[This post is a part of the Youth Ministry 101 series]
The longer you are in youth ministry, the more you will begin to see stereotypes of the hip-young-cool-trendy pastor guy. This video does an awesome job at poking fun at some of those stereotypes. The simple lesson…don’t be that guy.
[This post is part of the Youth Ministry 101 series]
I’ve never really understood why people like running; some athletes get punished by running and runners choose to do it for fun. In running there are two basic types of running, either long distance or sprints. Both of these types of running are very accurate metaphors for youth ministry. In order to be healthy leaders, we need to learn how to lead with both of these concepts in mind.
[This post is part of the Youth Ministry 101 series]
If you are involved in youth ministry for any period of time, you are likely to hear the gathering of teenagers referred to as the youth group. In literal terms, I suppose the term is accurate; there is a group of youth that have gathered together and grow together. While the terminology may be accurate in definition, some of the implications that come along with it are opposed to the goal of not only youth minsitry, but the Christian faith.
Google Voice is an incredible, free tool that Google has created. One of my favorite features that is built into Google Voice is text messaging; once you have a google voice number set up you can use it for text messaging. We have utilized this in our youth ministry as a great tool for sending out mass text messages. Google Voice does not have mass texting as a built in feature, but there are some work arounds that can let you capitalize on this possibility. As we’ve been using Google Voice, I’ve had a few ideas of ways that we can make use of this technology for our student ministry.
[This post is part of the Youth Ministry 101 series]
Youth ministry is not complicated. It may not be easy, but it’s not complicated. Youth ministry is not defined by programs or events, it’s not defined by a gathering of teenagers, and it’s not defiined by a particular model or philosophy of ministry. A church may not have any weekly programs, any volunteers, or any idea of what to do with the teenagers – but they can have a healthy youth ministry. On the same hand, a church may have tons of programs, a huge volunteer staff, and hundreds of teenagers coming to their events – and they could have an unhealthy youth ministry.
This Sunday we started a new sermon series for our middle school students entitled, “Now Showing.” The idea with the series was to take movies which are not meant to be films about Jesus and use them to talk about Christ. Over the course of the next several weeks, we are going to be spending time discussing scenes from various movies and talking about how our Christian faith relates to what comes up in the film. This week our movie for the week was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which in my opinion is one of the best movies at showing the life of a young middle school student. The following is an overview of the main ideas for our lesson from Sunday.
[This is part of the Youth Ministry 101 series]
If you’ve ever ridden on a plane, you have heard the flight attendants explain the instructions of how to use the oxygen mask. Whenever they explain what to do if the cabin loses pressure and the oxygen masks become necessary, they always say, “Please place the bag over your own mouth and nose before assisting children or adults.” They make this important statement because it is critical yet often difficult to do in an emergency situation. If you have kids with you, the likely first reaction is to protect them first, but the reality is that in order for you to protect them properly, you need to take care of yourself first.
Vince Lombardi, famously began his football training camp by saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” This was a camp with football players making more money than any of us have ever made for playing a sport. But Vince Lombardi realized something very important; no matter what you’ve already learned, the fundamentals are always critical to a person’s performance. Fundamentals can help a rookie be set on the right path as they develop their skills and can help refine the bad habits of a veteran that has slowly forgotten some of the basics.
Have you ever noticed the way that young children make friends? The social life for a two year old is relatively simple; a two year old becomes friends with another two year old because their parents are friends. What about in early grade school? Again the social life is relatively simple; kids become friends with other kids because they go to school together or they live in the same neighborhood. But something happens around the time of middle school and this all begins to change.
Some days ideas for a sermon can come without any effort; other days it is like pulling teeth to come up with something to say. I have a few questions that I like to ask myself when I’m working on my messages:
This is always one of the first questions that I ask. Depending on the type of message I am working on, I’ll sometime start with the text first and other times if I have a specific concept that I want to teach, I’ll work on narrowing down the focus of that topic. If I can’t simply and clearly communicate what I’m trying to teach, the students that I’m teaching probably won’t be able to remember it.
