I don’t know how many youth ministries out their do series for their teaching, so this may not apply to any of you, but I thought I would walk you through how we think through and build our series over at Atmosphere, the youth ministry of East Auburn Baptist Church.

Prayer, Picking and Preaching – I know what I will be preaching about 3-12 months in advance. The way I do this is I take intentional time to get away and think through where God is leading me, the students, our ministry, the culture and then what book we need to go through. For the most part we teach through books of the Bible, switching back and forth from an Old Testament book to New Testament.

Bring the Team in – The last time I did this, Jan 2010, I walked away with 3 books to preach through in mind; Lamentations, Jonah and Mark. Since we had just finished Galatians the next book we would hit was an OT book, leaving us between Lamentations and Jonah. I sent an email out to my theology team (a group of guys who help me think through my sermons, help study and hold me accountable with what I say). They got back to me and we chose Jonah. I then sent it to our creative guys (which includes a video team, graphic design guy, and music teams) along with our whole leadership team. This was so they could start reading, praying and studying the book for ideas, thoughts etc…

Brainstorming – For creative people this is easy, but for people who are not this is like nails on a chalkboard, but it is needed. We started thinking about what we could do to help students get the theology, story, themes and point of the book of Jonah. At this point I had started reading some commentaries on Jonah, and hashed out a title and major theme (which is the title) Jonah; Revealing God’s heart and Ours.

Outcome: Here is what we came away with:

• The series would be 7 weeks long
• Week one we would rewrite the book of Jonah into a first person monologue, and have someone from outside of our youth ministry do a dramatic reading.
• The other 6 weeks we would walk through with me preaching all the sermons. (I am not the only teacher in our ministry, some times we will switch off).
• Our video team would produce a teaser film, shot on green-screen (me talking) and using a Jonah flannel graph we bought for $15 online
• For scripture reading we would film 12-15 people reading the whole book of Jonah. Our video guys (all unpaid students and one adult leader) would edit the footage into a montage of them reading then cut them up for the passages that we cover each week. NOTE: This also will be a resource we hope to have for other churches at some point, and I will make sure to post it here.
• We would build a page on our site that would have all the books that we are using to study Jonah, the students reading, the sermons, a .pdf of the monologue and any other things we come up with
• One of our inters wrote a song based off of the book of Jonah that we would sing throughout the series.

I know when you look at it that way it seems like a lot of work and maybe a little overboard, but this is a process that has taken the better part of 6 months. We started in Jan and the series will not be preached until the end of July. Also the amount of money spent to do all of this was little to none. The key to all of this is planning far in advance. If given 2 weeks, none of this would have been able to be done.

(rss click through for video) Here is the teaser video:

Jonah Promo from Atmosphere Church on Vimeo.

What special things have you added to your youth group? Do you plan ahead? What are some tips you can give for our Mark sermon series, starting in November?