I remember when I got my first mobile phone. I was told it was really important to charge it all the way up to the maximum, and then run it down until it was completely flat, and then charge it all the way up again. If you didn?t, your battery wouldn?t have its upper and lower limits properly established. It would learn that it?s ok to only give 80, and that it?s ok to give up early. It would never operate at its full potential.
I wonder if the same thing applies to youth ministry?
Filling up to the max ? Are your young people confronted with the rich, deep, passionate prayer lives of people who walk intimately with Jesus? Are they thrown in to environments of extended, humbling worship? Are they exposed to others who flow in the supernatural and who can testify to real-life miracles?
Running completely flat ? Have your young people actually witnessed injustice (as opposed to just hearing about it)? Do they regularly find themselves in situations where they are completely out of their depth and need to rely fully on the Holy Spirit? Do they know what it feels like to sit with someone in need and feel powerless to do anything to help?
The consequences for getting this wrong with a mobile phone are reduced potential and decreased effectiveness. Are they any different for a young Christian?
(My fear is this: We get this wrong, and the result is Christian adults who are cynical of the supernatural, apathetic for justice, and lazy in their relationship with Jesus.)
Jarrod Newton is a regular contributor at The Salvation Army?s Youth Leadership Blog.
If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister. Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more. My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.
That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS. After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random). Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.
Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time! Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.
There’s also [...]
Jeff Atherstone is a friend of mine from seminary. We also worked together for a few years at Cornerstone – he was the pastor of student ministries in one of our church plants. Cool and very sharp guy.
A few years ago he left the ministry at Cornerstone and went out to Uganda to be a part of training leaders there. Church leaders. Pastors. There is a video here that has some very interesting statistics that honestly kind of surprised me. But in this video Jeff articulated a vision for what they are doing. He sees the big picture and is trying to get people behind it. He has been challenged by some questions by pastors of churches in Uganda:
Do I feed the orphans in the church or my own children? Do I pay for the widow?s hospital bills or do I take my own wife to the hospital? How can I find something to teach when I have never been taught?
Deep and penetrating questions. I wanted to post this video for three main reasons:
Anyway, watch and enjoy this short 2 minute video….it’s very well done.
We have a brand new start to finish resource we’d love to share with you: Girls Ministry from Start to Finish. Here’s what it’s covers:
Each week, you look at the girls in your church, and you dream about the opportunity to make a bigger impact in their lives. You envision a team of women coming alongside you, investing their time and talents to help teenage girls discover how beautiful and valuable they truly are. You imagine groups of girls gathering to talk about their life experiences and offering support and encouragement to one another. You picture moms and daughters experiencing healed relationships and new beginnings.
It?s just a dream?for now. But you can turn that dream into reality with the tools, tips, and training you?ll find in Girls Ministry from Start To Finish.
This resource is divided into two parts.
Part 1: The Strategy Who will lead your girls ministry? How will you structure it? How will it benefit your church? What impact can you have on the girls in your congregation and community? This section takes you from ?big picture? thinking all the way to hitting the ground running.
Part 2: The Tools and Resources This includes stuff that will save you tons of times: event ideas, sample Bible studies, and suggestions for curriculum. Use them as-is or customize them for your ministry. They?re all yours. We?ve also tossed in some extra training resources on the challenges facing girls in today?s [...]
Most of you would have no interest in this, but….
Our church offers 2 year internships, and our junior high team has a couple of spots opening up soon. If you are a college graduate looking to get some incredible, hands-on, experience we’d love to talk to you about the details of our internship program. You can read a little bit more about it for yourself here.
Attendance: Average
Lesson Topic: Week 10 of our summer series: Road Trip Summer (Temptation)
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Below Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Average
Length of Lesson: 22 minutes
Student Response: Average
Overall, a pretty decent ending to our Summer program. The highlight was our spontaneous game of “Singing Bee”.
We had a game that didn’t work very well at our first service, so in between services we quickly created our own version of Singing Bee. We simply picked two songs that we had loaded onto our iPod and played them for everybody to hear until we got to the chorus. At that point, we paused the song and the contestant had to try to sing the chorus….it was super fun.
The two songs we used: Since You’ve Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson and Fabulous from High School Musical 2.
If you are the leader of your junior high ministry, one of your roles is to develop some sort of team of volunteers to help you lead your ministry. Getting people on the team is a big step, but how do you keep them on board? Let me share, what I believe, the two most important things to do with your volunteer team:
1. Get Them On The Same Page: A team that works against each other is doomed. One of your most important roles is to get everybody heading the same direction.
- Why does your ministry do what it does?
- Why doesn’t it do what it doesn’t do?
- What are the ministry values?
- What is the purpose, mission, strategy etc. of your ministry?
