Over at YMX we’ve allowed comments on our articles for a while. In fact, we were the first youth ministry site around to do it. Not that that counts for anything but we set that trend.

We almost never unpublish comments. We read them all, respond to some, and it’s always been fun. So this morning I was really surprised to to discover this doosy as a comment to an article. (edited just one word)

Ok, for starters, you’re a fu**ing looney, of whom is obsessed with attempting to stop premarital sex, when premarital sex is responsible for more than half of the world’s population today. People like you will send the human race extinct if you get a foothold. Don’t you feel guilty destroying god’s creatures like that? And what next if you succeed? Preventing other animals from premarital sex? Advice for you. Go and ****. Find someone who is reeeeally good at it. Then come back and try and be all “oh, no, you cant have sex, god is being all perverse and watching you do it rarara” Incidentally, you need to check up the actual meanings of the verses you cited. You also need to look in a dictionary for the meaning of the word ’sex’. I suggest the King William english dictionary.

How would you respond to this comment?

With the economy slowing down or in full recession mode around the United States… the question is simple. How is your youth budget doing?

How is the slow economy hurting your ministry? What aren’t you doing in 2008 that you did in 2007 because of a lack of funds?

It’s Spring. And in youth ministry that really means one thing… a lot of people are changing gigs. Here are two jobs that have recently been posted on our job site, Youth Ministry Pro.

• Director of Youth and Family Ministries, Seattle WA
• Youth Director, Peoria IL

Don’t forget to shine up that resume before submitting it!

YMX is like a laboratory. We try things all the time. Some things work out great and other things… not so great.

Great things…  new registration process, new tabs on the main page, youthministrytips.com, youthministrypro.com, blog network, and at least one other good idea.

Not so great things… youthministryclassifieds.com, ymxhosting.com, all access, and a few others too embarrassing to mention in public.

We consider ourselves to be innovators.  And like every innovator we have a failure rate we are proud of. If we hadn’t tried all of those stupid ideas we wouldn’t have found the 3-4 that are working.

Anyway, enough babble. Here’s what we are doing that is new. For ages, millenia even, we have sent new forum members an email. It was a nice email… in fact we still send it because it gives lots of info.  But yesterday we started doing something different. When I see someone has joined I’ve been shooting them a simple two sentence “hi” message. And so far I’ve gotten a 75% response rate. How cool is that? We’ve sent out hundreds and hundreds of the other notes and rarely gotten a response. (+/- 1%)

Here’s a sample of what I’m e-mailing. It’s different each time depending on my mood. 

Hi! I’ve bumped up your account so that you can see way more of the forums. Welcome to the most amazing community in the history of the world. Go get ‘em. Peace out. Got questions? I’m your man. - Adam

So here’s the thing. What is it about this type of quickie email that makes you want to respond when the one full of information isn’t? 

Geeks that we are, Adam and I have made absolutely no secret about being fans of the Google Docs collection of free applications (did you get the free part?).  Today, the Official Google Docs Blog broke the news that it’s offline use features are complete.  You can opt to use Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations you’ve created in “the cloud” without an internet connection.

How cool is that, for free no less!

It’s that time of year.  Only weeks from now your church’s high schoolers will be honored for completing 13 years of school.  Almost nothing else in life requires 13 years to complete! Let’s help each other out by sharing ideas on the following:

1. How do you honor graduates?
2. How do you help them make the leap from the adult-directed world of childhood to the freedom and self-direction of college or work?

Post your ideas and resources in the comments and we’ll add them to this post.

One of the cool new things we’re doing at YMX is featuring news from youth ministry. We’re doing this because we don’t think any other site is doing it… pure and simple.

What kinds of news stories do you want?

• Success stories from the field. (We want to help tell stories of the great things being done for God among student ministries. So send us your reports!)
•  Ministry happenings. (Is someone significant moving on? We want to cover that story. Is something new starting? We’d like to help tell people about it.)
• Inside scoops. (Ready to tell the world about what’s happening at a youth ministry biz, mission agency, conference or publisher? Let us help get the word out.)

Do I have to write the whole story? Nope. Not at all. You can either give us a complete story or you can just give us a lead for a story. “Hey, did you hear ____ is now working for ____? They said they will be doing _____ from now on.” Sometimes it is leads like that which get us started on a great story. Don’t worry, we’ll check the facts and be journalistic about getting the story. But your tips are important to us knowing that there is a story out there.

Where do I submit a news item? Right here

Heavy on my mind today is growth. Growth is almost a cuss word in youth ministry circles… so let’s discuss that cuss word. I hear a lot about youth pastors who are feeling the pressure to grow their youth groups. There are two types of pressure, one legitimate and one illegitimate.

1. Church politics pressure. Pressure is put on you to grow in order to justify your job or your budget. That is understandable pressure from a business perspective, but not God-centered.
2. Reality driven pressure. Pressure is put on your youth ministry to grow because the need is so great. It’s not about you doing a good job or your ministry looking good, it’s about being significant in your community. This is God-centered.

For me, the reality is that I live in a community where about 4% of students attend church or youth group more than once per month. So if my students are in a class of 25… they are likely the only one who knows Jesus as their Savior and Lord.

And I am fighting hard to fight the culture of comfort. My students have a natural inclination to think that we’re big enough. But with 96% of students left unreached, I am forced to lead them where they don’t want to go… to grow.

So right now, I’m doing something that takes a lot of faith. I’m asking a youth group of 15 to invite 2000 people to an outreach. Why? It’s not because of internal political pressure or making myself look good or feel good… it’s because the need is so great in our community that we want to take ownership of the solution.

So what about you and your ministry? Are you feeling the pressure to grow for a God-centered reason?

This Saturday, April 12th, YMX will be putting in a new template. Here’s a sneak peak. (The final version looks like this, but will get a lot better)

We’re really excited about the new look. Not only is it a fresh, rich template. It also will represent some important changes we’re making on the nature of Youth Ministry Exchange. We’re building in even more interactivity than we currently have! Also, we’re adding a couple of brand new ideas that no one else is currently doing.

It’s a throwback and a throw-forward for us. In a lot of ways you’ll see us retool and go back to our roots as we make every effort to build-up our online community. But we’ll be doing that with a couple of fresh wrinkles that we hope many more people will enjoy!

We’re now about 2.5 years old… we’ve experimented with all sorts of things. But the best is yet to come! 

Maybe you’ve seen some new youth ministry ads popping up on the blogs you read? And you’ve wondered, “What’s up with that?”

Patti & I have been thinking of a very focused, very profitable (for both advertisers/bloggers) niche` ad network for youth pastors for a long time.

Essentially, our goal with it is to connect the best youth ministry bloggers with the best youth ministry advertisers. Its a natural fit… but it needed someone to be the conduit. That’s where YMX stepped in.  For the last two years we’ve built relationships with many of the best companies in youth ministry and we’ve done “direct sales” of ads since the beginning. In other words, we’ve had our own internal ad network for a couple years… so creating another separate network was a natural fit for us.

Next step. From there it was all about finding the right people and letting people know about it. From January 1st-March 31st we ran a pilot program. When that went well, we decided to keep it going… and here we are!

Why is it different? Unlike the two most common forms of online advertising (Pay per click [google ads] and Pay per action [affiliate links]) our bloggers are guaranteed payment just for displaying the ads. That isn’t altogether unique… but our payment structure is! The ad network only makes 20% of the revenue… whereas the accepted standard is 50%. That means we’re passing almost all the money onto our youth ministry bloggers. They are happy. Our advertisers our happy. It’s a cool thing.