I read the book a while ago and, although I disagree with some of the theology and thus some of the application, it’s overall message is definitely worth hearing. It’s a great reminder of how passionate God is for us and how complacent we are in responding to His love.

Visit the free download section of christianaudio.com and use the coupon code JUL2009 to download it for free.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. My wife, Dana Schmoyer, is our featured guest. She will answer your questions about being married to a youth pastor, and together we’ll answer your questions about marriage and youth ministry. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

First of all, my wife, Dana Schmoyer, will be the featured guest and will share from her experiences of the struggles and rewards of being married to a youth pastor.

Second, rather than her just talking a lot, she would like to do a Q&A format with you all. We’ve never done it this way before in a LIVE YM Talk, so this will be fun! Submit your questions related to being married to a youth pastor and together we will all answer them from our various experiences and perspectives. Also, if you have any questions about marriage and youth ministry in general, feel free to submit those questions, too.

That means two things

1. Submit your questions about being married to a youth pastor and about marriage and youth ministry in general using this form. [UPDATE: form now closed]

2. Make sure you join our LIVE YM Talk on Friday, July 3, at 2:00 PM so we can hear your advice and answers to people’s questions, too.

Even if you can’t join us for the live conversation on Friday, submit your questions anyway and then listen for our response in the recording that will be available on Saturday in our podcast in iTunes.

How to join the LIVE YM Talk

To join our live conversation at 2:00 PM Eastern Time on Friday, call (724) 444-7444 and enter ID 19105# (long distance charges may apply). Or, listen to it online by joining the live chat room and participate there.

Check out the LIVE YM Talk page for more details and to see an archive of past conversations.

1. What difference has the deep and wide program made to your youth ministry on the ground compared to any program you used before?

Going “deep and wide” is not a program. Taking kids “deep and wide” is our mission statement, purpose statement, core values, strategy, and our philosophy all in one simple vision for teenagers. It directs and determines our programs, the content we teach, the relationships
we build, and every other aspect of our ministry, but it is not a program.

2. What are the positive (and negative) you could share with me about it?

There’s really nothing negative about it. It follows Jesus’ commission to “go into all the world” (go wide) and “teach them to obey everything I have commanded” (grow deep). It’s also the great commandment to “love the Lord your God” (grow deep) and “love your neighbor as yourself” (go wide). Everything is wrapped up in those two inseparable aspects of Christianity: worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism, missions, everything.

If you want to read more about it, Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share Ministries) wrote a thesis on it that goes into more detail.

3. One concern I have about the material is [your] use of the word “push” which could potentially have negative connotations in terms of “pushing” young people to make a commitment. Maybe this is a difference in our theologies but there have been several ministries…over the years (of which I was involved in one as a young person) that have “pushed” young people and for many this has had long term negative fallout. I agree that we ought to be hastily encouraging young people to have relationship with Jesus and to share it, but I am keen for that relationship to be long term. Do you have any thoughts?

I understand your hesitation with the word “push” and I agree with what you’re saying. Too many churches are very passive when it comes to encouraging teens in their faith. We think that if we talk with them once a week at church for an hour about it, then that’s sufficient to help them grow. But in comparison to everything else in their life — academics, athletics, band, family, relationships, whatever — they are definitely pushed. There are expectations and boundaries for each of those things that are much more rigorous than what we expect of teens spiritually. Mormons, for example, expect their kids to go to seminary for classes every day early in the morning before school and the Mormon drop-out rate is almost 0! We barely expect that they show up at youth group.

So, when I use the word “push” I mean we need to raise the standards and expectations of spiritual growth in kids lives. According to my theology, we are all naturally sinful and rebel against the things of God. Pursuing Him does not come natural for any of us. That’s why it requires some gentle, sometimes forceful, pushing. In my experience, never has a kid rebelled against that. In fact, they always rise to the challenge and start seeing Christianity as something more than just a wussy thing on Sunday mornings.

The kids who are spiritually apathetic need to be challenged the most. Jesus said, “teaching them to OBEY everything I have commanded.” Sometimes we have to challenge kids to just try what Jesus commands in an area of their life, and as they see that it really works, that this
is real and not just old Bible stuff, they start to become more interested. As they continue to obey and follow the Lord and see Him at work in their lives, then they move to becoming more excited about their faith and then passionate. That doesn’t mean teens (and even myself) don’t fluctuate spiritually, just that we are striving to obey the Lord in every area of our life.

