This Sunday we used this video in the main worship services! It actually represents about 8-10 hours of editing – grabbing the sound bites from the three mission trip report audio files and cleaning them up (you can hear them in full on our podcast feed), picking photos, finding a song (I used a performance track of a song I liked, downloaded it from iTunes – that way I had the music, but no vocals, making it less distracting), then trying to time it all out right, balance the audio, and tweak it endlessly. Plus, I’m a nerd, so I fiddled with our mission logo and theme or this year to make it a little more fun.

Ultimately, there’s a couple reasons why I think it’s well worth the time and effort. We typically have 60-80 students and adults serve on our summer mission trips … but the church usually only hears from two of the teens, and it kills me to think so many people are represented by so few. So I started putting together these videos so people would get snippets from 18-20 other participants from all three trips. An unexpected side benefit? They’ve become a powerful tool throughout the year in communicating value behind our trips, and promoting the purposes behind the trips in the next mission trip cycle. They also definitely make the rounds around Facebook and other social media sites, becoming some of our most viewed student ministry videos. It’s also a win for parents – you can always spot the proud moms, dads and grandparents in the congregation when the church hears their child sharing something powerful.

Here are the videos from the last couple years as well: