Some of the best Christian business practices in youth ministry do not make someone money at all. We can be creating new products while teaching teenagers how to develop skills and not making any money off what is created. One of the ways we have done this at seventy8productions is teaching teenagers how to program in creating actual products. Teenagers can learn how to learn great program concepts for business models, learn useful skills, and they may able to use them to make money in college and maybe actually create careers out of these interactions. Yet, the products themselves will never ask ago for sale.
This school year, we have been interacting with a couple of students on how to write WordPress plugins. It started with coming up with a strategy, then teaching him PHP and MySQL instructions, and finally showing them the WordPress framework. We gave them a WordPress plugin request, showed them the details of what we wanted, and asked them to come up with it. Obviously this is a time-intensive process as we need to field their questions, guild them as we go along, and allow them to figure out the programming dilemmas themselves that we could spot a mile away. But eventually they contributed amazing material and we came away with some amazing stuff.
Here is the process we went through:
- Plugin Request: Create a youth ministry games WordPress plugin that allows registered people to submit games for review by administrators. All accepted games will be displayed to everyone via a browse link, top 100, and that will be searchable in the future.
- Viable Structure: We needed to thoroughly construct the database elements, how the WordPress admin will look, and what kinds of ways we will want to filter the games.
- Execution of Code: We started with creating the databases with all of the elements. From there, we created the administration aspect, including how to approval/disapprove game submissions, edit the, and delete some. Then we created the user display and added the proper filters to sort through a possibly huge database.
- Wishlist: When finished with the base product, we came up with five items that we would like to see in the 2.0 version. Should we ever revisit it, these will be the aspects we focus on later.
More Than Programming
The best part of this is that it truly is a ministry. Giving them the skills and buying them McDonalds every week is great, but for myself, the purpose was building relationships. Every week, while we ate, I was able to ask these teens how their live was going. They did not come from the greatest of homes and so my heart would break for them.
Sometimes I would be overly “Christian” with my questions and comments and other times I would just internally pray for them. The result of this was that they learned how to do something they loved, I got a useful plugin, and I was able to show the love of Christ to them. Shows that the love of Christ can come in many different forms and only sometimes needs to be in a church.
What gifts do you have to offer that you can use to invest in others?
[…] 12, 2011 by Jeremy Smith printWe did a guest post over at Churchm.ag you should check out. Here is a link to the full post and below is a snippet: Some of the best Christian business practices in youth […]