- After spending the better part of 3 days with middle school youth workers at SYMC, I am (once again) convinced that many of the sharpest minds in youth ministry are found in middle school ministry!

- At a conference like SYMC (or YS or any other large gathering of youth workers) you meet lots and lots of people. It’s always such a great reminder to me that God uses an amazingly vast array of people to pour into students. I’m so thankful that the stereotypical youth worker (young, cool, plays guitar, surfs, rides skateboards, has a tattoo….) is no longer the “norm”.

- We are starting a 3-week series this weekend called “STUFF”. We are using household stuff as object lessons to teach a biblical truth. It’s a series we have done once before with great success. This week’s lesson: Take Out The Trash!

- Quite a few people tracked me down at the conference to ask me about regional campuses (basically church plants that are still part of the mother ship). Questions about how we structure etc.  My simple answer: “Treat them like a franchise with freedom”  They are a franchise in that there are certainly some things that they have to do in line with the main campus because they are the same church.  But there shouldn’t be an overly large amount of control…they need freedom to tweak the ministry to their context.

- Dear Denver Broncos, Please get rid of Brandon Marshall.

- Dear senate and house leadership, Please either sign [...]

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As many of you who read this blog know, I have had a junior high-themed video podcast for a few years. If you’ve never seen one of them, you can check out the archive right here.

As I get ready to “crank up” the frequency of the podcast, I would love to have your input into what it looks like as it moves forward. Here are a few options (I would put a slick survey tool here but don’t know how!):

1.  Keep it as it is:  Me in front of a camera talking about one topic for 10 minutes. Short, sweet and to the point.

2.  Kurt and Guest: Me and a guest in front of a camera talking about one topic for 10 minutes. Short, sweet, to the point with one other perspective.

3.  ”Steal” the Simply Youth Ministry Podcast format: Create a 3-4 person team and make the podcast more like a radio show lasting about 30 minutes focusing purely on Junior High topics (the SYM podcast is typically about an hour).

4. Keep us guessing: Make it a random mash-up of all of the above.

Would love your thoughts in the comment section or you can email them to me at kurtj@saddleback.com

- LATELY, I have been thinking quite a bit about the need for junior high youth workers to be willing to do the tough work of getting into the minds of our kids instead of asking students to get into our minds. It seems that we often try to get students to laugh at what we think is funny, go “wow” at what we think is cool, want to talk about topics we find interesting etc.  It’s easier to minister that way, but it’s not as effective. As adults, we need to be willing to go to their level instead of hoping they will come to ours.

- QUESTION: Do you know your teaching style?  Andy Stanley posed this same question to a group of pastors a few weeks ago and it has stuck with me ever since. While I definitely seem to have a style, I’m not sure I have ever really dissected it to see if it’s the most effective style for communicating to junior highers. I am in that process now. Note: this feels much more important when I take seriously the whole “Me entering their minds instead of expecting them to enter mine” idea.

- FINGERS; I’m glad I have ten of them. I am spending a few days with my good friend Scott Rubin, and yesterday I had the first-time experience of operating a snow blower to clear his driveway and sidewalks. I naively assumed that a snow blower was just a big vacuum that somehow sucked the [...]

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I have gotten out of the habit of posting a recap of our weekend program each Monday. Let’s see If I can get back in the swing.

SERIES: This was week two of our “Cup Of Joe” series in which we are taking a look at Bible characters whose names start with “JO”  Week one was Jonah, and this week was Joseph. Our theme and stage decor is a coffee shop setting.  We are trying something new and making the entire program a play of sorts with everything happening in the context of a day in the coffee shop. My lesson takes place over coffee with somebody different each week. It’s been pretty fun.

ATTENDANCE: Below average. The holiday weekend combined with about 50 kids gone on a missions trip made this a fairly light weekend.

MUSIC: Music struggled a little bit. Mostly, it was just really inconsistent.

VOLUNTEER INVOLVEMENT: Volunteer involvement was a little low due to a lack of volunteers at church and our program is a little more “stage driven” than usual during this series.

FUN FACTOR: Overall it was a pretty fun weekend. Students seem to like the fact that we are trying something new and mixing things up a bit.

Today, we (Saddleback Church) are wrapping up our first 4-day “Radicalis” conference, and I have to say it was really, really good! Here were a few highlights for me:

Andy Stanley’s message on preaching was full of wonderful nuggets; some of which I will paraphrase here:

- “If you don’t have a ‘burden’ for it, don’t preach about it until you do.”

- “Find a compelling passage, rub their noses in it, drive it home and make it stick, and send them out with one way to apply it to their lives.”

