Tech Geek

I would guess that many of us face the weekly issue of what to do with our youth group. Some weeks are easy to plan because we are gearing up for an event or a fundraiser or a trip and will use our Wednesday Night, or Sunday Night, or whenever, time to work on preparing for that. Other weeks we are well prepared and have something ready to go days ahead of time. Some of you probably are better at keeping things in nice organized files than I am. And there are weeks that I, and I'm guessing some of you, find ourselves scrambling for something with only a few hours, or minutes, to get it ready.

Two of the websites that I find myself going to pretty frequently are our own ELCA Faith Lens site at http://blogs.elca.org/faithlens/ and the Youth Culture Lessons archive at http://www.youthworker.com/youth-lessons-bible-study/youth-lessons/archive/

These aren't zero-prep, but they are a good springboard to conversation about a relevant topic. Faith Lens follows the lectionary and ties into current events. My High School Sunday School class is using that right now and, because you don't have to worry about how far the last person got in the curriculum, it works well to rotate different adult teachers through each week.

The YCL are not written from a Lutheran perspective, so there are times they need a little tweaking, but they do tend to raise some interesting cultural issues that many of our young people are probably dealing with.

What about you? Do you have sites that you use for starting conversations? Please share in the comments field.