• With the dollar in your hand, what could you buy? What will a dollar purchase?
  
  
• If you could spend this dollar any way you want, what would you most likely do with it?
  
  
• Most of you probably weren't thinking of answers like, "Pay the rent," or "Buy food for my family," or "Get my little brother's prescription filled," right? Why is that?
  (The point here is not that they aren't thinking about others—though many might say "these are my parents' responsibilities, not mine!"—but the point is that $1 couldn't possibly pay for those things in our economy or anyone else's.)
  
  
• Do you think it's possible to live on $1 a day? What if you had to do it? Describe how you might look at that dollar differently.
  
  The truth is, people can barely live on $1 a day. There is no economy in the world that exists where all basic needs can be met for the equivalent of $1. Yet, over 1 BILLION people try to make it work. What's more, over HALF OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION—3 BILLION PEOPLE—live barely above that, on $2 a day.
  
  In sub-Saharan Africa, where the impact of AIDS is hitting hardest, 45% of people live on less than $1 a day. To be more specific, between 1990 and 2001, the average income in that region was around 60 cents a day.
  
  
• How many of you spent at least 60 cents to purchase something today? Raise your hands.
  
  
• As you hear these statistics, what do you feel? What is your honest response?
  (Help them with this question. Do they want to actively do something in response? Do they feel hopeless? Do they feel disconnected from the statistic or apathetic about it? Check their postures and body language for cues, and perhaps push them a bit to share their responses.)
  
  The point is not for us to feel overwhelmed with guilt or hopelessness. Neither of those are kingdom-of-God responses. Jesus spurs us to join him where he's already at work among the poor, and to start by actively praying. Tonight we're going to join with and pray for our brothers and sisters across the world, made in God's image, who are forced to attempt survival on less than a dollar a day.
  
  
• Let's pray together for those in extreme poverty around the world. (If your group supports a specific child or community in a developing nation, now is a time to connect them with those names and faces as they pray. Also include prayers for those who are being helped through the One Life program. You could use this time to watch a video segment from your One Life DVD to help students engage visually with real people in poverty.)
  • As we pray, let's think about these dollar bills and start by repenting of our flippant use of money, or our over-spending on ourselves ... I'm going to pass around this dollar and if you want to, go ahead and pray out loud when the dollar passes through your hands.
  • (OR, if you have the resources… get a dollar into everyone's hands in your group and hand over the responsibility to them.) How could you invest this dollar in making a difference in the lives of the poor? Is it possible? What you do with this dollar is, ultimately, up to you. But imagine the possibilities… and pray about expanding this dollar. (Develop together a timeline and a goal for your group's use of those dollars.)

• Station 1: Confession (post a few advertisements for things we don’t need from both guys' and girls' magazines). Confess our flippant use of money and our over-spending.
  
  
• Station 2: A prayer for Parents (post pictures of dads and moms from developing nations). Dads and moms (or often grandparents, aunts, or uncles who take on the role of parents) carry most of the burden of feeding and caring for their families' needs. In countries where an individual will make less than $1 dollar a day, imagine how that causes the dad or mom to feel. Pray for the parents who know they can’t afford to care for their families as they need to. Write down words on this paper that would describe how you would feel if you were responsible for taking care of someone and knew you could not. Give those words to Jesus.
  
  
• Station 3: Children (post pictures of children, of various ethnicities, engaged in different activities). Pray for the children whose parents are dying of AIDS, whose parents can’t afford to care for or feed them, who are unable to go to school, who are forced to work, beg, or are sold. (If you sponsor a child together, have that child's picture present and give students an opportunity to write a prayer for that specific child). With crayons and construction paper, write out your prayers.
  
  
• Station 4: Governments (post pictures of various governmental leaders, including some of our own). Pray for wisdom for those who govern. Pray that their eyes would be opened to the needs around the world and that they would have wise responses to poverty. Pray for nations to help other nations.
  
  
• Station 5: Me, Us (have a mirror hanging at this station and a picture of your youth group). Pray that God will open your eyes to the needs around you. Pray that you will be given wisdom in how you can respond to the needs. Pray for the group, that together you will be able to impact your community, nation and world with your response to poverty and the needs of those around you. Have a jar there for students to place their dollar bills in.

