Amid all the busyness, the Christmas season inspires people to intentionally draw near to God and to one another. Youth ministries can learn a lot from that about relationship-building throughout the year. Our youth program runs a solid midweek combo of large and small groups, with some big outreach events tossed in.…
This has never happened to me before in ministry… It’s summer, and at least half of the adult leaders I serve with are unplugging from their roles until the fall. And a large chunk of our youth group also won’t be around because they’ll be “at the cabin” for most of the summer.…
You need a break, right? Of course you do. The struggle is real. Ministry is hard and demanding. You’re running a church-within-the-church that likely has its own worship team, small group ministry, administrative needs, and teaching cycle. Toss in the larger church calendar, and you’re one busy youth worker.…
Play a game with me… Imagine you weren’t allowed to have small groups of any kind in your youth ministry. How would you build community? We all know that creating relationship-rich spaces to grow community is important, but what if our go-to greenhouse for friendship-building wasn’t an option?…
What’s your big dream for your youth ministry this year? And can you sum it up on a T-shirt? Leadership guru Peter Drucker made the “T-shirt” challenge famous—his argument was that big goals should be so easy to understand that they fit on a T-shirt.…
“I still tell people about how great and accepting our youth group was,” a 30-year-old recently shared with me. When I was his youth pastor years ago, “Mike” never took the big step of becoming a Christian. Back then he described himself as an atheist-meets-Wiccan.…
Every small group has some genuinely quirky personalities. I know because I’ve been one of them. In high school, I accepted a friend’s invitation to his youth group. Then he wanted me to check out his small group. Each member had a perceptibly unique influence on the conversation about God and life, but somehow the diversity worked.…
There’s nothing like a pandemic to make you wonder if anything you’re doing in ministry is effective. I’ve never in my life felt so intelligent about my ignorance. Our church adapted along the way, like many others, setting up an online student ministry and weekend services.…
Jesus is an artist, and he’s used the ugly raw material of the COVID-19 pandemic and re-fashioned it in ways we couldn’t conceive… We’ve all been dragged into a forced re-set—we’ve had to rely on Jesus, not our own ministry swagger or momentum, to feel our way forward.…
His name was Andy, and some weeks he was the only teenager who showed up for my youth group. It was a small church. And when things were good, the youth group might have 15 kids show up. But things suddenly became not-so-good as our senior pastor and congregation battled over whether or not he should resign. …
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