I hope every one had a fantastic Easter weekend. powerful Easter drama on Friday and Saturday, I participated in World Table Top Day, playing board games with my youngest son on Saturday, and then Easter dinner at the in-laws. It was a full weekend.
Amidst all the business I managed to watch a few Youtube videos and one of them was from a group called The Story Men. They talked about the Crowdsourced church. You might have been a part of crowdsourcing and did not even know it. Did you vote to decide the fate of the character on t.v.? Did you respond to the Lays Potato Chip contest to decide their new flavors? If you did, you added value to a company or a brand.
Crowdsourcing is asking a crowd to participate by adding content, ideas, and value to your company, brand, or event.
Crowdsourcing in youth ministry used to look like this “What do you guys want to do tonight?” This is a great way to get a lot of bad ideas. Here are some of them:
“Let’s go TP someone’s house!”
“Let’s go TP Pastor’s house”
“Let’s play dodgeball in the sanctuary!”
“Let’s have a lock-Iin”
This is not to say that good ideas do not make their way through, they do, but you have to sift through them to find them.
This is nothing new, here were two bad Bible crowdsourcing incidents:
Aaron asking the crowd to contribute jewelry to make an idol and Pilate asking the crowd, “What shall we do with this man?”. One did not work out the latter ultimately dd.
There are good ways and bad ways to ask our group to contribute to our youth programs and the direction of our ministry should go. Prayer and discernment plays a significant part in deciding the ideas you should listen to and the one’s you should pass on.
I’ll take a a few post to unpack how to get and implement the best ideas from your group, but I need your help. Tell me about how you engage students with participating in the programing of your youth ministry:
Do you poll your group?
Do break down in small groups and ask questions?
Do you use social media to get ideas for your meetings?
Share your thoughts below and I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about your ideas and a few of my own. See you tomorrow.