Ultimately, you’ll have to be sensitive to how much you “push” a kid. It’s different for every teenager. Some need a lot of accountability, challenges, and follow-up. Some only need to be “pushed” once.

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While some are more prone to self pity than others, I guess everyone has had a time or two when they’ve indulged themselves in it. Depression isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy to defeat. While there are various contributing factors, central to victory over depression is a strong faith in God. When we get our eyes off Him we sink emotionally just like Peter sunk in the water when he focused on the waves instead of Jesus in the boat. Elijah was a great man of faith, but when he lost focus he, too, sank.

After experiencing God’s power in a way few ever have, he ran away depressed. Challenging the priests of Baal was a draining experience and Elijah was exhausted when God burnt up Elijah’s altar and sacrifice. The priests of Baal were killed and the people turned back to God. But Jezebel threatened Elijah’s life and he fell apart. He forgot how God had protected and taken care of him when the raven fed him and when he lived with the poor widow. Instead he withdrew from the people and places he knew and told God he was tired of living and wanted to die. He said he was the only one still faithful to God and he was tired of it all. He got into a deep depression, felt sorry for himself, didn’t think God cared about him any more and even wanted to die.

What did God do? Well, God didn’t lecture him, scold him, reject him or punish him. God let him talk, had him eat and sleep, then let him talk again. After eating and sleeping some more told him to get back to work. God reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who had stayed faithful to God, that others had as well. Elijah got his eyes off himself and back on God and went on to continue his fruitful service as a prophet.

We can, too, when we do the same thing. Proper diet, enough rest, good exercise – these are foundational to keep good emotional and spiritual health. But even more important is to keep our eyes on Jesus, trusting Him no matter what happens It is easy to get our eyes off of God and onto ourselves when things get hard and we face difficulties and opposition, especially if we are physically or emotionally drained. God still loves us. He is still there. We are not alone. We need to stop believing those lies. We need to get your eyes off ourselves and back on Him!

Scripture
1 Kings 19:3, “I have had enough, Lord,” Elijah said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

Psalms 42:11, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

1 Peter 5:7, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Reflect

• Are you prone to self-pity and depression?
• What usually triggers it in your life?
• What can you do to help prevent depression from taking over?
• How can you help someone else who is going through depression?

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

If you haven’t recently checked out Simply’s freebie page, it’s be worth your time to do so.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

The idea

As I’ve written before, on overnight youth trips I like to embed my Twitter account’s RSS feed into our youth group website so parents can get the play-by-play action of our trip while we’re gone. They love it for so many reasons!

Now that our new youth group website includes a special LiveStream just for our group’s online social activity, I’m taking the mobile updates to a new level for this summer’s youth group trips. Instead of all the web updates, mobile pictures and videos coming solely from me, I’ve opened it up so all the kids on the trip can contribute to our LiveStream while we’re away. I think there’s a couple benefits of this:

• All the kids feel like they have some ownership in sharing the story with what’s going on.
• Parents can see and read the trip from the perspective of the teenagers.
• Parents feel included and have a lot to talk about with their teen when they get home besides asking, “So how was it?”
• We have an ongoing “digital scrapbook” of pictures, short video clips and updates for every trip. Everyone can contribute to it.

How to set it up

I’ve already explained how to setup the website for collecting all the updates. The rest of it is really quite simple. It basically entails setting up a couple email addresses and passing them on to the kids to send updates, pictures and videos to.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your youth group. Twitter is limited to receiving updates from only one mobile device, so I use TwitterMail.com to setup a special email address for the youth group’s twitter account that can receive messages from anyone. Any message sent to that special email address is automatically posted to our Twitter feed.

2. Set up a TwitPic account for your youth group. TwitPic.com allows users to take a picture with their mobile phone and post it to their Twitter updates. Again, you’ll get a secret email address to send pictures to that will automatically publish the images to Twitter.

3. Set up a YouTube account for your youth group. Then grab the mobile “secret address” for your YouTube account. Any videos that are taken with a cell phone and sent to that address will automatically be added to your YouTube account.

Once all your youth group accounts are setup, plug each one of them in to the Lifestream WordPress Plugin you setup on your youth group’s WordPress website.

Then, right before the trip, give the teenagers the “secret addresses” for Twittermail, TwitPic and YouTube and let ‘em loose (within reason, of course). I recommend encouraging them to add the email addresses to their cell phones as individual contacts for easy access. And it might be best to ensure that you or someone at home has access to moderating the messages through the plugin throughout the trip just in case something inappropriate is posted.