• Check out the report on progress so far towards the achievement of Millennium Development Goals. Goal number one is to "Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty," with a target to "Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day." Check out the progress on this goal and think of ways your group can help make this goal a reality.
  
  
• At www.oneliferevolution.org you can find out how your group can help children who are vulnerable or who have been orphaned by AIDS. Because of government grants, just $17 is all it takes to provide AIDS-related care for an entire year! How many lives can your group impact?

Vision Generation is an exclusive youth ministry resource, created for World Vision by Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry (CYFM). To find more free resources like these provided by CYFM, check out www.cyfm.net.   

BIG IDEA: The Kingdom of God reorients our ideas of personal value and net worth.

YOU’LL NEED:

• Paper & pencils or pens
• Calculators
• (Potentially) Copies of your church’s annual budget
• A prize, if you choose to award one

FOCUSING TEXT:
Mark 10:17-31

DIVING IN:

Note to Leader: This exercise involves students assessing the monetary worth of what they and a partner are wearing. Since you are the best gauge of your group, feel free to adapt this activity to fit their needs. For example, perhaps instead of sharing their "net worth" with a partner and/or evaluating the "net worth" of a partner, students could maintain privacy by simply evaluating their own "net worth" and keeping that number to themselves.

Ask your group, “What is the significance of April 15th in our country?” By April 15th every U.S. citizen must give an account to the government of how much income they made over the past year, and essentially how much they are worth, in order to pay taxes in a way that the government deems appropriate.

Have your group divide into pairs. Give each student a piece of paper and pencil, and distribute as many calculators as possible to students. 

Group Instructions: In light of the practice of “tax day,” each one of us is going to total up our monetary value. I’d like you to calculate, to the best of your ability, how much money is represented at this moment on your person. In other words, what is your “net worth” right now? Make a guess at how much you (or someone else) spent on your shoes, jeans, jacket, purse, sunglasses, cell phone, jewelry, whatever is in your backpack or wallet, even your braces, the highlights in your hair… anything you can put a monetary value on. List all of this stuff, and add up the total dollar amount. How much money do you represent right now? Be sure you don’t share your list with your partner yet.

Give them a few minutes to calculate their own total net worth. Either ahead of time or as the students ere calculating their own net worth, you should likewise calculate your own net worth so that you can share your own experience.

More Instructions: Once you’re done estimating your own “net worth,” make a guess about your partner’s “net worth” based on what they are wearing and carrying at the moment.

After a few minutes calculating their partner’s net worth, students can then compare and share their estimates with each other. You may want to give a prize to the student who was best able to calculate their partner’s net worth.

Debrief: What was this experience like for you? What made it easy to calculate your own net worth? What made it challenging?

(Continue this one up a few more until students start to arrive at the point at which they feel like they’ve likely crossed the line into the number of jeans that feels excessive. Note: In the discussion that follows, the point is not to suggest that this “find the line” mentality is the way to make decisions about money or possessions. Rather, the point is to reveal that the Kingdom of God is based on generosity rather than possessiveness, and on a worth that has already been determined rather than worth we must prove or earn.) 

Scripture: At this point, ask a few students to read aloud the account of “The Rich and the Kingdom of God” found in Mark 10:17-31. 

Share that it may not have been this man’s wealth itself that excluded him from the Kingdom, but rather his inability to be generous with it or free to live without it. Jesus repeats several times that it is hard—particularly for the rich, but for everyone, really—to enter the Kingdom of God. For some, following the Kingdom Way may in fact require giving away everything they have. For everyone, it requires a new way of viewing possessions and personal worth.

Wrap up: Close your time with a journaling exercise, asking your students to reflect on what they value and why. Have them create a “Lowering my self net worth” list—brainstorming ways they can reduce the costly material stuff that clutters their lives and ways to possibly redistribute some of that money and stuff to others.

You may also want to close by using Genesis 1:26-27 or Psalm 139 as a focal point for prayer, acknowledging that it is God who has determined our worth already, by creating us in His image in a mysterious and wonderful way. This worth extends to every person on the earth, meaning that we share this same sense of value with the poor, oppressed, sick, and hungry around the world. 

HAVE MORE TIME?

