Pixable: Your Girls Ministry’s best friend for memory keeping

Dec 23, 2009 by     No Comments    Posted under: Featured, Girls Ministry, technology

It’s amazing how facebook has revolutionized our ability to save, comment on, celebrate, and keep in touch with memories through the facebook photo tagging abilities.  I know that within hours of an event, I have instant feedback from our students and leaders as they upload their photos to photo albums on facebook and tag me in on the fun.  Sometimes this can be my worst nightmare as we try to educate our students about what should be uploaded and what should not. However, today I just want to live in a naive world and pretend that all pictures are good pictures. You with me?  So wouldn’t it be great to somehow have tangible albums that can be printed off, even passed out the week after an event?  Let me introduce you to Pixable!  It’s pretty simple.      You have all the photographers (ie your students and leaders) now here’s how you can aggregate those into an amazing memory book or calendar.  Image the possibilities! Meet your new best scrapbooking friend. I can’t explain it better then them…so here is Pixable.com!

Praying for and with parents

Dec 11, 2009 by     No Comments    Posted under: Featured, Girls Ministry, Moms

Recently I have had the great honor of praying with some moms that mean a lot to me, and listening to them lift their daughters up to God in prayer.  As I participated in one such prayer time with a mom, it made me think—I need to make more time for this.  I regularly schedule time to talk with girls and disciple them.  I work on events to help bring them together and fellowship. I try to regularly encourage and follow up with leaders that lead our girls…but a regular time to pray with moms of the girls…that hasn’t been top on my list as a girls minister.   One thing that may escape our ministry strategies are prayer partnerships with the parents of the girls we minister to.  There are moms I am now partnering with to pray for their prodigal daughters.  It’s important for us as girls ministers to remember that moms need prayer too, and they need encouragement, and how amazing is it when the church and home connect to lift up a unified purpose to Christ in prayer?  I think that’s why I know without a shadow of a doubt that He truly is Immanuel when “two or more are gathered in prayer”.  Below is a Parent’s Prayer as seen in Janet Thompson’s book: Praying for your Prodigal daughter. It’s a great book and has 40 days of scriptural prayers in the back.  I am so thankful for some mothers who have daughters in our student ministry and have allowed me to pray with and for them.  They are the primary Girlsminister for their daughter…and they need our prayers.

A MOTHER’S PRAYER:

Is there anyplace my daughter can go to avoid Your Spirit?
To be out of Your sight?
If she climbs to the sky, You’re there!
If she goes underground, You’re there!
If she flew on morning’s wings
to the far western horizon,
You’d find her in a minute—–
You’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees her in the dark!
At night she’s immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to You;
nigh and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to You.
Oh yes, You shaped my daughter first inside, then out;
You formed her in her mother’s womb.
I thank You, High God—You’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, she is marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know her inside and out,
You know every bone in her body,
You know exactly how she was made, bit by bit,
how she was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like and open book, You watched her grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of her life were spread out before You,
The days of her life all prepared
before she’d even lived one day.

Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!
God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them—
any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with You!
And please, God, do away with wickedness for good!

PERSONALIZATION OF PSALM 139:12-19 MSG as seen in Janet Thompson’s Praying for your prodigal daughter.

Developing the art of conversation and listening

Dec 5, 2009 by     No Comments    Posted under: Featured, Girls Ministry, Moms, volunteers

“They don’t listen to me!”  This is a statement I hear over and over again from teen girls.  How do you develop the art of listening to a teen girl?  It’s different than how it was when they were younger.  Girls have a lot of words don’t they?  It’s one reason I have loaded “Spinvox” onto my voicemail so that when I receive a call from a girl, their voicemail is transcribed into text. That way I see all the words, and can piece the situation together.  Sometimes they don’t talk at all.  Sometimes they do that because they know the question you are going to ask them already. It’s a routine conversation…and they hate routine conversations. If we’re honest—we do too!  We can almost verbatim know the flow of this conversation because we’ve heard it before:  “How was school?”   teen: “It was okay”  Parent: “What did you do”  teen: “nothing really”  Parent: “What did you eat?”and I’m shutting this conversation down because it is already snoozing us all.  The parent was asking routine questions, seeing if all the necessities were covered.  The teen was just going through the motions…but what happens when you ask the right question and listen actively?  A conversation may be born!

