Inexpensive Draw for Students: Local Bands

One of the biggest discoveries I made in my early years of ministry was the draw of local bands.  All throughout your community there are teenagers practicing in bedrooms and garages waiting for a place and an audience.  When you open up your super bowl party or friday night hang out time a beautiful relationship is formed.  

First, you have something out of the ordinary to offer your students, and second, the band will promote your event until they are blue in the face.  No one wants to play to an empty room, and local teen bands have a way of making sure that doesn't happen by getting every friend of a friend to show up in support.  Depending on

Click to read more ...

Easy way to support your students - Fan Club

Hello.  My name is David Thompson and I am a United Methodist youth pastor at a church in Birmingham, AL.  I am excited about sharing some of my thoughts and ideas from my years in youth ministry with you.  Please feel free to ask questions and let me know what you think.  I don’t pretend to have this youth ministry thing figured out, but God has blessed us with a heart to serve students the best way we can.

The first idea that I want to share with you is probably the easiest.  I honestly don’t know if it is my idea or I got it from someone else.  Either way it is a pretty cool idea and very simple, we call it Fan Club.  Here is how it works:

If your students are like mine then they are involved in everything from sports to dance to choir.  And there are few things worse then having to go watch a middle school girl’s basketball game by yourself.  But it is important to watch those activities, get out in the community and support your students.  So we created a Fan Club.  Fan Club is a group of students who go with you to go watch and support other students’ activities. The first year our fan club had about 40 students to sign up and purchase a $5 t-shirt that says “Fan Club” on the front and the name of our church on the back.  We made the t-shirt very bright so we would be seen for sure.  During the school year we would try to have at least one fan club event a month (sometimes one a week).  We would make posters and signs for the student from our group that we were there to support.  We would take a bus to the game/activity or meet there.  Our fan club group would sit all together and cheer as loud and as crazy as we could for our student(s).  Important note: When going to a sporting event we made it a point not to cheer against or even for a certain team.  Instead we cheered for our students.  We were there to support students, get our name out there, meet parents and have fun. We didn’t want to make people mad or cheer against other students. Our hope is that they would want to be a part of our group. 

This ministry has been a huge hit.  It takes a little bit of planning ahead of time but our kids beg for the Fan Club to come to their event.  The Fan Club is also getting pretty popular around the city.

Here is what you do to get a Fan Club started at your church:

1) Get students and parents to send you schedules of upcoming events and programs that they would like you to come watch.

2) At your youth program announce the beginning of Fan Club.  Have students sign up, name, email, phone number and get $5 for a t-shirt. 

3) At first schedule just one fan club event a month.  Make sure you make posters, wear your t-shirts, and get loud, but behave.  You do not want to turn people off from your group.

4) Take some time to publicize your Fan Club event, take pictures and share it with your group the next Sunday.

GRAPHICS: On the t-shirts we used a ESPN style font. www.dafont.com

I loaded some promotional material in the downloads.

In Christ,

David