Category: YMX
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Managing a virtual 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…
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3 RSS Feeds for Free Youth Ministry Stuff
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.…
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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…
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Monday Exchange
We 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…
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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…
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In the middle of a customer service nightmare
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…
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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! In other…
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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…
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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…
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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…