My mother is the super-hero of active listening. She doesn’t understand why people go to her to talk to this day. She doesn’t understand why when I was in highschool, most of my girlfriends and I would end up where she was. One time that was when she was cleaning the bathroom. We all sat in the floor of the bathroom and talked with her while she cleaned. Why?  Because we knew she listened to us…really listened.  I never knew what she would ask next. It was a real conversation.  So here are some tips to throw those routine conversations out the door:

1. Remember things that they are working on and work those into conversations.  It shows you are observing and caring about their world.  Resist the urge to judge. Example: “Hey Abby, last week you said something about Carly quitting the cheerleading squad, how is she doing? “  The response could be: She’s okay.  If so, ask how the dynamics of the squad are changing because she quit.

2.Ask questions to gain insight into the “ROOT”.   So you think Emily is being mean-girled at school?  That must be hard to be her friend with all that going on. How are you coping with that?  WHY do you think the girls are acting that way towards Emily? WHAT do you think you would do if you were her?

3.Create a place of conversation.  My mom was stationed at the kitchen table after dinner to read the newspaper or do a cross word puzzle. She was always on her feet but after dinner, this is where she was.  I knew her patterns. This is where I would hang to work on my homework. It wasn’t a place where forced conversation happened.  If I wanted to talk, she was there.

4. LISTEN.  Do more listening than talking.  There are 4 main reasons we listen

We listen to obtain information.
We listen to understand.
We listen for enjoyment.
We listen to learn.

People remember 25-50% of what we hear.  So when you spend your time with your daughter lecturing them for 10 minutes, they may only hear about 2 minutes of your speech before they tune you out.  However, they will take away much more if they feel listened to by you.  This is a LOUD way of telling them you love them and building that relationship.

This is just a start…other thoughts to share from parents or girls ministry leaders?

4 experiments to break parents out of a love language rut

Dec 4, 2009 by     No Comments    Posted under: Girls Ministry

I had the opportunity to listen to some girls recently.  They shared that they heard their parents say they loved them, but their actions weren’t matching up.  It made me think that perhaps those parents were getting into a love rut with their student.  What’s a love rut? It’s like a tractor rut. A tractor rut is a well-worn and deep path where the tractor has crushed the ground underneath and it would take lots of dirt to fill in the gaping path.  I think sometimes it’s possible to only demonstrate our love in a certain way to students that they get so used to it that it doesn’t even look like love to them anymore.  Talk with your parents in your girls ministry and see if they would be willing to break some routine and move out of a love rut into a love trampoline. Hang with me

1. write a short note to your daughter and lay it on her pillow before she goes to bed with a piece of chocolate. (words of affirmation/encouragement)

2. buy her a pair of fun socks and put them on her bed along with the verse Isaiah 52:7. (gifts)

3. Schedule a Saturday for you both to go serve at your local homeless shelter together and then take her for a snack break to talk about all that you experienced. Make a rule that you can’t talk about home issues or school issues…  (Quality time)

4. Surprise her when she comes home from school by setting up a nail station where you are serving as her personal nail technician.  For mothers and daughters that struggle with the love language of personal touch…this is a great starting activity as it allows you to hold her hand as you paint her nails.  You may want to provide a book of “Would you ever” questions to help with conversation during this opportunity.

These are just 4 ideas for parents to get out of their love language rut and show their daughter they love them in a new, fresh way. They are dying to hear those words, and they may just be tuned out because it has become routine for them to see them.

Help for the frazzled girlsminister or girlsministry leader!

Dec 2, 2009 by     2 Comments    Posted under: Featured, Girls Ministry, technology

I have great intentions of getting together with people for coffee. By the time I’m done with responsibilities on a Sunday or Wednesday, I have a handful of people that I know I need to touch base with over coffee or lunch.  The problem is sitting down to set up those meetings and get them in to my calendar. Anyone else have these problems?  I’ve tried countless scheduling programs but I am most excited about Tungle.  I even love it more after they just allowed me to select the days and hours to allow someone to set up meetings with me. There are several ways now that I can begin the process of connecting with those I have good intentions of getting together with.  1. I can send log into my Tungle account and select some days and times I’m available and send a request to emails I enter.  The recipients never have to register to Tungle to accept an appointment, and it even adds our meeting automatically to each other’s calendar.  2. I can send out my personal tungle link. Mine is

Tungle.me/Girlsminister

From this link, people can request times from my posted availability.  Tungle will then alert me to a request and ask me if I want to accept.  In addition, I can post my link on my blog, email, facebook—wherever…and if students, parents, or leaders want to contact me for a meeting–they can go ahead and go to my tungle.me link!  The amazing thing is that Tungle will not double book me so on Mondays, I can send out several meeting invites and the first people to respond get a meeting booked.  So far it has worked great!  Just passing it along to you guys.  What do you think? Could this be something you would use?