Do you have to preach from the Bible to have a good  Lesson?

I used to think this was a definite yes. But then our Middle School Ministry started an interesting series.

For the next few weeks, and the past few, we are working our way through the book “Live Large. Be Different. Shine Bright.” By Doug Fields and Josh Griffin. We aren’t necessarily going through the book together, but I have been taking each chapter and rewriting it into a sermon format.

But what has somewhat bothered me is that there isn’t a lot of Bible in the book, per se. More so, it bothers me that I can’t easily find where these Relationship Qualities are biblically based as opposed to just things a good person would have. And to be honest, I almost wanted to can the series because of that as we got closer to it.

What I have found, though, has been that our Middle School Students have really latched on to these truths and have been able to, in our break out groups, really “Shine Bright” by finding how these truths align with the teachings of Jesus. Its been awesome to me to see students take something that we are talking about that isn’t coming directly out of the bible, and be able to bring it back around to the bible, which is far better than I could have hoped for.

So it really got me thinking, do you have to teach from the Bible to have a biblically based lesson?

I think my answer would still be that our messages should be biblically centered, but I also know that there are exceptions to this Unwritten Youth Pastor rule.

With that, though, comes the warning. If my students weren’t able to relate the lesson back to the bible, I don’t think I would be as excited for this series as I have become. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how a lot of these values are based off of Jesus Teachings, and I know Doug and Josh are not saying forget the Bible and just be happy. But I’m the one failing to so far find the space to make these biblically based. If we weren’t opening our bibles at all through the night, I wouldn’t call that a good night of youth group.

At the same time, I love that I’ve seen the potential of how to Teach the Bible by going non-biblical.

I’m wicked excited that Kolby Milton has joined the team of Youthmin.org Collaborators. I love his blog and his stuff, and can’t wait to see what he brings to Youthmin.org. I mention him because every month he does a goals review, and though he’s certainly not the only blogger to do it, I tend to like his quite a bit because A) he’s a fellow Youth Pastor, and B) he doesn’t come off smug and arrogant about his goals.

Last month, I laid out some of the goals I had for youthmin.org for February, and here is a report on how we did, as well as adjustments and additions to the goals for March.

Goal 1 | January 1st, we had 360 twitter followers, and today (January 31) we are at 531. I would love to be at 1000 by March 1st. Want to be one of the 1000? Follow @youth_min

Failed : As of March 1st at Midnight, we were at 722 twitter followers. I know there was a lot more I could have done, and we could do some of the easy things they say will grow a twitter account, but I’m trying to keep it organic in that sense. the Goal remains: 1000 followers.

Goal 2 | Along those same lines, we are currently are at 281 Fans on our Facebook page. I would love to be at 400 by the end of February. With this, though, I am trying to find a balance. We have a specific strategy with what we tweet with our buffer, but along those lines, I don’t want our twitter streams and Facebook stream to be too identical. Im learning, though, that not all of our Facebook fans are on twitter, so we are missing out, I feel, on traffic when we don’t post on there. Im doing some tests this month about that, and will share them in March. Want to help us out? Like Youthmin.org on Facebook!

Failed : But so close! We had 386 Fans at midnight, and we’ve been adding 4 fans a day on average. So I’m upping the goal, and because of some things we have that may or may not be going on in March, I’m setting the goal at 750 Fans.

Goal 3 | Decemeber was our soft launch, and we had nearly 38,000 views. January was our official launch, and we had 8,000. We’re starting something in February with some of our top contributors that Im hoping pays off, and I’d like to get back to 25,000 views in February.

Failed : Once again, so close.  We finished February with nearly 19,000 views. So maybe not that close, but still, compared to the 8,000 in January, significant improvement. Same goal for March, to have 25,000 views.

Goal 4 | We did 2 or 3 weeks of a weekly round up, a popular flavor on many blogs, where we posted our posts from the week and 10 favorite posts from others. In February, I’m hoping to do this through an email newsletter with some other things incorporated in it. Would love to have 50 people sign up by the end of February for our weekly newsletter.

Failed : We didn’t get this one started.  We only did one weekly round up and and never sent a single newsletter, but we got to 45 subscribers of our email newsletter. For March, I’d like 100 newsletter subscribers.

Goal 5 | Our bi-weekly #youthmin #tweetchats have been awesome. I love hearing the feedback from people about how great they are for youth pastors, and I couldn’t agree more. We only had one in January, but had over 30 people participate. We have a few in February on the books, and I would love to have 50 people participate in our #youthmin #tweetchats.

Failed : Could have gotten closer.  The latter part of February got insanely busy for me and we only had the one tweet chat, but it easily had 35 involved. So the goal lives on for March to have 50 people participate in our #youthmin #tweetchats.

