Relevant Network Strikes Again

I’ve just received my third install­ment of resources from Rel­e­vant Net­work. I reviewed my first box, meant to review my sec­ond but got a lit­tle bit busy, and now want to tell you what came in my third (and also allude to the sec­ond when appro­pri­ate).

In both the sec­ond and third box­es I received 5 copies of the most recent issue of Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine. Nice for hand­outs to students–I gave away the last ones and I’ll give these away as well.

In both of the last two box­es I received the lit­tle mag­a­zinelet Rel­e­vant Leader, which seems to be devel­op­ing into some­thing a lit­tle more than the anno­tat­ed resource review it was in the first box.

As in the pre­vi­ous two box­es I received a good mix of books and CDs.

The CDs include:

The books are:

My crit­i­cism of the first box (that it con­tained almost no min­istry resources) has been tend­ed to, inci­den­tal­ly. The last box, for instance, con­tained a High­way Video DVD and a Blue­prints CD from Crave Resources. I was­n’t as impressed with the Blue­prints CD as I want­ed to be, by the way.

This box car­ries on the resource trend with a DVD called That’s My King from Ver­ti­cal Sky Pro­duc­tions. There is also a jour­naly kind of Bible-study thing to accom­pa­ny the Miles to Cross book.

All in all, I still think Rel­e­vant Net­work is the best bang for buck any min­istry to col­le­gians or twen­tysome­things is like­ly to run across.

2 thoughts on “Relevant Network Strikes Again”

  1. Hi there,
    Just saw your com­ment about the Blue­prints CD from Crave Resources. Well, we are now called Illu­mi­nate
    Resources and, as we are always try­ing to make our resources more use­ful to those in the trench­es of
    min­istry, was won­der­ing what it was that did­n’t impress you about the resource.…We would real­ly appre­ci­ate
    your hon­est feed­back…
    Bless­ings,
    jodie how­er­ton

    Reply

  2. Jodie: I’m touched that you took time to ask.

    I’m very impressed with Crave over­all. I’ve actu­al­ly vis­it­ed the min­istry before and I’ve also used Sar­ti Designs to cre­ate some pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als based sim­ply on the fact that Leigh has an asso­ci­a­tion with you. And although I was­n’t thrilled with the Blue­prints CD, I do reg­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend it to church­es that are try­ing to start a col­lege min­istry.

    Hav­ing said that, I was just under­whelmed with the CD. It was ade­quate but not excel­lent, and giv­en that there are equiv­a­lent-qual­i­ty resources avail­able for free I was dis­ap­point­ed.

    What resources? Here are a few:

    http://www.upc.org/download/1010.pdf
    http://www.ncncollege.com/
    http://www.reachtheu.com/
    http://regions.ivcf.org/

    What would have made it bet­ter? The talks were nice, but should­n’t have been the focal point of the CD. A few more doc­u­ments like the Blue­prints 1.0 essay would have been great.

    Some oth­er essays that would have been won­der­ful:
    * The dif­fer­ences between youth min­istry and col­lege min­istry.
    * Help­ing high school stu­dents from your church plug into your church’s col­lege min­istry.
    * Min­is­ter­ing to the col­le­gians who study away from home.
    * How to relate to cam­pus-based min­istries like Inter­Var­si­ty or Cam­pus Cru­sade.
    * The chal­lenges of work­ing on a pas­toral staff when no one else seems to under­stand your pas­sion.
    * How to launch a col­lege min­istry out of a local church that already draws many col­le­gians.
    * How to launch a col­lege min­istry out of a church that does­n’t draw a lot of col­le­gians yet has a large youth group.

    And I could go on. Even if you don’t have the exper­tise to pro­duce all that your­self you can part­ner with peo­ple like Mike Gaffney at UPC or Tim Elmore at growingleaders.com (John Maxwell’s for­mer col­lege pas­tor).

    Stuff like that would have real­ly added some seri­ous val­ue. If all you’re going to put on the CD is one essay and a cou­ple of mes­sages, then I’d rec­om­mend that you put the essay online for free in PDF for­mat along with your cat­a­log of resources as a free pro­mo­tion. Peo­ple will email it to each oth­er and see your cat­a­log of resources con­stant­ly.

    Just my two cents,

    Glen

    Reply

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