirling around the grey matter (Is it good? Is it moral? Can it last? Is it enduring and helping the trade?) between my ears when I read Seth’s Godin’s post.     In Seth’s opinion, forming, managing, and growing trade-based online communities is one of the big jobs of the future. See, it’s one thing when you feel like the only guy on the block who thinks your idea is worthwhile. It’s another thing when one of the premier business minds out there says the same thing. (Hey, when is this guy going to appear at the Leadership Summit?) See, I think places like YMX are valuable to people in Youth Ministry… but I am just one person and a nobody. When other people start saying that trade-based online communities are important now and will be super important in the future, I start to believe it!

    Ymx_nofullname
    I know online communities are important.     (Why else would I operate one?) And I know they can be redemptive. (Why else would we have joined the Gospelcom Alliance?) The hard part of managing an online community is this: Creating an online place where everyone feels valued, feels like they can contribute, and is still narrowly focused enough to effect growth and change in a specific sub-culture or trade. Put that in a bottle and you will make millions.

    Questions: When it comes to online communities from YMX, to Facebook, to the now dead and dying MySpace, what is the community value? How does an online community keep out of the grave? How does it keep going and become something enduring for an entire tribe of people?And how do I manage a community for long-term and not short term profit in the way MySpace did?

  • 3 RSS Feeds for Free Youth Ministry Stuff

    Freemonday_logo_draft
    I’ve gotten a couple of comments in the last two weeks saying things like "Why is Youth Ministry Exchange giving stuff away when other companies/sites already do that?" I’ve got a lot of sarcastic responses to that question but the simple truth is this… We think you can’t help youth workers enough with free stuff.

    With that in mind, I want to give you my personal top 3 sites for getting Youth Ministry Stuff for FREE.

    1. Simply Youth Ministry Freebies Subscribe to the feed
    2. Tim’s Schmoyer’s "Life in Student Ministry" Subscribe to the feed
    3. Youth Ministry Exchange’s "The Monday Exchange." Subscribe to the feed

    Just as a bonus… here are a couple of other "FREE" sites that I use all the time for snagging good ideas.

    1. Pastor 2 Youth
    2. The Source for Youth Ministry’s game section

    Do you just take what is being given away and use it? Not all the time. In fact, with the YMX giveaway we’re trying to give away both a ready to use version and the source files so that you can easily tweak stuff for your use. To me, there is nothing worse than using a free or a pay resource and having your students walk away and say… "It’s not like they came up with that, it has some other youth group’s logo all over it." I believe people should give credit. But then again the point behind the free resource giveaways for me is helping youth workers look good. If they want to tweak a couple of things so they can call it their own, I’m cool with that.

  • Pray for Cathie

    Cathie Gibbons, daughter of Patti and Tom, is right now en route to La Paz, Bolivia. She’s on a 20 person mission trip for the next 12 days doing all sorts of ministry. You can get updates on their trip on their mission team blog. I am positive Cathie will have a great time serving our Lord as she is an awesome young lady.

    I got to know Cathie a little bit on my trip to Albany last month. She is 100% 15 years old, but also developing a 100% heart for God. As a youth worker she is the reason why we do this thing. She truly gets the idea of "blind stupid faith that makes no logical sense" and lives it out.

  • Monday Exchange

    Monday_promo_logo_smallWe started a promotion yesterday that I think is pretty sweet. Each Monday we’re going to give away a FREE resource for youth workers. It’s not always going to be fancy and as much as we’d like to give everyone iPhones, our giveaways will always be downloadable.

    Here is a link to the free resource page at YMX.

    Here is a link to subscribe to our feed    … get our stuff delivered to your RSS reader so you’ll never miss it.

    Here’s a link to our email subscriptions… you’ll get our stuff delivered to your inbox.

    Our first downloadable is a bucket full of permission slips and commonly used forms for youth group.

  • No More Wimpy Church

    Alright, this is pretty funny and cool. Mark Driscoll is the teaching pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA and the founder of Acts 29 church plant movement. What’s interesting to me is that he’s not alone in this sentiment. There are a lot of people asking "the church" to get more masculine. I went to a session at NYWC in Cincinnati last fall essentially saying the same thing about youth ministry… How do you think you’re going to attract young men? By doing stuff that would get them labeled as gay? I don’t think so.

    question: For those who go to church… do you agree with Mark’s sentiment that we tend to make church for chicks? If so, what can we do to change that? If you don’t think so, how come?
    HT to Bobby Williams (aka B Dub)

  • In the middle of a customer service nightmare

    Manpullinghairout2754970
    This was a big weekend for YMX. If everything had gone to plan the site would have undergone major structural upgrades and no one would have really noticed.