- “Going long doesn’t prove how smart you are, it proves that you are under-prepared.”

- “Don’t memorize the whole thing…just memorize the ‘flow’ of the message; where you want to go with it.”

Mark Driscoll’s message about the cross, coupled with Rick Warren’s message on Radical Compassion, was a very powerful experience.  What stuck out most to me was the simple reminder that at the end of the day our theology is nothing more than this: The Cross. 

Spending three days with youth workers in the youth ministry track was so much fun. I’m not sure anybody will ever be able to convince me there is any other group of Christian leaders who are more fun to hang around than those who work with teenagers!  I met lots of new friends including a wonderful woman who has taken “Kurt and Scott’s Junior High Adventures” and turned it into a 12-hour training session she uses to train youth workers all throughout Egypt!

Radicalis convenes again [...]

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- BIG NEWS FOR MARK OESTREICHER AND MAYBE FOR YOU, TOO!  Marko has just laid out details of his plans to start a youth ministry coaching plan. If you are looking for a fantastic opportunity to be mentored by one of youth ministry’s best thinkers, I couldn’t recommend this opportunity more highly!  Check here for more details.                                                                                                   

- Just heard that Taylor Guitars is giving away five free guitars at our Radicalis conference next week! I found this interesting because I had heard in the past that Taylor never gives away free guitars…that they don’t sponsor musicians etc. So this seems like a pretty big deal.  As a fun side note, Bob Taylor served on the board of elders while I was at Skyline Church in San Diego and both of his daughters attended our junior high ministry. Now that my son, Cole, is an avid guitar player I have always wanted to try to get a deal on a Taylor for him….you know, Bob’s way of saying “thank you”.  But to date, I haven’t found the courage to ask.

- This weekend we are starting a new series called, “Cup O’ Joe”.  We are decorating the stage like a coffee shop and I will be telling the story of a different Old Testament hero of the faith each week.  Each person highlighted will have a name that starts with “JO” (thus the creative, and somewhat confusing, title/theme of the series). We are teaching on Jonah, Joseph and Joshua.  Should be pretty fun [...]

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- Today is cold, wet and windy. Having 3-4 days of rain in a row in Southern California is really rare and a fun change of pace! I’m holed up in Starbucks doing some writing and getting ready for “Staff Camp”.

- “Staff Camp” is our team’s 3-day getaway where we do lots of long term planning,  lots of work and have lots of fun. That’s the plan, anyway because this will be our first one.

- I am really excited about, and having trouble finding the time to write, a new book that should release in early fall. The Best Practices In Youth Ministry takes a look at an extensive study that was conducted to determine why some churches seem to have more success  fostering “mature faith” in their students. I am co-authoring with a long-time buddy of mine, and it has been really fun to take a massive study and break it down into a user-friendly youth ministry resource.

- Want to contribute to the book?  One of the features we would like to include in the book is about ten, 300-400  word, essays entitled, “I Hate When That Happens”.  These need to be stories of something that has gone horrifically wrong in your youth ministry! It can have to do with a program that went bad, a relationship scenario, a volunteer story, a youth group vs. “big church” story etc.  If you are interested, please contact me at kurtj@saddleback.com

- New Blog coming soon!I am in the initial stages of [...]

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Found a blog post from about six months ago by Kara Powell that is well worth the read.  The post itself is great, but the best fodder for discussion is found in the comments.

WEEKEND WRAP UP:  This past weekend we kicked off our new series, “Flipped”.  This series takes a look at some of the ways Jesus flipped the world’s ways of thinking upside down. This week’s topic was “Power Doesn’t Matter”.  Matt Hall, one of our team members, did a fantastic job of helping students look at Jesus’ view of what true power is all about.  We played a game we called “Flipped Phrases”, which was a rip off of Mad Gab which went over well.  We also had a cool backdrop/sign on stage with our “Flipped” logo on it that we flipped over halfway through the lesson, which was a pretty fun little visual.

STAFF CAMP: We are trying something new in a couple of weeks. Because of budget cuts, we lost the ability to take our team to a conference this year for ongoing learning etc. So, in a creative moment we decided to take the money it would cost for ONE person to go to a conference and put on our own, in house, conference for our entire student ministry team. We have asked a couple of the other pastors on our team to share with us, we will do some reading, some training etc.  Should be awesome….but could be a flop!

CHANGES: A couple of months ago I posted here that our team is in the beginning stages of streamlining our programs, re-evaluating how we spend our time etc.  Two months later and we are still taking some baby [...]

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