• Have your students design their “ideal church budget.” That is, if it were up to them, how and where would they spend the church’s money? You might even want to see if they can come up with the percent of the budget they’d like to spend on each of their separate categories. Then, distribute copies of your church’s annual budget, explain where the money goes, and dialogue about the similarities or contrasts between the “ideal” budget and your church’s budget. (Note: you may also want to give some framework for how the church budget is determined in your church). What part, if any, does caring for those impacted by AIDS in Africa or dying of malnourishment play in your church budget? What would your church need to do in order to give more away beyond its own walls? Maybe invite someone from your church’s finance committee to be part of this dialogue.

GET ACTIVE!

• Consider adapting the “Closets with a Cause” experience on page 51 of the One Life curriculum for this theme. Have students process this practice of simplifying in light of the above discussion of personal worth. 
• Teach students how to create and live within a personal budget. Push them to consider how our actual use of money shapes our beliefs about money, and how both of these influence our sense of worth.
• Encourage your students to go home and talk with their parents about how their family approaches money. What are their biggest spending “line items”? How much do they give away, and how do they decide? What line items might their families choose to reduce or cut out in order to deliberately give more away? How do we spend money differently as a family because we’re Christians? What choices can we make that would be even more generous?

Vision Generation is an exclusive youth ministry resource, created for World Vision by Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry (CYFM). To find more free resources like these provided by CYFM, check out www.cyfm.net.   

BIG IDEA: America’s addiction to stuff has created a “storage culture” in which hoarding is a core value. The Kingdom of God pushes us to re-evaluate that against the values of generosity, simplicity and stewardship.

YOU’LL NEED:

HAVE MORE TIME?

• Take a field trip. Drive your students around town or through a specific area of your city. Have them number and count off how many banks and self-storage facilities they see. Ask questions like: What can we learn from this? What does this tell us about how our community uses its money and material possessions?  
• Research the Christian Community Development Association’s “Three R’s” of community development: Relocation, Reconciliation, and Redistribution. How can your church incorporate some of the insights of CCDA into ministry in your neighborhood and beyond? What does this important concept of redistribution have to do with the kind of generosity that counteracts our tendency to hoard things? Look for opportunities to discuss these thoughts with your students, volunteers and church leaders.

• Take inventory: Encourage students to take their lists home and to bring their circled items to church the next week. Collect the students’ donations in order to help them see how much stuff we intentionally or unintentionally hoard. You could spend the rest of your time transporting those items to your local homeless shelter, Salvation Army, Goodwill, or have a rummage sale and use the money that is raised to help reach your One Life goals. 
• Take some students to a local ministry serving the poor, and meet with leaders or volunteers there. Ask them questions like: What kinds of things do people drop off here? How much is useful, and how much is not useful? What do you most need? What kind of support would you most appreciate from the community? Take this information back to report to your youth group, your church, and/or any appropriate ministry team or committee at your church.

VISION GENERATION #6 (JUNE): Can Scrubbing Potatoes Stop Slavery?

• Dirty potatoes (The amount will vary depending on the size of your group, but have enough potatoes to keep several people busy for your entire time together. Ideal would be for everyone present to be able to hold a potato in their hands toward the end of this exercise.)
• Scrub brushes (You can vary the difficulty of this exercise by limiting these materials.)
• Potato peelers
• Bowl or bucket of water
• Bin to hold peeled potatoes
• Optional: DVD of "Amazing Grace" (previewed ahead of time and cued to specific clips you might want to incorporate. Alternatively, you may want to set aside a movie night to watch the film together before or after the study.)

VISION GENERATION #7 (JULY): Sharing the Master's Happiness

Focusing Text: Matthew 25:14-30

Diving In:

Begin by asking your students: What are your favorite television shows? What television shows do you watch every day or every week? List all of their responses on the whiteboard.

Then, pass out 3x5 note cards and have each student list on the card the television shows they personally watch. Next, have them each calculate the total number of hours per week they spend watching television, and have them write that number on the note card. Collect all of the note cards.

Ask: Would anyone like to share his or her number?

Q: Who has a higher number? Who thinks they have the lowest number?

Q: How do you feel knowing we spend that much time watching TV?

Q: How much time would you guess the average American spends watching television?