Goal 6 | Adding a goal. Currently we are at 560 comments on just 130 posts. By the end of February I hope to be at 160 posts and I’m aiming big - 1,000 comments

Failed : Made Great progress, but ultimately fell short at 766 comments. Again, with what we may be doing in March, I think 1000 comments will be achieved this month.

Goal 7 | New for March, our Pinterest account has been bringing in a lot of traffic already. Currently were at 27 pins, but I’d like to be at 100 pins by April.

When my Brother and I first started talking about youthmin.org last summer, we had a lot of dreams for it, some of which were realistic and some maybe not so much, at least not for now.

But if you had asked me in October, when we were heavily working on getting the site up and running and ready for launch, what my vision for the site was, you would have gotten what now seems like a very shortsighted answer.

I wanted to create a site in Youth Ministry that would amplify the voice of the “Everyday Youth Pastor” and create dialogue about things in Youth Ministry.

In talking to a friend recently, he asked me “What would you define ‘Success’ as for youthmin.org?” And I had to think long and hard about it, and truthfully, I’m still not done thinking.

Two months ago, I would have said success would be getting 1,000 views a day, 20 comments a day, 20 ReTweets a day. And as I thought about that more, I realized that specifically with a blog, these are some of the only metrics you can use for judging the effectiveness of what you are doing. To me, Success is all about Effectiveness, and when I look at the above, I would say  if our site was doing those things, we would be Effective in starting dialogue in relation to Youth Ministry.

But then I wrote my goals for February post after a “Poor” month in January for the site (Poor in relation to the above metrical goals, I still think we pumped out some great content last month). It’s almost like I willed things into happening, because we went from an average of 350 views a day in January, until the day I wrote that I wanted to hit 25,000 views in February, when our stats doubled and we’ve been closer to 1000 views every day this month, sometimes more sometimes a little less.

All that to say, we are showing signs of “effectiveness.”

But are we really?

I read a lot of posts about Youth Ministry, but I also read a lot about social media and blogging, and one thing I have come to see as being true is that the best blogs know what product they are selling. Now, I don’t mean they are selling a literal product (though many are) but they fully understand why their Readers read their blog specifically over the thousands of other blogs out there, and they know how to capitalize on that.

I would put forth that these bloggers have made the Vision Turn. I don’t think there is a single thing a person has started without vision. For all the talk about the word by Leaders in whatever industry, I would say Vision is not what lacks from most leaders. It’s easy to have. I mean, literally, thinking back, how hard was it for my brother and I to have a “Vision” for a new Youth Ministry site? We saw a few needs, and saw a way to fill them, and have been working at that.

But the problem comes when organizations, be it blogs, Youth Ministries, Churches, Companies, whatever, reach their vision turn, when the “What are we going to do?” turns into the “What are we going to do next?”

I think back to an article in Group magazine this past Spring/Summer about a Youth Worker who was fired from a church, and in his article he talked about one of the things he believed led up to his release was the lack of vision in the church after finishing a huge building campaign. I would put forth that this church failed to make the vision turn.

Coming up with a dream is only a fourth of the battle. The hard part is figuring out what to really do when you get there.

I don’t know whats next for youthmin.org. We’re not there yet, still a long way off. But I also know, if I don’t start planning for it now, then Youthmin.org will be a pretty cool site for a few months and then die off.

Just like in Youth Ministry. It’s easy to see a Youth Pastor who says “I want to build a building and it would look like this, and it would have this purpose, and were going to have 200 new kids this next year, and 50 baptisms.” Thats a great sounding vision. But when it happens, when those things are true, what are you going to do?

Prepare for the vision turn before you get to the curve.

It’s Orange Week, and so I’ll be talking all about my Favorite Ministry Conference of the Year for the next few days.

I’m super excited about this year’s theme of Game Changer, and I know that the Orange Conference will once again be a game changer for me and the Ministry I am blessed to lead.

But for some reason, I can’t help but think of another huge Game Changer in my life.

A friend and fellow Orange Blogger Ben Kerns posted a video yesterday that was a recap of the Winter retreat he just got back from at Hume Lake camp in California. This is a place I haven’t really thought of much in the past few years, but 8 years ago as a Jr. in High School, I was at this very Winter Retreat with my Youth Group. I saw 15 seconds of the video and paused because all these thoughts kept coming back to me about that retreat, because it was a game changer in my life.

But here is the thing, I remember EVERYTHING about that retreat. I remember the inside Jokes my friends and I had from our cabin trying to fall asleep at night, I remember the walk from our cabin to where we would meet the girls and walk down to chapel or the cafeteria or the recreation areas. Speaking of girls, I remember that I did not have a girlfriend when we got to the retreat center, but I did have one when we left, and I remember that whole process, from making one of my friends who was a girl go in a different van so she could sit by the girl and put in a good word for me, to countless other little details about that process. I explicitly remember, also, falling off of my tube and sliding on a giant sheet of ice and scraping skin off of my hip bone to where I could see the bone, and going to the nurse and her telling me “You need to gain more weight, you have nothing to protect your bones from this sort of thing.” I still have a 4 inch scar there, though its faded, and where as it used to be on by hip bone, its now in a slightly different area.

