Clips for iPhone Launches Today

Today has been one that I have been looking forward to for several months.  Clips started for a simple reason; I wanted it on my iPhone.  I truly believe that there is a huge world of possibilities on the App Store for ministry resources, which in many cases will become more valuable because of their mobile format.  Over the past several years in youth ministry, I have used countless scenes from movies to illustrate ideas during a lesson.  I have also bought Videos that Teach to hand out routinely to small group leaders to lead discussions based on scenes from movies.  There's something about taking a popular movie scene and watching it in the light of scripture that really connects with students. Download Clips today on the App Store.

This is exactly why Clips has been developed.  I want it.  I want my volunteers to use it.  I'd even love to see parents of our students using it.   Here's a snippet of the app description from iTunes:

"Clips is all about helping people engage with the Bible by using scenes from great films. Pastors, small group leaders, and youth ministers can all benefit with the tools provided. Clips tells you exactly what scenes to use, what topics to teach, the verses you could use, and even some possible discussion questions.  It gives you everything you need to easily find the scene you are teaching from, even linking to it in iTunes."

One of the benefits of me releasing this app is that I'm free to grow it as I see fit.  If you want new features, I can add new features.  In fact, I already have 1.0.1 uploaded and waiting for review to fix some minor bugs and improve the international support for iTunes links. I have a lot of ideas and have been getting incredible suggestions from some of the early users.

I am very excited about what's in store for the future of Clips.  We'll be quickly working on getting an update to add even more movies and add the requested "Suggest a Clip" feature.  And I have a few other ideas up my sleeve too, but you'll just have to wait and see what those are.

Buy Clips on the App Store today for $2.99.

Fall Teaching Plan

As the fall comes so does all the planning for the upcoming year.  One of my absolute favorite parts of my job is getting to teach our students about Jesus.  And like I usually am, I am very excited to jump into the fall with some fun series and lessons planned.

Wild Kingdom: a 3 week series on the Kingdom of God answering questions like what is the kingdom of God, where is the kingdom of God, and when do we see the kingdom of God?  Also if you'd like to take this image to use as your own, just e-mail me and i'll send you a full resolution one.



Schooled: a 3 week series on living out your faith while your in school (or home-schooled since we have a lot in our group).  We'll spend time talking about Standing Up for your faith, Sticking Out from the crowd, and Speaking Out the message of Jesus.  The graphics for this series can be found at stufficanuse.com.

Choose Your Own Adventure: a 4 week series all about speaking to our students felt needs.  They are literally choosing the topics each week.  We will have some fun voting on the various topics each week and then spending times talking about whatever our students want to talk about.

This will take us up to December, where we will jump into a Christmas series, which we are still working out our theme for.  But regardless, I'm guessing that it will have something to do with the birth of Jesus...just guessing.

Everyone Poops

Everyone poops. We are taught from a young age this fact of life and brilliant children books have been written to help us understand this concept.  If you eat, you will poop.  And chances are you not only don't think much about this simple fact of life, but you rarely have associated it with Jesus.

Jesus ate...therefore, Jesus pooped.

The Bible never goes into detail about Jesus' bathroom habits, thankfully.  But I'd be willing to argue that this simple fact of life is true and if not, the act of not pooping for 33 years should be on the list of Jesus' most amazing miracles.  All throughout the scriptures we learn about who Jesus is and what he came to do, and the Bible speaks clearly that Jesus was human.

Jesus is both 100% man and 100% God.  Jesus felt pain, he slept, he got angry, he wept, he got hungry, he ate and inevitably he pooped.  I think  as Christians we often talk about the humanity of Jesus and think of him more as an almost-human.  We think of Jesus as someone who never got sick because he's God; his temptations weren't a big deal because he's God.  If we remove the humanity from our view of Jesus, we have an incomplete picture of who Jesus is.

The humanity of Jesus life is crucial to our relationship with God.  The humanity of Jesus helps us realize that God isn't a distant-far off God that doesn't understand what we go through.  And most importantly, by being completely human Jesus was able to give his life for our sins.  If we eliminate the humanity of God, we also inevitably eliminate the sacrifice he made and his role in taking our place.  In the same way if we eliminate the complete divinity of Jesus, we also eliminate the power to forgive sins, be the perfect payment for all of sin, and conquer death.