- What are the expectations of being part of the team? What do you expect from them and what can they expect from you?
2. Encourage Them: Training is important (in fact it’s one of the key ways you keep everybody on the same page), but I’ve seen far too many well trained volunteers leave youth ministry because they are worn out and discouraged. My theory is that if you keep your leaders encouraged, you’ll have plenty of time to train them!
My suggestion:
- A formal interview process on the front end that allows you to get to know the potential volunteer. Do a background check, ask for and call references, work the potential volunteer through your purpose statement. Be clear in your expectations [...]
-We are wrapping up our Summer series this week. I like the idea of a Summer-long series, but 10 weeks always feels long.
- We are on a short, three-day, vacation in Palm Springs with Ron and Katie Edwards. Ron’s parents have a time share so we are staying in a REALLY nice resort at no cost.
- I went golfing today in 106 degree temperature and hoped to play alone. Instead I got paired up with another guy who had the foulest mouth I’ve heard in a while. He used all the classic words about a thousand times each and introduced me to several phrases I’d never heard. The Pastor and The Cusser on the course together. It was actually a pretty good time.
- My daughter downloaded most of the songs from High School Musical 2. How embarrassing is it to admit that I actually like most of ‘em!
- I flew out to Colorado a few weeks ago to shoot 10 video small group lessons and learned today that something went wrong and two complete lessons never got captured. Now I’ll need to fly back out for one day to re-shoot those which is a total bummer, but I promised my team we’d have 10 ready to go by Fall.
- I’m watching sports center and most of the stories are revolving around NFL and College football. The season is almost here! GO BRONCOS.
I was going through a bunch of old stuff while working in my garage, and ran across some old baseball cards. To my astonishment, I found a Barry Bonds rookie card, mint condition. I really think that at some point in the future Bonds will be exonerated of most all steroid charges and will go in to the Hall of Fame distinguished as the best hitter of all time.
If you, or anybody you know, might have an interest in buying this card, let me know ASAP. I’m giving it 2 weeks and then putting it on Ebay and taking whatever I can get for it. I’ve included a scanned copy of the card to show it’s condition – as you’ll see it is in MINT condition.
(SO to Alan Mercer)
…I’m wondering if this is what it looks like when Willow Creek takes their junior high ministry to the local water park.
I’ve been doing a whole lot of thinking lately….maybe a little too much. It seems like the majority of my recent posts are trolling for answers and insight which serves as a reminder that we’ll probably never totally figure this thing out!
Here’s my current wrestling match: What does a truly effective weekly junior high program look like?
In our setting, we’ve got a variety of programs for students at a variety of places in their spiritual journey, but we do have ONE PRIMARY program each weekend that is more of an entry level experience for students. This is the program we hope will attract un-churched students and the program we hope our regular attenders will invite their friends to.
It’s a solid program, and one that I think is serving us well, but we’re missing something.
Is it that we need more adult volunteers loving on kids? Is it that we need a better follow up system to help us notice when students are missing? Is it that we need better lights, a new fog machine and bigger screens (gosh, I REALLY hope it isn’t that…)? Is it that we need to radically examine how we teach the gospel? Is it that the program is fine but we need to be spending more time with students on campus, at games etc. earning the right to be heard?
This could prove to be a lively discussion….so don’t be afraid to fire away with your ideas, your successes, your failures and your reactions to what others [...]
A reader recently posted this comment:
“I just discovered you, the simplyyouthministry newsletter, and the simply jr. high podcast. One question: where do I look to get your best training material? Podcast, articles from the newsletter, or somewhere else? (I miss the podcasts! But I’m sure you are crazy busy). If you have time, please let me know.”
This reader may already be aware of the fact that there are plenty of other, BETTER places to get junior high resources and training, but I thought it would be worthwhile for everybody to share a few places, companies, people, events etc. you go to for your training, resources and encouragment. If you feel so inclined, include what that particular organization’s ’specialty’ might be.
I’ve been in a little email discussion with several junior high youth workers concerning the best way to approach music/worship. Some questions that have been raised:
- What types of songs are best?
- Should students be able to understand all the concepts the words and theology of the songs they are singing?
- How often should new songs be introduced?
- Other than singing, what elements are being mixed in to the worship time?
Great questions…..what are your thoughts?
Attendance: Below Average
Lesson Topic: Week 8 of our summer series: Road Trip Summer (How To Handle A Breakdown)
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Below Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Above Average
Length of Lesson: 24 minutes
Student Response: Above Average
We had a really fun weekend. One of our interns, Brian shared the lesson and did a fantastic job! He told a great story that inner twined through the whole lesson that really connected with our students. Games were fun, music was great. All in all a good weekend.
Subscribe to the Network