Justin is the Pastor of High School Ministry Small Groups at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. He loves what he does. He loves to write. He loves tattoos. He loves his beautiful wife. He loves Jesus.
Some awesome videos we are playing this weekend. Pretty epic promos to get our students excited for HSM’s Halloween Party. Also, continuing our high school sports recaps, where we cover our local schools sports in one minute.
Videos are huge in our services. It adds a great dynamic to the service and with this generation that we preach too, nothing gets student’s attention like video. There is something about it that just makes them quiet and so focused.
Pumpkinfest Promo!
Sports Minute Vol. 4
At HSM at Saddleback, we are extremely excited to announce the production of our very first “Inside [HSM]” Magazine. It is something that we worked on all summer long, it took a ton of work and planning from our team, writing articles and editing, but we have the Fall edition of our magazine. Every inch of it was done in house by someone on the HSM team. It has our fall series, events, calendars, funny bits, a comic and much more. We have been handing it out to all our students, leaders and parents for free and they have been eating it up! You can scroll through below and check it out!
We are currently working on our second edition which should be ready by January!
If you want a hard copy, email me, and I will see what I can do!
I think this is one of my favorite videos that the HSM weekend team has done so far. We just closed our registration for our small groups and this video was used at our small group leader training and to open our weekend services last weekend. I’m pretty sure that this is a direct transcript from one of our girls small groups. Enjoy!
If you have not seen the Korean music video “Gangnam Style“… you probably do not have a computer or a TV because it has over 200,000,000 views on Youtube, it has been on SNL, Ellen and probably has been played in every student ministry in the nation (I wouldn’t be surprised to be honest because it’s super catchy).
We just had our fall kick-off and our students wanted to do our opener with this song. They did a “translation” of the words as well. They went all out and it was so fun. So here it is:
Here is a great funny video we made for our services last week. A few weeks ago I posted a blog on wanting to do video announcements in HSM (click HERE if you want to check that out). But we made one for this last weekend and it was received well. Instead of doing announcements from the stage, like usual, we did it on video and it is way more entertaining. I’m looking forward to making some more for our weekend services.
Last week I posted on the first part of our creative process for Saddleback Church high school ministry. If you missed it, click HERE and you can check it out and catch up.
From our big brain storm meeting where everyone is involved, we have a smaller meeting the following week with Josh (high school pastor), Parker (creative master, video extraordinary), Travis (mind can think of anything funny/can literally build anything) and myself (the guy who tries to reign everyone in on one point). This meeting is to take all of the ideas from the big meeting and start the conversations of putting feet to some of the ideas that the students had and make them happen in the services. This is where we talk about what ideas go best in certain services, what sermon illustrations can actually happen, and what videos we think we can actually do make service just that much more fun.
How I process this meeting:
Dont be too specific – This meeting is not to hammer out exactly what we are doing for each service. The previous meeting was to get ALL ideas come to the board for the entire month of services. This meeting is to start to place some ideas (which not all ideas will be used) into the service we feel will best fit for the topic of teaching. This is just to get a basic over view, and a generic plan of action of who, what, and why we want this idea into the service. The specifics will be hashed out in one more meeting (which I will post next week).
Let it soak in – Coming from the previous big meeting, there are a ton of ideas that are being thrown left and right. It can be a lot to take in all at once. I know for me, I let all of the ideas come, and I just sit back and help navigate to make sure they don’t stop. I do better when I have all the ideas and I can look them over and have a few days to process them. then I can come up with a better way of implementing them into our services. That is why I dont like to have a meeting the next day. Give it a week.
Make it intimate - I don’t mean have a dimly lit room and candles everywhere. I mean this meeting needs to be intentionally smaller than the main idea one. I want just a few people, the people who will actually be making the ideas into reality for services. Instead of the bombarding of ideas, this is where you take the existing ideas and talk about what is actually possible. You need to be able to discuss and be able to banter back and forth. This is how amazing ideas come out of good ideas.
Allow discussion and disagreement – A lot of the time, we are left to thinking we are limited on what we can do because we have not tried something before. If one person feels strong for one idea, and I dont feel like I can pull it off, there is aback and forth and a push of encouragement to pull it off. We all push each other to do things we never have done before, or things that have never been done before ever. I’m excited as we keep on pushing each other for the fall. Big things coming out of Saddleback HSM.
Be strategic – At this point, we are a month out. During this meeting we talk about what ideas should go to what service and how we should do them. We know how much time we have and this is the meeting we talk about what it will take to get the idea done. We dont hash out the specifics, but just the general idea for what needs to happen and how much time this will take us. We need to be up on our game and know when to start moving.
Are you a slow processor? A fast processor? Is there anything you think I am missing? Would love to hear your input!
Last weekend we had a worship and music weekend. Our student worship director taught the weekend services about how music triggers emotions. He did amazing! He explained how music moves us and we need to be careful not to worship the worship, but worship God. He then sang some popular worship songs but he explained what each one of them meant and why we sing them and the students went off! It was the most passionate I have seen the students worship. It was incredible.
But since we were talking about music, we thought it would be awesome to open up the service with a music video that we blatantly ripped off from the popular boy band 1Direction. It was a hit, so please enjoy!
I saw this on another blog and thought it was super interesting. Thought it was a cool to see a visual for how teenagers now are using technology. It is from onlineschools.com.
What do you think? Do you think this is accurate?
This was a bumper video that was used for Parker before he got up and taught this weekend. He usually is the one who makes all of the videos for our services and since he was teaching, we thought of this little gem and it turned out awesome!
This video was shown last week in our services to promote the opening of summer camp registration. It was a an awesome and fun shoot. Parker shot and edited it (you will getting a post of his tomorrow) and Josh is a star and I die at the end of it. So that is fun.
Based on the fact that 90% of our students saw this movie, it played really well in the services and got huge laughs. Enjoy!
