Nothing has the power to transform your teenagers’ lives better than an outside-my-comfort-zone mission trip or service project. Outreach is the lifeblood of a thriving youth ministry, and serves as a microwave for life-change.
What You’ll Find
The Missions and Service section provides guidance, inspiration, and ideas to help you find or create life-changing experiences for your youth ministry. You’ll find stories of epic triumphs and epic fails, along with how-to’s that will aid you in planning a trip/project, fundraising, recruiting volunteers and even post-trip follow through.
After years in youth ministry, the one event that impacts our students the most are mission trips. But here’s another secret—the trip itself is the icing but the preparation is the cake! Don’t miss out on the cake because it makes the event so much more powerful!…
A longtime youth leader questions the real impact of short-term service that’s divorced from an everyday commitment to mission in kids’ lives, and offers a four-pronged strategy for hooking them into a servant lifestyle Just when you’re all geared up for another summer mission trip, I’m about to throw a rock in your pond.…
Do our young people return from a mission trip feeling as though they’ve “done” missions? In other words, do they mentally check off missions from their list of “good works” and move on? Is the trip akin to a pill that fills their recommended daily mission allowance?…
I don’t know how I thought I’d drive everyone to our events, or be everywhere at once, or find the time in my already crammed schedule. But then it happened–I needed adults for the mission trip. I couldn’t drive all the vans and do all the chaperone details, so I put out the word to the congregation: HELP!!…
On which arm do you wear your watch? This was a question asked in church recently by Rikki Grace, the wife of Pastor Ryan Grace of Bluffton, Ohio. I’ve never met them, but I can’t wait until I do. The two adults were about to join other adults and several youth from their church on a mission trip in Indianapolis.…
Why do we go on youth mission trips? For me the answer is simple. It works. Teenagers serve others, and, in the process, those young people grow closer to God. I’ve never seen anything like mission trips for helping young people figure out what being a Christian is all about.…
I’m sure you’re aware boys and girls are different. Mission trips impact both genders, but in different ways. Next week I’ll talk about girls. This week it’s boys. In my youth ministry experience, I seemed to have more girls involved than boys.…