And no, teens do not have to send messages as an email for this to work. Sending a text message, picture message or video message to an email address works just fine for most mobile providers and does not usually require a data plan or incur extra charges beyond their normal messaging plan.

For advanced users

Since I plan on utilizing this for most of our overnight trips, I want the kids to be able to use the same “secret addresses” over and over again without having to update the contacts in their phone for every trip. But neither do I want them to be able to continue updating the LiveStream on our site randomly throughout the year. I want to control when they can and can’t update our youth group website with those addresses.

So I went into our webhost’s control panel and created an email forwarding address for each of the services: one for the TwitterMail address, one for TwitPic address, and one for YouTube address. (For example, trippics@alexandriayouth.com forwards all messages to our secret TwitPic address and tripupdates@alexandriayouth.com forwards all mail to our TwitterMail secret address.) Instead of handing out the original secret addresses, I instead hand out the forwarding addresses to kids so they can use them on every trip. For the time between trips, I will delete the forwarding addresses so no messages pass through to the social stream during that time.

Plus, it just looks cool to use addresses from your own domain.

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Support Life In Student Ministry by checking out MinistryWebsites.biz for easy, simple and effective web communication for your ministry.

Six months ago I told you all about how I got a free Xbox 360 Elite, iPod Touch and more for free. I try not to blog about this too often because some of you think this is a scam and some of you just get too envious, but for everyone else, twice a year doesn’t feel like too much to keep you updated on the free stuff I earn and information on how you can get these items for free, too.

Since my last post on freebie sites 6 months ago, I’ve earned a free Canon HD video camera, and external microphone for it, and a Macbook for my wife. All for free. Not bad, eh? Here are some proof pictures. (Click an image to see it larger.)

How it works

1. Companies (like Blockbuster, for example) are looking for new potential customers to try out their products and services.

2. Blockbuster goes to the Bonus Network and says, “Hey, we’ll give you $80 for every customer you send our way to try out our online DVD rental service.” (Some advertisers pay Bonus Network $80, some pay them $40.)

3. So Bonus Network comes to you and says, “If you try out Blockbuster’s service and refer other people to try it through us, or one of our other advertising partner’s services, we’ll split the $80 with you for each person you recruit.”

4. You try out Blockbuster’s service and get 6 other people to try it, too (or another product/service offered through Bonus Network’s site) by giving your friends and family a special link that Bonus provides for you to share. (Of course, your friends can then get people to sign-up under their special link so they can work toward a free prize, too, but know that the people they refer have no benefit for you.)

5. After your 6 friends try a product or service, Bonus Network says, “Thanks! We’ll give you $240 ($40/referral x 6 referrals) or an iPod Touch. Which do you want?”

6. About a week later, your prize shows up in the mail, or your money shows up in your PayPal account.

Interview with co-owner of Bonus Network

Last October I interviewed a co-owner of the Bonus Network, Fehz, about his company and how it all works. Watch it below:

List of Bonus Network sites

*The login you create at one Bonus Network site is valid for all the other sites.

Prizes	Sign-up Link	100% Legit
iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, cash	BonusiPod.com
iPhone, Apple gift card, cash	BonusiPhone.com
Wii, Wii Fit, cash	BonusWii.com
Xbox 360, Halo 3 edition, Xbox 360 Elite, cash	BonusXbox360.com
PlayStation 3 (40 GB), PlayStation 3 (80 GB), cash	BonusPS3.com
Laptops from Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, more, cash	BonusLaptops.com
Plasma TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, more, cash	BonusPlasmas.com

Common excuses

Most people would love to earn some of these free prizes, but there’s three common excuses:

1. It’s a scam!
2. I’ll get hit with a ton of spam mail.
3. Completing offers costs more than the prize itself!
4. I don’t think I can get others to complete referrals for me.

For #1, check out my story above and the links below. I’ve done it several times and received several prizes, so I know it’s not a scam.

Concerning #2, I have not received one single shred of spam as a result of completing these trial offers or freebie sites, not via email nor postal mail. These companies actually have pretty aggressive privacy statements.

Number 3 also is not true. I’ve paid about a total of $100 out-of-pocket for all these free things combined. The most I ever paid for a single offer was $24.98 for a sheet of photo stamps. Most offers cost between absolutely nothing and $15. Some of the services I stuck with past the trial because I really liked what they offered. Some of them I didn’t like and canceled when the trial period was over. There’s no commitment either way, except that you complete the offer and give it a fair chance.