I remember everything about this retreat, even the guy who spoke, his name was Eric Heard, and I found out last night he’s a pastor at Mariners Church. But I remember everything he said about himself that first night, how he was still in Youth Ministry in his 40′s and that was kind of rare.

But what I don’t remember are any of the talks, any of the lessons we did in our cabin. I don’t remember any of the teaching from this weekend, not even the general theme ( which I feel bad for, because now that I’m a Youth Pastor, I know how hard they probably worked on making a memorable theme. Oh well).

So what was a game changer for me? Was it the girl I started dating? No, she broke up with me because I was a bad influence for not always listening to “Christian Music.” From Facebook, I’d say I wasn’t the only bad influence she ever had.

Was the game changer that I ripped my side open and got too scared to do anything ever again? No. I still do stupid stuff, I’m a Youth Pastor after all.

No, the Game Changer was when my Youth Pastor pulled me aside for just a few minutes after that first talk when Eric mentioned he was rare, being in Youth Ministry at 45, and told me “Someday that will be you. God is calling you to bigger and better things than you can think of for yourself. You’re going to leave a legacy, live like it.”

It was nothing profound, not 3 point lesson or “Im going to impress you with my biblical knowledge” lecture.

Im sure to Aaron it was nothing, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a “Hey, quit joking around, live better” type lecture. But I know to me, it was a game changer. That someone outside of my family would see in me something I didn’t see yet, but that my parents had been telling me.

I may never leave a legacy of being the world’s greatest Youth Pastor, that award will probably never show up at my door. My legacy may only be that a few kids got saved from going through our ministry and they went on to live happy, Christian lives. But the words of Aaron have since and will forever be a challenge to me to Live like I’m going to leave a legacy, and never settle for what I think I am possible of.

This coming week is Orange week, a week in which several bloggers commit all of our posts to spreading the Message of Orange. Why? Because its a philosophy of doing Ministry that we believe in, and one that we want to spread.

In return, Orange often times hooks us up with freebies to give away to our readers, which is how I was able to give away a free registration to the Orange Conference 2012 to Ben Zabel in September.

This go around, I’ve been given a copy of Parenting a New Generation by Chap Clark to give away. I’m super jealous, because part of me would love to keep this for myself, because a) I have heard such great things about it, b) I have seen my friends in ministry talk about the great things that came from doing the study with parents, and c) its Chap Clark, I love anything and everything by Chap Clark because the man does great work.

But here is the tricky part. I started a new site a few months ago, Youthmin.org, and Im actually giving away this item through that site. So if you want to win a copy of Parenting a New Generation , just visit Youthmin.org and enter using the Punchtab promotion.

And you can get more than one entry! You get an entry for tweeting the post, for liking the page, for answering a question, and on and on and on.

So what are you waiting for?! Go Enter Now!

The last two summers, God has really put different ideas for blogging on my heart. Two years ago, he put a desire and passion to start a site specifically for Small Town Student Ministries and the struggles and environments that don’t really come into play in the larger churches and towns. From that, SmallTownStudentMinistry.com was born and God really blessed it.

Then we moved from a small town of 1500 to living less than 10 miles from Fenway and the rest of the heart of Downtown Boston. I was no longer in a small town or small church, and so the site changed to Intentional Student Ministry this past August.

But around that same time, God started putting something on my heart as well as my Brothers heart, another, new site. This new site, I really felt, was to be something that would grow into being a megaphone for the new voices in the Youth Ministry world. From this, Youthmin.org was born. I tried hiding the fact that it was my site for a while, but I’ve been outed by a few people, so oh well. (thats for another post)

Though I didn’t fully agree with everything Marko wrote in “Youth Ministry 3.0″ I love the language and purpose of the title, and I fully believe that just because his definition of 3.0 might be different from mine or how others would define it, I believe that Youth Ministry is moving from 2.0 to 3.0. It has been for a few years, but still has a ways to go. I wanted Youthmin.org to sort of be the soapbox that discussed the sort of issues that arise in that transition of the Youth Ministry world.

There are a lot of various things we hope to accomplish with Youthmin.org. Some of them have already started happening, and some are a ways away.

But one thing I love about this experience is that I’m learning so much, both about Youth Ministry but also about writing. Ill get to one aspect in a bit, but for starters, I read and edit a lot of posts every day for the site, whether to publish on the site or simply tweet out. A long with that, I’m learning a lot more about social media than I ever planned.

