In 2010 we launched our first Love is our Weapon Campaign. Over 10 weeks we saw literally thousands of love deeds done and our youth ministry double. 9 months later we are still seeing the fruit. We learnt many lessons on what worked and didn’t work so well. Here’s my top 10 list on what to do to best utilize the LIOW campaign for your ministry:
1) Raise a revolution: Realize the magnitude of what you’re doing. Your raising an army of love. An army that can’t fail because his love never fails. Every young person that get’s a revelation of this is very dangerous to the enemy. Remember, your raising a revolution!
2) Build expectation: Set aside a month to build faith and expectation for what God is about to do. Use the LIOW promo’s , speak vision and pray leading up to your big LIOW launch day!
3) Own it: If you and your leadership team fully own the vision of LIOW in seeing your community radically changed by Gods love, then your youth will pick up on that. Choose to eat, sleep, breath, live, the campaign for 10 weeks. Your passion will be infectious!
4) Make it easy: Be creative about how to sign your young people up. Set up laptops at youth so they can create accounts, leave testimonies & register deeds each week. The easier the better!
5) Share testimonies: This is the greatest momentum builder you have. Each week, make room for youth to share testimonies of how they did the love deed from the previous week. This builds expectation and boldness in those listening!
6) Celebrate: Highlight the victories, both big and small: Every week, make room to celebrate milestones. You may have a faith-goal to see 100 love deeds done – When you reach it, go ballistic at youth, on facebook etc. God deserves all the praise!
7) Stay focused: Because the campaign goes for 10 weeks. It’s easy to get to the middle of the term and lose focus (kind of like Wednesdays!). Stay focus and choose to finish strong!
8) Use social media: The is something that we went crazy with and encouraged our youth to do the same. Create a facebook group for the LIOW in your ministry, use status updates to promote love deeds each week, update your statuses with testimonies, and post videos and links to your page! For #cheerachamp we even had one youth encourage all her facebook friends – all 400 of them!
9) Maximize the use of your youth ministry deed counter: You will have your own youth ministry deed counter. As this counter goes up, expectation, ownership and unity will go to a whole new level, as kids start to practically see the impact they’re making.
10) Finish strong: Use the last 4 weeks to build towards a LIOW celebration night were you can celebrate what God has done, share testimonies and see the change in your ministry.
I hope this helps! Remember our heart is to simply support and help your youth ministry, both through the LIOW campaign and beyond. So please give us a call or email if we can help you or your ministry in any way.
Your awesome,
Benaiah Halliday & the LIOW team
This is awesome!
I do believe that we’re in those days that the prophets of old & Jesus says it would happen, the end of time & the 2nd coming of Christ. All these new mindsets of reaching the young & old are wonderful means of spreading & teaching others to reach the lost & encourage other Christians.