And about #4, check out this post I wrote that gives 10 ideas for how to earn referrals for your freebie site. They work for me, anyway. It may take some patience and persistence to get the first prize (especially if you’re going for a big one), but after it shows up on your doorstep and you have physical proof for the skeptics, all the other prizes flow in pretty easily. In fact, after I got my Xbox 360 Elite, I tried for the 16 GB iPod Touch and it took only 5 days to get all the referrals I needed!

My other prizes

For almost two years now I’ve been getting free stuff from freebie sites online. The list of prizes I’ve received is too long to name each item individually, but here’s a start:

• FREE Xbox 360 Elite, 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, Halo 3
• FREE 16 GB iPod Touch
• FREE 32 GB iPod Touch
• Canon HD video camera, external mic for the video camera, Macbook. See above. (I took cash prizes and purchased these items on my own.)
• and thousands of dollars in cash from the iPhone site, PS3 site, Wii site, and more.

If you have any questions about the process, I’ve done it many many times, so feel free to ask in the comments below. Fehz, a co-owner of the Bonus Network, will also be around this post in case you have any questions for him, too.

Greed and foolishness aren’t limited to the young, but young people seem to fall into that trap quite regularly. With age and perspective comes wisdom, at least some of the time. However, without that important asset it is easy to let pride and self-centeredness rule. That’s what happened to the man who replaced Solomon as king, his son Rehoboam.

When Rehoboam took the throne the people demanded a remission in the severe financial burden that Solomon had imposed to carry on his building activities. Rehoboam said he’d give them an answer in three days. That was a smart move for there is always time to make a good decision. Forced reactions seldom turn out well. Take time to thoroughly think and pray about important decisions.

During this time Rehoboam talked to his father’s advisers who advised him to give in to the people and lesson the burden so the nation would continue strong and whole. But instead of taking this advice Rehoboam consulted the young men who grew up in the palace with him. They didn’t have the maturity, wisdom or perspective to make a good decision about this, but they were his friends. Perhaps peer pressure had something to do with it, but obviously Rehoboam liked their advise better for it boosted his ego and would increase his wealth. Their advice was to actually increase taxes and show the people who was boss. “Don’t let them tell you what to do, show them you are tougher than your father was. Show them who is the king!” Unfortunately, Rehoboam liked this advice for he took it. The consequence, though, was disastrous. The northern 10 tribes broke away and he was left with Judah and Benjamin. The 12 tribes would never again rejoin to form a united nation. The days of Israel’s glory were over and her decline was swift.

It’s so easy for us today to think we know what is best and not realize pride and/or greed are motivating us. We want to do what impresses our peers and feel we know better than those who are older. Then we later regret our choices. This is true of everyone, from youth pastors to university presidents. Be careful of searching out those who will give you advise you want to hear. Learn to listen to those who disagree with you and would point you in a different direction. If they are wise, godly mature people pay close attention to what they say and don’t dismiss it lightly. Peers are great to enjoy, but outside perspective can offer a lot of good sense. Learn from Rheoboam – take godly advice.

Scripture
Proverbs 12:5, “The plans of the righteous are just, but the advice of the wicked is deceitful.”

Proverbs 12:15, “The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice.”

Proverbs 19:20, “Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.”

Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Reflect

• When was the last time you made a decision you regretted? What made it so bad?
• Was there greed or self-centeredness involved?
• Are you aware of the limits of your age and perspective when you make a decision, or do you feel you know better than those you might consult?
• Who do you go to for advice and guidance? Are they will qualified to direct you?
• What do you do if you don’t like the suggestions they make?
• What major decision are you making now? Who are you going to for advice?

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• Ideas for integrating theology into our teaching
• Some misconceptions about theology
• Why theology is important
• Evaluating who should teach and who shouldn’t
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

June 26: Next week’s topic and guest is still to be determined. Keep your eye on the LIVE YM Talk page and Twitter for details as they’re released this week. for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Last week everyone was given a little rock as they entered the room and we used it for a couple symbolism things throughout the evening. I led the prayer time using the following meditative prayer outline I put together below. Feel free to use it with your groups as a way of breaking the prayer ruts we often fall into.

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The rock can represent a number of different things. Let’s prayerfully reflect on it together.
If you want to move to another place in the room for more privacy, kneel, feel free.

