In the often-chaotic cloud that is everyday youth ministry, one goal always rises to the surface—growing disciples who follow Jesus with an all-in commitment. You’re after life-changing, inside-out transformation—driven by a passion for Jesus that spills out onto the lives of others.
What You’ll Find
The Discipleship section offers practical ideas and insights about effective discipleship in youth ministry. We explore the method and models and strategies your ministry can use to help “seed” a generation of teenagers who are all-in for Jesus.
Teaching junior highers; I’m not sure a higher calling exists! Churches often make the mistake of seeing junior high ministry as a place for young, or spiritually immature, leaders to cut their teeth and learn the ropes of ministry. This is a massive mistake, largely due to the fact that young teens are in an enormous season of developmental change and it takes a mature leader to help junior highers navigate these changes well.…
About six months ago I had this idea to put a fire under a group of apathetic students. I started teaching about injustice in the world and how God handles it. We discussed our responsibility alongside his work and from this, “Passion Projects” were born.…
Last week I had the joy to “preach” in our church’s weekly staff meeting. Somebody teaches every week; I hadn’t in a very long time. Afterwards, no fewer than a dozen people pulled me aside to share how much they appreciated what I had to say.…
Junior highers are my people. For most of ministry career I’ve had the privilege (did I really just say junior high ministry is a PRIVILEGE?) of focusing exclusively on this age group, and even as my role has changed this wonderful little tribe has remained the closest to my heart!…
You are not a horse. While this may seem like fairly common knowledge (unless this blog post has found itself on some Planet of the Horses), sometimes we need to be reminded of the simplest of things. Here’s what I mean: When a horse is born it does not spend the next 18 months of its life swaddled in a crib and crawling on a floor.…
Reaching Kids Experiencing Same Sex Attraction An article from Jonathan McKee at TheSource4YM.com “We are confident in our theology concerning sexuality. We are equally confident that how we’ve traditionally approached sexuality, and ministering to teenagers in all stages of their sexual identity, has been unintentionally hurtful, confusing, and alienating to a whole bunch of teenagers.”…
The journey to inclusion is the road less traveled. It’s a road I didn’t even see until I had my own wrestling match with God. I’d been traveling a safe youth ministry road. This safe road led me to teens who were like me, where I challenged students and didn’t allow them to challenge me.…
It’s that time of year. In a couple short months, churches everywhere will move elementary-aged kids up into junior high ministry and 8th graders up into the big, bad world of high school youth group. For years at Saddleback, we’ve been fairly intentional in our promotion strategy.…
Once upon a time, I thought it would be a great idea to fill a hot tub full of milk, sardines and pigs feet. Who hasn’t, right? It was one of those crazy youth ministry program nights where our leadership team thought up absurd things we thought we could get students to do.…
Once a year we reflect and focus on the journey and resurrection of Christ. This week is an exciting week in the life of the church. We look forward to higher attendance, the annual Easter egg hunt, and the larger than average offering.…
