My head is spinning. Recently, a man I know—a professing Christian, and a man very involved in ministry—was sent away to prison for a long, long time. He was arrested for, charged with, and pleaded guilty to more than two dozen counts related to the sexual molestation and abuse of multiple girls, most of them tween-agers or younger, all of them were family friends.…
As a youth worker, you know it’s important to communicate well with parents. You may have learned that lesson via the School of Hard Knocks, maybe from a frustrated parent, or from 14 billion phone calls regarding something you should’ve conveyed with a quick text or email.…
Although we’ve made leaps and bounds in the past few decades, the sex talk is still horrifically awkward for many parents. Some even plop their kids down at church and say, “Here, you tell them what they need to know!” And for years, we did.…
As youth workers, we generally recognize that parents have the greatest influence on teenagers. Sometimes that’s simply a factor of time. We spend an hour or two with kids every other week (depending on homework and sports practice), while most moms and dads are with them nearly every day.…
The last time I saw Aaron, he was learning about life skills at a training session for at-risk teenagers. At the time, he was close to the cliff’s edge—where kids who are drug-addicted and homeless slip into oblivion. His parents didn’t know or care where he was.…
Editor’s Note: I met Jeanne Mayo more than a decade ago on a flight to the Canadian boondocks, where we were both speaking at a conference for youth leaders. She saw me walking back to the restroom on the plane, introduced herself, and asked if I’d like to hang with her.…
My wife, Rachel, doesn’t like to give me a Christmas list. (I’m sitting in Starbucks drinking some sort of holiday themed drink, which serves to remind me that Christmas is just around the corner!) Instead, around this time each year, she expects me to be listening to her cues and “reading between the lines” to decipher things she’d like under the tree.…
I talked to a fellow youth worker this morning who made the comment, “I feel like I am so behind already in planning the coming school year.” Although it’s only July, before we know it students will be home from vacation and back in school. …
Once you become a youth worker, it won’t take long for you to discover: You. Need. Help! One key ingredient in a healthy youth ministry is a team of caring adults. For the longest time, we tried to recruit young, funny, musical, athletic, attractive, cool, wealthy adults with big swimming pools and lots of free time on their hands.…
Recruiting Adult Volunteers for Your Mission Trip Adults are crucial to the success of the mission trip, in fact, it’s required. So, how do you get adults as excited about your mission experience? Here are some of our favorite tips for recruiting awesome adult volunteers: Ask them individually – Pick out adults in your church or adults who are connected to your youth group who qualify to be leaders, and take them out for coffee or ice cream.…