• Feel the stone. Study it. How is it unique from every other rock in existence? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• How are you unique from every other person created by God? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: Psalm 139:1-18, 23-24

Rocks can also causes us to slip and stumble, to loose traction in our walk.

• What’s causing you to slip and stumble in your walk with the Lord? What are you tripping over? Pray about it. (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: 1 Corinthians 10:6-13

The rock can also represent our burdens, the things that weigh us down.

• As you look and feel your rock, what burdens does it represent in your life? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• How is God using that burden to teach you something? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: 1 Peter 5:3; Matthew 11:28-30
• Place your stone on the floor in front of you, symbolizing that you’ve laid it at the feet of Jesus.

But most importantly, the rock represents Jesus. He’s the only one who can help us, grant us victory, and be the solid, firm foundation that our lives were intended to have in Him.

• In what areas of your life do you need Jesus to be your rock? (pause for prayer/reflection)
• READ ALOUD: Psalm 27:1-8, 13-14; Psalm 28:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 18:1-3
• Think about what it means for Jesus to be “the rock of your salvation.” Praise Him, thank Him, and worship Him for that in prayer.
• Pick your rock up again and hold on to it as a reminder of Jesus being your rock.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Rob Kashow who will talk with us about teaching theology in youth ministry. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

“Youth Ministry sets the path for the whole church to follow.”

It’s perhaps the most important ministry of your church. The old saying is somewhat true: “Teens are not the church of the future; they’re the church of today.” Yes, they are they church of today, but they are also the church of tomorrow. And as these teens grow into adults, their church will become the church of the future. This is why you must evaluate yourself and the youth ministry and lead with a strong vision.

Something I have been wondering about and this book stirred this up in my thinking again, is how influential youth ministry is to the church at large. What I mean by that is wondering if what youth ministries do now will become what churches are like in the future. I have been interested in looking at in particular the rise of some “adult” churches in the Bible belt. This may just be my perspective and incorrect - but some of the very large ones, look almost identical to youth ministries of the 1990’s. The lights, the bands, the smoke machines, the whole shebang in what the worship gatherings are like.

Youth ministry may be critical in so many more ways than you ever considered.

So, I backed up to this idea of being spiritually influential. I’m not really sure what that means exactly, but it’s interesting to think about. As I do so, I feel drawn to the question, “What creates a spiritually influential environment for high school teenagers?” Is it a better teaching series? Someone with more charisma? Bigger games? Giving teenagers 30 minutes to discuss a lesson instead of 15 minutes?

According to the evaluation survey I used (and some good common sense), I think a spiritually influential environment depends on three things. Two of them I can somewhat control, one of them I can’t control at all.

1. What is the most spiritually influential aspect of our ministry?

The evaluations showed that shared experiences are the most spiritually influential aspect of our ministry. These shared experiences took place through trips, events, spontaneous hang-outs, and sharing life together. It’s not really too surprising because, if you think about it, experiences are what have shaped most of us into what we are today. When you think back to the life-changing moments in your life, very rarely is it a sermon you heard, or a small group discussion. Granted, those things have their place and they definitely contribute to life-change, but typically we think back to experiences in our lives that have shaped us, and usually it’s the negative ones that have shaped us the most.

I’m not saying I’m going to try to intentionally create a series of negative experiences for teens, but I do believe that youth ministry needs to become more experiential, in which case the question shifts from what we teach to how we teach. I think I need to be more intentional about creating flexible experiences for teens and teaching through those experiences. For example, going into the inner city to feed homeless people and teaching teens on the spot about materialism, servanthood, equality, etc. The downsides are that it would take a lot more time and energy to prepare, it has the potential to be a lot messier than teaching in a sterile classroom, and I really can’t control the experience anyone actually has.

2. Who is the most spiritually influential person in our ministry?

Although I’d like to think I’m the most spiritually influential person in our ministry, we all know that’s not true. According to the survey my high school teens filled out, the students who claimed they grew a lot spiritually last year are the same ones who admitted to having frequent spiritual conversations at home with their parents. They also said their parents are the #1 spiritual influence in their lives.

So what if we combined the most spiritually influential aspect of our ministry (experiences) with the most spiritually influential person (parents)? What if we intentionally created environments where teens and parents had spiritual discussions and experiences together? What could happen if teens and parents went to the inner city together to feed the homeless? And what if I taught briefly to everyone about materialism, servanthood, equality, etc, and then let the parents lead discussions about the experience with their teens?

