January 21, 2009

Today was my first day at my internship at the Wesleyan Church of Hamburg, more specifically, The Hub youth center that is connected to that church.  I started the day meeting with my supervisor to discuss goals for the semester and the assignments that I would have during my internship.  We discussed my first few assignments, along with a few others that would last the entire semester.  The first one was to "manage", for lack of a better word, the team leaders for our Middle School night, also called Overdrive. The was it works is that every Wednesday from 6-8 we have the Middle School Youth group (Overdrive) where students come play games, listen to a message, have small group discussions where they talk about the message or other things that are going on in their lives, and they can hang out and connect with other students.  For this program, we have four teams, Red, Blue, Yellow and Green.  These teams have two leaders each that keep track of the small group leaders, watch their team's student attendance and organize team parties and get-togethers.  My job would be to help these team leaders.  I would encourage them when they feel unmotivated, inform them of changes made to the program or other significant events, assist with struggles they have with their small group leaders or the students on their team and to help with anything else that they need.  Another ongoing assignment is to read to books by the end of the semester, Communicating for a Change by Andy Stanley and My First Two Years in Ministry by Doug Fields.  Both of these books are going to help me to see the inside perspective of youth ministry and teach me about the challenges and rewards of this profession.  The assignment that I began immediately was to organize and plan out the rest of the semester's Middle School nights.  I created a chart briefly laying out what each day's events were going to be.  These events included the crowd breaker (a game at the beginning of the night that gets kids excited to be here), the message, the large group games, small group discussion and then any other major announcements that need to be made that night.  To complete this chart I needed to get in contact with many people from the program, so I spent the remainder of the day making phone calls and sending out emails to figure out the schedule.   One of the last things that my supervisor and I talked about was the "rewards" system for students who brought other friends with them to the program that night.  I briefly did research for this, but mainly worked on organizing the rest of the semester.  

January 26 and 28, 2009

This week I spent most of my time doing research for the rewards program.  I searched online for ideas on how to best motivate these kids who are coming each week.  I played around with the idea of using "Snack Shack Bucks", or coupons for the snack/cafe area that we have in the building.  Each time the students brought someone new on Wednesday night, they would receive a "buck" that they could use to buy candy or other things at the Snack Shack.  I also thought about doing a raffle.  Each week if a student brought someone, they would be able to put their name into raffle. Every single time that the new guest came both them and the student that brought them would get to enter their name again into the raffle.  At the end of the month we would raffle off several prizes for those students who brought new guests with them.  I have considered other ideas, however I think that these two programs would work out the best for the students.  On Monday I also took care of some errands for Wednesday night's games.  I had to get many supplies, mostly food, for the "Dress 4 the Mess" night that week.  On Wednesday, due to the horrible weather conditions, we were forced to cancel the program for that night.  Most of the day however, was spent trying to figure out how to plan that night, if we should change the "Dress 4 the Mess" to the next week or if we should keep it in place.  When we finally cancelled the evening, I had to make calls to all of the team leaders to inform them of the cancelation and provide them with phone numbers to their small group leaders so that they could inform them of the news.  

February 2 and 4, 2009