A trip or gathering at the end of the summer is a good way to build relationships in your youth groups. Whitewater rafting may not be the best idea for young youth groups, but you could go canoeing or maybe boating if someone in your congregation has a watercraft available.

Since this is the first summer in my church job, I plan to start really small -- with a swimming party at someone's home.  The young people will have a chance to reconnect after a year of summer vacation.Parents will also be invited to attend so they can learn about youth group plans for the coming year.

For a copy of the invitation I will send out in early August, see the Youth Files and Forms section of this site.

PowerPoint has been around long enough to cause a shift in attitude. Many of the people who were once in awe of the possibilities for its use now roll their eyes in boredom at its mention. Yes, PowerPoint has been overused in unimaginative attempts to pump up presentations devoid of content. But most of our mainline churches have been slow to see the ways PowerPoint might be used to engage jaded youth and adults.

In the past five years, I have been joyfully using PowerPoint in worship services. I designed the images and words used on the screen for the first EU2charist. I worked with a team to use PowerPoint slides in a weekly Sunday evening worship service in a church where I worked. Later, I gained some experience working with middle school students using PowerPoint both for worship and for Sunday school class discussion.

At the 5:03 service at All Saints Church in Sunderland, MD, each of the songs used for worship uses a series of twenty or more PowerPoint slides. Each slide contains a phrase of the song and an image which illuminates that phrase. At other churches, I have seen projections of several verses of a hymn on a single PowerPoint slide with a colorful background. But the approach I am accustomed to using is more labor intensive. At All Saints, I sometimes set up the slides with the words already typed in. (It’s easy enough to cut and past the lyrics from sources on the Internet.) I maintained a “library” of images on the “My Picture” part of my computer files. The middle school and high school students would then think about what the song or hymn meant to them -- and choose an image from the files to cut and paste into each PowerPoint slide. Since most of these students had been preparing PowerPoint presentations in school, it took them about 30 minutes or so to get a song or hymn ready to be projected in worship.

At my current church job, we will be experimenting with the use of a PowerPoint Prayers of the People in the main service once a month. The youth will use photos of members of the congregation as well as images illustrating the people of the world, the environment, government leaders -- and whatever else we may be praying for-- to project on a screen during that part of the service. The screen will be removed for later parts of the worship. I expect a range of reactions, but I will be most closely watching the young people and their parents.

Our youth groups of any age like cooking together. I used to teach cooking to the 14 children in our parent- run alternative school. We successfully made things like Samosas-  fried Indian turnovers filled with vegetables and curry-- and Pavlova, a baked meringue dessert layered with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Sometimes the more challenging recipes intrigue the young people and give them a deep sense of accomplishment. Often if a recipe is too simple or if the adult leaders do too much of the kitchen work, the youth feel  they are being given "busy work" -- and they get bored. The important thing to remember is to prepare the work area ahead of time and divide the more complicated recipes into parts that small groups can work on together. 

Below are several ideas  to get a group cooperating together in the kitchen. To make any cooking venture more successful, have enough tasks to keep everyone in the group occupied. (NOT like in the photo above!) Set up cooking stations for 2-3 young people to work at together. Each station should have a set of measuring cups and spoons, all the necessary ingredients for that part of the recipe, mixing bowls, pots, or pans as needed, and  a sponge and paper towels for quick clean ups. I also have alternative activities ready in case the cooking goes faster than I anticipated. For example, we use rubber stamps and markers to make labels for the food or gift cards if it is being sold or given away. Or we set the table and make place mats if we are eating the food together after it is cooked.

Things to cook

• Make pizzas together - make yeast dough ahead of time in a bread machine or buy frozen pizza dough. Do not use ready made crusts; half the fun comes from learning how to stretch out the dough. Use a variety of toppings. Put the names of each young person in your group in a fishbowl or hat. Have the young people make an individual  pizza for the person whose name they have drawn.
• Make Christmas cookies. There are lots of no-bake recipes. Bar cookies are another good choice. After the youth sample a few cookies, take the rest to members of the congregation who are sick or in retirement communities. Or take them to be served at a community soup kitchen.
• Make "mixes" in jars. There are recipes for brownie mixes, soup mixes, taco seasoning mixes, and hot chocolate mixes -- as well as many others on justpeace.org. Our young people decorate the tops of glass Ball jars with fabric circles and sell the mixes to make money to give to charity.

From time to time I'll be sharing some of our most successful recipes.