3. How does spiritual influence happen?

I’d be remiss to neglect the role of the Holy Spirit in the process of life-change. Obviously, I can’t coerce the Holy Spirit to do anything, but I’d like to do the best job I know how in partnering with Him. That mostly means begging Him in prayer to move, work, and change hearts through the experiences and people involved.

How would it work practically?

I’m still thinking this through, but I’ve been talking with our adult ministries pastor about pushing hard to get parents plugged into small groups where they can “grow deep.” The youth ministry pushes teens into small groups, but statistically a lot of parents aren’t connected to one. The idea is that, as parents grow themselves, the more they can become the spiritually influential person their kids desperately need. And the more that happens, the more effective the bi-monthly experiences to serve and “go wide” together in family-oriented missions trips will be.

I know this isn’t necessarily an earth-shattering idea. In fact, I know some ministries who already do something like this. Even our own church has done things that could fall into this strategy, too, but it would definitely be a shift for us to intentionally make this our focused strategy in taking kids and families deep and wide.

I’m still wrestling with a lot of this. Mostly thinking out loud here in this post. What do you all think?

Our online communication has changed

One of the most important aspects of any ministry is communication. Two years ago one of the main places that took place for our group was through our website, AlexandriaYouth.com. Over the years, however, the way we communicate online morphed and our youth group’s website effectiveness dropped. I think it was due to a couple reasons:

• Teens dropped our site’s interactive features (like forums and live chat) for Facebook
• It was cluttered with too much information
• The home page was overloaded
• The site had too many target audiences, causing us to hit none of them

Our response in the new website

It was time to make adjustments and overhaul the youth group website, so last week I hunkered down and cranked out a new AlexandriaYouth.com that reflects some of the trends of how we communicate online.

• It’s simple. There’s not a lot of navigation menus, sidebars, and trails to follow. Pretty much everything you’re looking for is found right on the front page.
• We decided to use Facebook to our advantage by hosting as much media and information on our Alexandria Youth Facebook Page as possible.
• The site’s target audience is our youth group teenagers. There’s a little bit of information for perspective visitors and parents, but not much.
• To reflect the “status update” trend of social media, we’ve added a livestream of random photos, videos, and updates that I can easily update from my cell phone throughout the day, especially while we’re gone on youth trips (parents love it!). It aggregates all my youth group posts from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in one place.

How I put the site together

For the nerds out there, here’s how I put it together:

• It’s built on WordPress. (No more Joomla!)
• I’m using the free Irresistable theme from WooThemes.
• The livestream is powered by the Lifestream plugin for WordPress.
• I use the Selective Twitter Facebook App to have youth group tweets update our Facebook Page status and the livestream on our site so they all stay in sync. (I removed line 110 in extensions.php in the Lifestream plugin so the “#fb” in twitter updates don’t show up on our site.)
• The calendar is obviously Google Calendar with a simple copy and paste of embed code (technically iframe code, but whatever). Just make sure you made the calendars public.

That’s really all there is to it. Pretty simple, just the way I like it.

If you’re looking for a webhost to build something like this yourself, I’d recommend the host I use for AlexandriaYouth.com, Buyhttp.com, because they don’t oversell their shared servers (i.e. cram too many accounts on one server and overload it) and their support for WordPress is pretty solid. Alternatively, for an easier hosted solution you don’t have to mess with, you could check out my side-business, MinistryWebsites.biz.

Social media we’re using

The social media we’re using is Twitter, Facebook Page, and YouTube.

I chose to stick with YouTube for video on our website instead of Facebook because Facebook’s video embed code sometimes glitches on our site and the dimensions are wrong if you view it on Facebook while not logged in. Plus, YouTube offers better streaming for people with slower Internet connections. So I post our youth group news videos on both YouTube (for our site) and on Facebook (for people who see it there).

Feel free to ask questions about any of this in the comments below.

[ Visit AlexandriaYouth.com ]

1. Ten Short Mission Trip Land Mines Your Team Must Avoid. This one includes a FREE 13-page training session for your team for you to use before you leave.

2. Service Projects That Make Middle Schoolers Shine. Mission trips don’t have to be far away and they also don’t have to be only for older kids. Here’s why you should do service projects with jr. highers and how to make the experience leave a lasting impression.