    I wanted people to login on Monday morning and say, "Hmm, that’s cool. They have a new promotion… wait, something about the site seems different." I had hoped that they would have to go to the Announcement area to find out exactly what all the fuss was about.

    But it didn’t go down as scheduled. My 4 hour Saturday morning project is now in its 3rd day. Here are the 3 things we are changing:

    1. Upgrading our server environment. This will eliminate 95% of our errors on the site. We paid for an upgrade because we want to have a stable environment for the community to grow on.
    2. Changing our site structure to search engine friendly URLs. Other than our web addresses looking prettier, this wouldn’t benefit users at all. But it would mean that our site gets a high search ranking on Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. Which is like gold!
    3. Announcing our new weekly resource giveaway. This was something we’d been cooking a while and we were using the downtime to create a little buzz before its launch this morning.

    Instead, our site is mostly down. I’m trying to get it sorted out with our host… but in the mean time our customers are not getting the services they’ve paid for. Right now, there is no benefit to the enhancements we’ve put in place because something with #1 went horribly and terribly wrong.

    In short, I am frustrated. I had hoped this weekend would be a home run. And so far this project has been a pop fly.

  • Glutton for Punishment

    Yeah, I’m spending my morning doing site maintenance and a big upgrade. I even had to take the site and forums offline to make this happen. So far so good… a little bit of sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen.

    Equally bored or just morbidly curious? Watch what I’m doing… live!

    Licensetowed
    In other news, Kristen and I went to see License to Wed last night. Robin William was stinking funny. There were many moments when you could hear the audience roar with laughter. I think I may be putting together a proper review for the site. I thought it was worth seeing, cute, a little crass at times but not over the top. Actually, while there was some good pre-marital counseling sex talk there wasn’t a lot of cussing. And as someone who has actually done pre-marital counseling… there were many new ideas to implement. (Yeah, right!) There were some sacrilegious moments as well but not over the top. Long story short… it was a good date flick.

  • Trends vs. Problems

    Numbers at YMX are down. Not terribly down, but down. One thing is true in life… when quantifiable numbers go down I always seem to take notice.

    This is why I am not panicking. This is why I don’t really even care. Less is normal right now.

    While the calendar has 4 seasons, youth ministry has 2.
    School’s in: Defined by youth workers daily/weekly routines of weekly meetings, retreats, lesson planning, etc. YMX gets more traffic when school is in for obvious reasons… they are looking for help on curriculum, issues raised, retreat programming, etc.
    School’s out: Defined by a crazy schedule of daily/weekly routines interupted with the schedule of summer. Students are out of school so they are more free. Loads of churches do VBS and week long camps, mission trips, etc. Obviously, less time spent in the office looking for answers to questions you have leads to less time spent at YMX.

    I think a lot of areas of our lives would be better if we would recognize high seasons and low seasons and expect stuff out of people accordingly.

    Herein is the difference between are real trend and a real problem. If your trend has a traditional downturn and you panic… it’s counterproductive. If you see a downturn right on schedule you should just be able to look at the trends and say, "OK, it’s down now… let’s gear up for an upswing there… when the trends takes us back up."

    Understanding the difference between a trend and a problem is the difference between good management and bad management.

  • Exclusivity in the church

    There has been a quiet, yet interesting discussion going on behind the scenes at YMX. It revolves around a very touchy issue for us: Are all people invited to join the site, or is it exclusive to a certain type of person?

    Exclusivity in anything labeled "Christian" automatically makes people nervous.     To one extreme some feel like since salvation is free and open to all, that most parts of Christianity and the church ought to be accessible to all as well. To the other extreme, some feel like there should be private areas of Christianity that allow for frank discussion away from the eyes and misunderstanding of those outside of Christianity, and in YMX’s case… outside of youth ministry altogether. (The reality is that the discussion is clearly in the middle of these extremes as no one is to one extreme or the other.

    (more…)

  • error report

    You know… YMX is a pretty complicated beast. What started as a tiny little site for my friends now reaches all sorts of people, attracts a lot of attention, and has some pretty complex coding that makes it happen.

    Yesterday I discovered a mistake. I’m in the process of trying to fix it… but the result is that the site is generating 2-3 errors for each forum post that people view. Amazingly I discovered that there were nearly 300,000 errors in the error log!

    There is a spiritual metaphor here, isn’t there? Sometimes in life we know there is a "known issue" that we can chose to ignore. It may seem small but it ends up affecting all sorts of things. James 5 talks about some people even being sick because they have a problem (in that case, unconfessed sin) that is actually making them ill. Whoa… a little thing can not only cause spiritual havoc, it can result in physical havoc too!

    James provides the answer: Just like the code on the site has to reach out for help in order to fix the
    root of the problem, James tells us that if we want to get better… we need to confess that sin in order to move on.