10 Great Youth Videos to Use at Your Next Meeting

Videos are definitely powerful, but who has the time to look for them!  Here are some of my personal favorites!

1. God's Chisel:

The Skit Guys put together what is in my opinion the best skit available on growing in holiness.

2. Youth MiniStarz:
 
This one is just fun but is a great way to begin a volunteer thank you or staff person intro.

3. Most - The Bridge:
 
This is a classic alegory put into a powerful, professional format.  The love of God is rarely displayed so clearly.

4. 99 Baloons:
 
Another gut-wrenching video.  A father's love for a sick child, and a shining example of what one life can mean.

5. Rule Breakers:

The Skit Guys do it again!  Use this for your next retreat instead of listing 20 don'ts.

6. All Around Me:
 
One of my favorite music videos.  It's about worship.

7. Moonwalking Bear
 
How many times do we miss noticing God's actions because we are not looking for them?

8. Dragon - Trogdor:
 
Two ideas here: 1. Playing Fair 2. You don't have to be good, just loud!

9. Hebrews Star Wars:
 
A great intro for a lesson from the book of Hebrews!

10. iLife - There's an App for That
 Fun with the apple commercials and crazy Bible stories.

Game: Musical Condiment Twister

We have played this game several times, but had an addition a couple of nights ago that made it even more fun.  The basic idea goes like this:  

1. Create a twister board on a piece of plastic sheeting using paper plates to mark circles and filling those circles in with Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, and Mayonnaise with blue food coloring.
2. Print out pieces of paper that say, "Right foot," "Left Foot," "right hand," and "Left Hand" on red, blue, green, and red paper.  You want enough of these to have each phrase on each color AND to have enough for each spectator to have one.
3. Place the pieces of papers on the backs of the spectator chairs.
4. Blow up a beach ball.
5. Select four or five players (you may want to have two boards... one for guys, and one for girls)
6. Instruct the spectators, "Once the music starts, throw or hit the beach ball back and fourth.  When the music stops, so does the beach ball.  The person holding the beach ball yells out the instructions on the back of their chair like "right foot red" and the players will obey.
7. The players play without removing hands/feet from the board unless they are instructed to by the crowd.

Youth Group Videos: Quick and Free

You come back from a retreat and you have a bunch of pictures and video.  You want to make an awesome video but have less than no extra time to create one, much less learn how to use some video editing software.  All you need to remember is Animoto.com 

Once you've signed up for a free account, you are ready to upload your images and videos for animoto to magically turn into a great video.  For free you get 30-second videos that you have to access through the web.  Do not fret, if you want to have longer videos, it's only $3 per video or $30 per year for unlimted.  The $30 also gets you the ability to download the video files so you can burn them to a DVD, upload them to a website, or whatever you need to do.

AND Animoto has a great selection of Christian music already uploded and ready to be used as your background (you are welcome to upload your own as well).  If you are wondering what they look like, here's what happened when we locked a sixth grader in our office for about 15 minutes with a bunch of picture files:

Silence and Solitude Retreat

We had an opening in our summer schedule and decided to do something very different.  We would take an inexpensive retreat and spend most of our time praying.  It was amazing!

Using a lot of information from the book Sacred Way, we taught several ancient prayer practices and spent time doing them.  We also used no electricity except A/C (if you live in the deep south you'll understand).  Paper for words, candles for lights, you get the idea.  

All you need to do is buy the book to prep each of the practices and come up with a schedule (Click here to download ours) and book or borrow an inexpensive place to get away.  Be prepared to change students' lives!

Marco Polo on Land

This is a fun game for a spring evening.  Just enough water to be fun, and not enough to get sick when it's still a little cool.

What you need:

• Blindfold
• Long-range water gun (super soaker)
• Field
• Cones or other method to designate boundaries.

Choose someone to be marco.  Blindfold marco and give him the super-soaker.  Then instruct the students that there are four rules:  1. They must stay inside the boundaries.  2. They must answer polo whenever Marco says his name (though they do not have to yell).  3. When they are hit by water, they are out and must exit the playing field.  4. Persons who are not on the field must not respond when marco says "MARCO!"  The last person standing is marco next time.

To kick it up a notch:

• Periodically make the boundaries smaller
• Add an additional marco after each round
• Make someone being "out" expire after counting to 30 or 60 (this works best if you have a large number of Marcos