3. Making The Most Of Mission Trips. Six things your groups needs to start doing now before you leave. Share it with your team as soon as possible.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. There’s no featured guest, set topic or agenda except to have an open discussion. Ask questions, seek advice, share prayer concerns, vent, whatever you want. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

So, we stopped the program for a summer (like we do with most of the regular programming) and did a lot of hard evaluating, refocusing, and renewing the vision for what it should be like. In short, we decided that it was too academic and needed to be more intentional about connecting God’s Word to jr. highers’ individual lives. The plan was to take the curriculum out of the classroom and put it into small groups where two adult leaders could co-teach gender and grade specific groups of about 5 to 8 jr. highers for two years. We also changed it from a Sunday morning to a Wednesday night and updated the curriculum to include personal journaling about assigned scripture readings every weekday.

The changes were met with some debate, opposition, and pushback from several people in our church, including people in leadership. When it eventually came before our church board, they debated long and hard about the changes. Although the vote narrowly passed, it left me feeling very unsure if the season of evaluation and dreaming would be worth it the road ahead.

But two years later I can look back and say it was definitely worth it. This past year we had about 110 jr. highers actively involved, 24 adult leaders passionately teaching in small groups, and amazing stories of life-change like you wouldn’t believe! It’s not just a special kid here or there that’s been impacted, it’s almost every single one! In fact, you can watch many of them share their testimonies right here. Plus, most of these jr. high small groups will now transition into being high school small groups, meaning our transition rate from jr. high to high school ministry is poised to jump from about 25% to 80% this year.

Maybe you think taking a couple months (or even a year) off is too long of a period to step back and refocus, and for you and your ministry, maybe it is. Or maybe you’re the kind of person who has to be busy doing something in order to feel like your ministry is accomplishing anything. In my humble opinion, ministry is not as much about “doing” as much as it is about “being.” Identity precedes function. Function flows from identity, not the other way around. I take time to focus in our identity for a season and let the function flow from it for the rest of the year.

If I didn’t, then our jr. high ministry would still be struggling with about 20 kids involved. Was the season of a “time out” from jr. high programming worth it for us? Absolutely. Lives are now being changed exponentially because of it.

Don’t be afraid to slow down or even shut down programs for a season in order to change lives. It’s really not as counter-productive as you might think.

1. Video Camera. I have the Canon VIXIA HF100, which is great because it records in full 1080p HD quality, has outstanding image reproduction, records to SD cards and is about the size of a soda can. It was relatively cheap when I bought it, but now it costs almost twice as much. Not sure why, especially when the newer Canon VIXIA HF200 is a better camera for a cheaper price. Weird. But anyway, we all love capturing our favorite moments together on video and putting it on Facebook for all to share. Some youth workers swear by the mini Flip HD cameras that’s approximately the size of a deck of cards. For $129, it’s hard to go wrong.

2. iMovie. What good would the video camera be without a very simple, intuitive, user-friendly video editing program to make some quick modifications to make a professional-looking video? Although I have the higher-end Final Cut Express software, I hardly use it because iMovie does pretty much everything I need and more.

3. Digital camera. Video is cool and all, but still images have their place, too. Gotta have a digital camera around to snap quick poses, twisted facial expressions, and capture those unrepeatable moments. Plus, a photo you can hang up around your youth room or put on a bulletin board at church. Can’t quite do that with videos.

4. Swimming suit. Since a lot of people in our community live on lakes, it goes without saying that we’ll need bathing suits. In fact, we often get together to go water skiing, tubing, wake boarding, and more. We do it officially as a youth group one Sunday each month, but it definitely happens more than that on a more spontaneous level.

5. Xbox. For those rainy days when we’re all hanging out and stuck inside, the Xbox comes in handy. I don’t think I’ve met a teenager who wasn’t up for some Halo or Guitar Hero. When we hop on Xbox Live and compete against others, it’s like instant teamwork and comradery.

What equipment is essential for your ministry this summer? I asked this question on Twitter and Facebook and got a bunch of answers from some of you.

• Jeff Greathouse: “air conditioning”
• Tony Myles: “A car trunk full of athletic balls and cones.”
• Sarah Webber: “spaghetti dinners”
• Joshua Treece: “Orange game cones”
• Summer Hamilton Brown: “water balloons”
• Dale Wayman: “patience and tolerance”
• Pastor Robbie: “diet mt dews, macbook, the message bible, megaphone, & college leaders to help hype up the youth”
• Chris Kidd: “water pistol, vit C tablets, team of leaders, BBQ & burgers, minibus keys, sleeping bag, credit card to buy the things you forget”
• Josh Christian: “Sunscreen, deodorant, water balloons, super soakers, and air conditioning. Not really “equipment” but essential!”
• Brit Windel: “Gas in the van, tons of disc golfs, Bible, camcorder, paint…”

How about you? What essential summer equipment do you use for youth ministry during the summer?