Explain: In a recent study conducted by Nielsen Media Research, the average person in America watches 4:35 (that's four hours and thirty-five minutes) of television every day. Altogether, that means the average person watches over 65 days of television per year.

Discussion Questions:

Q: Do you think this is a number we should be okay with? Why or why not? If not, what number would you find acceptable?

Q: How dramatically would our numbers increase if we began to add the time we spend on watching movies, gaming, Instant Messenger, social networking sites, downloading music, etc.?

Following this discussion (or perhaps during it, if you have someone to help), determine the number of hours your group collectively spends watching television by taking all of the 3x5 cards, heading back to the whiteboard and totaling the number of hours listed on each card. Then, multiply that number by 52 to determine the number of hours your student ministry spends watching television per year (this won't be precise data).

Q: How do you feel knowing our ministry spends [Fill in the blank] hours per year watching television?

Q: Who benefits from the amount of time our ministry watches TV?

Q: Could we make better use of our time? Why or why not?

Explain: Maybe today is the day we begin to examine how and where we spend our time. Many of us might be tempted to think that "time" is something we don't have enough of. However, like all things, time is a resource that God has given us. And like all of the resources He allows us to use, He desires that we would use our time to build His kingdom and to bless other people.

Q: When does our TV watching bless other people?
(You might need to give some examples here since students will likely expect you to condemn all TV all the time. Examples include watching a TV show with your little brother so he won't be watching TV alone, or watching TV to be informed about world issues.)

Q: When does our TV watching NOT bless other people?


Next, break your students into groups and have them read Matthew 25:14-30. Have them discuss their initial responses to the story through the following questions:

• What is your reaction to the servants and the master?
• Do you think the master is harsh with any of them?
• Is the master "just" in his decisions?
• How do you feel about someone being punished for NOT doing the wrong thing?
  The servant didn't lose the talent, after all; he just didn't do anything with it.

Continue: We can often miss the point of this passage entirely. We get focused on how much talent, time, or resources we have been given. We start to ask questions like: Have I been given as much as others? Who has more than I do? Who has less? Or we can become focused on the reward, thinking, "If I just do this, then God will give me that."

However, the point of the passage seems to be about sharing the master's happiness. It's about joy. Regardless of what God has given us, His intention is to share His happiness with us.

The servants in this story did one of two things with the talents they had been given: they either invested or buried them. While "talents" in the story refer directly to amounts of money, the larger implications apply to all the resources we're given—time, treasure, and talents of different kinds. The harsh reality of this story is that it is possible to bury the resources God has given us to invest.

This is what building the kingdom of God is all about—investing all of the resources God has entrusted to us (time, talents, and treasure) in such a way that our decisions benefit others and allow us to experience the Master's happiness.


Close your time together in a period of solitude. You might want to play some music, light candles, or have students journal or draw responses to these kinds of questions:

• Based on how Jesus spent His time, how might we want to spend ours?
• How could your TV and other media-using habits be transformed into something that is pleasing to God?
• As you reflect on what you know about the Bible and its teachings about the kingdom, how do you think that the way we spend our time is related to our level of joy?
• What would happen if Christians all over the world invested just one additional hour per week in service to the poor? Would that change anything?
• What would happen if our group invested a little more time toward a justice-oriented cause? Would that make a difference? What if we invested a different amount of time in praying together?

Have More Time?

• By yourself or working with some of your students, create a time log sheet of some sort and have students track where they spend their time for an entire week. Then, encourage them to debrief the log and the experience with a mentor or small group leader. Perhaps have your small groups practice this discipline together, and then discuss and pray about their time use as a group.

Get Active!

• Invite your students to find a "time accountability partner" so they can call each other once per day for the next week—at all different times during the day. When they chat, they should talk about how they are spending their time AT THAT MOMENT. They should ask each other whether there is something they could do at that moment to bless others even more effectively and make God's kingdom more visible.
• Invite your students to blog about their use of time through your ministry's web site, or whatever social networking sites are popular with your students. Where do they find God present in the different ways they use time?

Other Potential Scriptures:

You may also want to discuss these scriptures, use them to create a Bible study, or involve them in small-group discussions about time through the week.

• Ecclesiastes 1
• John 15

VISION GENERATION #8 (AUGUST):
Becoming an Advocate