All that to sort of lead into 5 quick goals I have for Youthmin.org for February, and some discussion about them.

Goal 1 | January 1st, we had 360 twitter followers, and today (January 31) we are at 531. I would love to be at 1000 by March 1st. Want to be one of the 1000? Follow @youth_min

However, we don’t have a huge number of followers compared to many sites. I know the tricks and tips on growing a twitter following very easily, and have seen it work with some friends. But, we haven’t tried those tips and tricks and probably won’t because I am amazed at the interaction we get with our followers. I feel like the majority of people who follow us want to be following us and are engaged with our tweets. We use buffer.com, which I HIGHLY recommend for anyone interested in using twitter with a blog or business, and its amazing to see our engagement go up and up and up with our followers.

Goal 2 | Along those same lines, we are currently are at 281 Fans on our Facebook page. I would love to be at 400 by the end of February. With this, though, I am trying to find a balance. We have a specific strategy with what we tweet with our buffer, but along those lines, I don’t want our twitter streams and Facebook stream to be too identical. Im learning, though, that not all of our Facebook fans are on twitter, so we are missing out, I feel, on traffic when we don’t post on there. Im doing some tests this month about that, and will share them in March. Want to help us out? Like Youthmin.org on Facebook!

Goal 3 | Decemeber was our soft launch, and we had nearly 38,000 views. January was our official launch, and we had 8,000. We’re starting something in February with some of our top contributors that Im hoping pays off, and I’d like to get back to 25,000 views in February.

Goal 4 | We did 2 or 3 weeks of a weekly round up, a popular flavor on many blogs, where we posted our posts from the week and 10 favorite posts from others. In February, I’m hoping to do this through an email newsletter with some other things incorporated in it. Would love to have 50 people sign up by the end of February for our weekly newsletter.

Goal 5 | Our bi-weekly #youthmin #tweetchats have been awesome. I love hearing the feedback from people about how great they are for youth pastors, and I couldn’t agree more. We only had one in January, but had over 30 people participate. We have a few in February on the books, and I would love to have 50 people participate in our #youthmin #tweetchats.

Update: Goal 6 | Adding a goal. Currently we are at 560 comments on just 130 posts. By the end of February I hope to be at 160 posts and I’m aiming big - 1,000 comments

I had several people ask how we made this calendar. It was very simple to do but it was a bit time consuming for me. Here are the photoshop files for this interested, Feel free to download this and remake it for your ministry.

This post Originally appeared on Youthmin.org

This verse can sometimes serve as a direct punch to the gut.

The easy way to see this verse is that its talking to those who want to be Teachers but are not called. In Youth Ministry application, it could be seen as talking to people who want to be Youth Pastors yet are not called to be Youth Pastors. It’s sometimes tough to imagine that people would be crazy enough to want to be Youth Pastors without being called to be Youth Pastors by God, but their are people out there living this way.

But like I said, thats the easy way to view this verse.

What God has been laying on my heart as I reflect on this verse is the idea that as Youth Pastors, we are teachers, and we have HUGE expectations on us. Not just the expectations the Parents of the teens we minister to, not just the expectations of the teens we minister to. Greater than the expectations our Sr. Pastors and Elders and other church members have on us as the Pastor of the Youth.

God called you to where you are. I don’t know your current circumstances in ministry, but I look back at where I was a year ago, and even in that dark time, I understand that God called me to that church and that ministry. Just because I am no longer there, doesn’t mean I wasn’t supposed to go there for a season. And the same applies to you. Whether you are in a dark time in your Ministry or things have never been better, God has placed a Call on you, not just to Youth Ministry, but to the specific Ministry you are in right now.

This means that God has great expectations on you, on me, on every one of us who have accepted the call as Youth Pastors.

God has been laying on my heart the severity of this the last few months and weeks and really pushed me hard about something I have been struggling with the last year or so.

Im of the understanding that as Youth Pastors, one of our functions is to Teach the Bible to the students. Yet, in the past, I have taken something that God takes very seriously, and James tells us we will be held accountable for, and placed it in the hands of people I have never met.

There are great curriculums out there, there are great resources available to us as Youth Pastors to make our “jobs” easier. And in the past, I have been a huge fan of these things.

But I have to wonder, did God really call us to the Ministries he has called us to so that we could teach the students what some other Youth Pastor is teaching their students and repackaging for us to buy for $20?

I know I always appreciate trying to find other calendars from Youth Group’s as inspiration for design and possible future events, so I thought I’d share ours for this spring.

What this doesn’t show is the intentionality behind our Calendar. We really focused on our 5 purposes in our Youth Group and made sure we had events that specifically fulfilled each of these purposes, and tried to balance it so that each purpose had at least 3 events.