Practical Youth Ministry Tips

Announcements are, unfortunately, necessary. We all do them. Usually we get up front, read through the list of announcements and hope that they all stick. Every announcement is important to us, but is it important to your audience? That’s the great question. You need to get the word out about upcoming events, but when you deliver them from the front, reading off your printed/handwritten list, it gets dry and monotonous.

If you really want to get your audience to listen, you need to change things up. This first “announcement installment” is a musical one. Sort of. There is a great app (FREE) for iPhone and iPad called IAMBEATBOX, made by Savage Apps and another one by them called Dub Step ($.99). They both take on the same concept. There are 5 circles* at the bottom of your screen that you can drop into one of 20 squares. Each circle represents one type of sound. It could be a basic beat, a synthesizer, a clap sound, a repeating vocal, a beat box sound, etc.

You can take the circles and move them all around to get the sound you want. There are also preset sounds that you can use as they are or tweak any way you want. It goes for 8 measures and the loops around again. You can also record a track moving around your circles as much as you want. It’s a pretty amazing app.

So here comes the announcement part. Set it up to loop for the 8 measures or record your own track and then give students the announcement you have written out. Then they have to rap the announcement. You can either give it to them ahead of time and have them write the announcement or you can write the announcement and have a different student rap each of your announcement and make it into a game.

There are several things that happen when you try this one out.

* It is something different and change always makes you listen up.

* It is fun to see the audience dance around a bit as the beat gets started.

* You get students some stage time to do something fun.

* If you have a really creative student you get to platform their unique ability.

Here’s a quick example of a rap you could do:

It’s summertime and you know what that means
All the grass turns to brown from green
Listen, there’s lots to seek
When you start thinking about what to do each week
Sign up for summer camp
Don’t sit in the corner like a table lamp
Beach trip on the 31st
Make sure you bring water to quench your thirst

Have fun!

*This review is on the Dub Step version. The Beatbox version is slightly different, but same concept. Below is a screenshot for the Beatbox version.

iphone version