We wrapped up a series on relationships and dating the other week in our senior high Sunday morning meeting time. I grabbed the ‘Facebook Official‘ series from Doug Fields and Josh Griffin off their new youth ministry resource site, Download Youth Ministry. I really liked the progression of the series; friendship, marriage, dating, sex. I ended up not using the fifth week, but mostly because it was a series wrap-up. It was a great outline, but honestly, half the reason I got it was the name – it’s very, very relevant.

We had fun with it overall. Each week I tried to have different funny video clips with pop culture references to relationship statuses, whether it was the bizarre music video ‘Facebook Official,’ Tom bragging about his relationship status being ‘complicated’ on ‘Parks and Recreation’, or Barney from ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ That one took a little bit of editing to clean it up for church …

We also experimented with Poll Everywhere, a text message based polling system. I signed up for the free plan, which could handle up to forty votes/answers. After a few glitches at first we got it working and it was a BIG hit. You can actually embed the polls in a powerpoint show so we were able to just click through to it. Students LOVED texting in answers and have been asking me repeatedly to use it again. Personally, I loved the idea that on that Sunday their cell phones served as a tool for interacting with the message instead of distracting from it.

If you’re really curious where all we went with the series you can listen to the whole thing on our podcast feed. Definitely worth more than the $15 they’re charging for it over at DYM! My only wish? That they had made the audio of Fields and Griffin teaching the series available; I would have been willing to pay extra for it.