like a fire

Those crazy guys over at Simply Youth Ministry have broken the teen barrier. It seems they have come up with a new way to communicate to teens called “txt”ing. I did some research and it seems that the mobile phone companies have been holding out on us. Apparently, most cell phones can send and receive short messages in the form of text (for those uninformed, text is another word for words or letters). Not only that, but unbeknownst to most youth leaders, the teens have known this for quite some time and have been using this technology to communicate secretly all the time. In fact, there are several plans that they are undertaking using only this technology.

The good news, at least for us youth pastors, is that SYM is helping us be more relevant (for a small fee) by providing a service to “txt” teens we know and work with. For just 10-40 dollars a month, youth pastors can communicate the teen way. This is actually a bit of a tradeoff, though. On the pro side, you don’t have to get into the other techonology that most people don’t know about yet called the “cell” or “mobile” phone. On the con side, you have to deal with another very new techonology called the “internet” or “World Wide Web” (don’t worry, it has nothing to do with spiders).

So you will have to make up your mind for yourself. I will say that SYM has a great track record since making available the “web site” in a box. I also look forward to the new technologies that SYM may tackle in the future. There are so many possibilities with some hints at things to come like:

“peer to peer” file sharing - you could sent the notes from you sermon to your kids at home on there computers. This probably won’t be feasible until much later when most homes have computers and the “internet”.

“MMOG or Massive Multiplayer Online Game” - this one is really out there but I think it is possible. One day (probably in the distant future), people are going start playing games online. When they do, they will get more for their experience if they play with a lot of people online all at once. I could see people getting together in groups, maybe called clans, and playing together. What better place for your youth group?

“Social” or “User Generated” content - this would be really cool. What if your youth group could host a site where teens could make their own user pages and put information about themselves, maybe even pictures. Again, this won’t be feasible until probably 2112 because people will have to have computers in there homes, but I think it is a possibility.

Having said all this, if you are a youth worker in the US and have never heard of any of this stuff (and your not Amish) then you might want to check out some of this stuff. If you do know about this stuff, forget about this whole article and continue doing what you have been doing all along. And if you need to send a “txt” message to many people all at once (and can’t do it from your Facebook account) then head over the Tim Schmoyer’s blog and get the lowdown on how to do it for free with txtsignal.

UPDATE: txtsignal is a pay service. For a free ride use Broadtexter.