Adventist Youth Program Ideas

Idea # 3

Music is a huge part of any worship service. It is a gift that God wants us to use and enjoy to His glory. These days, the gray area between good church music and otherwise has widened along with the musical generation gap. It probably also happens in your church: the older members complaining that church music now just isn't as good as in the old days. But God has bestowed musical talents just as wisely on this generation as in previous ones. So this is what today's AY program idea is about: bridging the musical generation gap.

MUSIC: OLD AND YOUNG

Materials: writing board and chalk or papers and pens (for copying song lyrics)

Mechanics: Group the congregation into two or more (depending on the size of the congregation). Make sure that each group has enough young members as well as older ones. Instruct the older members of the group to teach their younger members a song from the old days - one that the youth are not familiar with. Also, ask the youth to teach their older members a song that is from their generation. Allow practice time. Now, each group will be given time to perform both songs - the older ones singing the new song, and the younger ones singing the old song.

Now you have young people learning and singing old songs and older people learning and actually singing new songs! This may just start everyone on a road to appreciating music from different generations. Plus, you   just gave them an avenue to interact and work with each other toward a common goal.

At my church, everyone enjoyed the activity, especially the older ones as they sang their newly-learned song while their young teachers looked proudly on.

The important thing to emphasize here is that the sacredness of the musical gift cuts across generations. God designed for music to be as much a part of worship as is prayer. In the words of the Apostle Paul:

I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also. 1 Corinthians 14:15

What do you do to bring out the good music at your church?


Check out other AY Program Ideas in this blog by clicking here.

Friends Reunited

Gladys Ethel Ana Ronora circa 2003

Gladys Ronora Ana June 2012

(no worries, Ethel's still alive. just married)

we also chanced upon dear friend Jeffrey with Lendle.

Happy Evening. :)

seeds and sunflowers

i'm vegetarian.

i've been asked why. 

humans aren't supposed to kill for food.

but plants are living things too, right? when you eat a plant, then you kill it too, right? right?

wrong.

the difference is that, when you take an animal -say a chicken- for food, you end its life and take away all possibility of it reproducing ever again. okay so this arguable. you take away all possibility of it reproducing naturally ever again.

but when you take a plant for food, what usually happens is you leave out the reproductive parts allowing the plant to live on and die its natural death. like in an avocado. you take a fruit from the tree, the tree lives on to produce more fruit, you eat the flesh of the fruit, and plant the seed, thus making way for another avocado tree just like it.

see the difference?

great! because that really wasn't what i was planning to share. haha

what i did want to share are photos of the sunflower seeds the inmates at jail gave me. i put them in a little seed bed and just two day later, they've sprouted!

a fresh batch of seeds 

i can't wait till they're full-grown sunflowers with bright yellow heads that follow the sun!

p.s.

did you know? after a sunflower blossom withers  and dies, that's the time you get to "harvest" the seeds from the blossom head and plant them to get a whole bunch of new sunflowers.