Workshops

Youth Ministry Today: Navigating Statistics, Trends and Popular Culture

Led by Lisa Kimball, the Director of the Center of Ministry of Teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary. What a dynamic and energetic person she is! After listening to her talk, you feel like you can go out and change the world. This workshop focused on the complexity of the world Youths live in today and that just showing up at Youth Group is not helping them in the long term, studies are showing. That being involved with their community and be altruistic and compassionate is all good and well, but are our Youths graduating from our programs feeling the two most basic teachings of the Gospel: 1) That they are loved 2) That they are forgiven.

I found this a fascinating analysis of how, in the pursuit of being free thinking "cool" Epsicopalians, are we failing our kids at church and in life by not being more specific about what it is to be a Christian and how faith can help you in your darkest hours? This generation of young people are living in a world where they are being shown to believe that what we buy and what we have is how they define themselves.

Media in Ministry

This workshop talked about creating movies using free software (such as Windows Movie Maker) to promote your Christian Ed and Church events. That if we don't get on the superhighway of technology we are going to lose our young people to archaic ways of doing things. We talked about Facebook and Twitter and digital cameras and pocket size video cameras. How having Internet access for your program space is becoming essentional for older teens especially because it can be utilized in a hundred different ways. In ways that SPEAK to teens. I loved this workshop. The ideas were flowing at all that you could do if your church was willing to embrace technology.

Keeping Up with The Times Without Sacrificing Quality

Ways to Grow your Minitry was focused on. Keywords were:

Connect, Explore, Trim, Rediscover, Choose, Overcome, Be, Praise, Build, Celebrate.

Christian Ed should always be changing, always be updated, always be building...it should never be stagnate. We explored LOTS of great ideas on how to invigorate the congregation to become a part of the Christian Ed process.

More on other activities...