Many churches all over the country are marking the start of a new school year by blessing back packs. I have found this to be a meaningful way to tangibly connect church with something important in the lives of the youth in our congregation. We publicize the event well in advance, send reminder post cards, and have a brief service in church on the first Sunday back in Sunday school. This is the important part -- people of all ages are invited to bring forward briefcases, messenger bags, PDAs, back packs, and other symbols of returning to work after summer vacation. The youth will happily participate along side the little kids if adults are participating too. (Otherwise, it can become an occasion for cynical eye-rolling among the teen set.) . After the blessing, key chains are distributed to everyone as a reminder of the congregation that supports them. See the US Toy Company  for a large selection of inexpensive key chains. One idea is to give each person a photo frame key chain with a picture of your church. Other possibilities ripe with symbolism are fish, butterflies, footprints, and light bulbs. See the Youth Files and Forms part of this site for promotional paragraphs to advertise the service in your Sunday bulletin or newsletter. Suggested texts for the service are also in the Youth Files and Forms part 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.