Last week I “preached” twice: once at our community’s high school baccalaureate service and again at all three church services for Graduation Sunday. After each time, people tell me, “Tim, you did a great job!” Sometimes I feel they’re just saying that because they’re not sure how else to start a conversation with me after I was just on stage in front of everyone. Other times I sense that they truly are genuinely thankful for the message. But either way, I’ve found that I really wish I could remove myself from too much praise or criticism right after teaching. In fact, despite wanting to hang around after the baccalaureate service and talk with seniors, I left right away.

My buddy, Tony Myles, wrote something several years ago that has stuck with me. He said:

“I am most vulnerable to criticism right after a sermon, and tend to take [criticism] too deeply in that moment. Likewise, it’s the worst time for me to hear affirmation because then my ego just gets bigger.”

That is so totally true for me. After the baccalaureate I really had to distance myself from all the praise because I was hearing it too much. So I left. Preaching at church last weekend felt somewhat similar. Moments after I finish teaching, I’m way too emotionally attached to the message and vulnerable to really hear anything objectively, whether praise or criticism. I really need about a day to pass before I can respond to feedback with a level head. Otherwise I get too cocky or hurt, depressed, or defensive.

While attending Dallas Theological Seminary, one of my professors, Howard Hendricks, called “sermon praise” the “glorification of the worm.” I am, in fact, a lowly worm, a very inadequate vessel for communicating God’s Word. Anything good that comes as a result of anything I say is solely a work of the Holy Spirit, not me. I’m so thankful that He chooses to work in spite of me, never because of me.

How does a branch bear fruit? By trying its best and working hard? By doing its very best? No, a branch cannot bear fruit by itself. If you see a branch lying by the side of the road and bring it home will you see fruit form, grow and ripen on it? Never. A branch only bears fruit when it is attached to the fine. Actually the vine produces the fruit, the branch just displays it. It manifests itself on the branch, but is produced within the vine itself. The roots and trunk supply the branch with what it needs to produce fruit.

That was common knowledge to anyone in Jesus’ day, so that is the analogy Jesus used when explaining to His disciples that they needed Him to produce fruit. It was late Thursday night, April 2, 33 AD, a few hours before the crucifixion. Jesus knew His time with His disciples was almost at an end so He wanted His last teaching opportunity to really count. So He uses this final opportunity to again make sure they knew the importance of staying in close contact with Him in order to produce spiritual fruit for the Kingdom.

The meaning is clear: Jesus’ branches (disciples) need to stay in close contact with Him in order for Him to produce fruit through them. We can’t do anything on our own, only through Him. Salvation is all by Him, so is the fruit we produce as we live for Him. A branch not in direct contact with the vine is useless. It can be a mile from the vine or a thousandth of a Millimeter. The distance doesn’t mater. Any removal at all, no matter how small, and the sap doesn’t flow so fruit isn’t produced. Without God’s Spirit freely flowing in us we won’t be able to produce the fruit of the Spirit.

How can we tell if we are in direct contact or not? That’s easy. When we spend time in prayer and Bible study, worship and service, and when we make sure all our sins are confessed and under the blood, then we are assured we are filled with His Spirit. We will then find we have an unconditional love for God, family, self and others. We will have a joy despite circumstances and be at peace with God and others no matter what is going on around us. We will be patient in trials and our thoughts and actions will be characterized by kindness, goodness and gentleness. Our faith in God will grow and so will our loyalty and devotion to Him. We will have Spirit-control in all areas of life. In effect, we will be growing in spiritual maturity. He does all the work – we just stay close and allow Him to work in us. That certainly isn’t hard, is it. It’s all available if we allow Him to do it.

Scripture
John 15:1-8, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

Reflect

• Does your life and ministry clearly show evidence of these fruit being produced in your life?
• What percent of your ministry is done in the power of the flesh and what percent under the control of the Holy Spirit?
• Of these 9 fruit of the Holy Spirit, which do you need most in your life? Why?
• Write them down and pray every morning that God would fill you with His Spirit and produce these fruit in you. When a need arises during the day pause and ask for His fruit to be manifest at that time.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• What is a “simple” student ministry?
• Why is it important to be simple instead of complex?
• How do we implement changes for becoming simple and intentional?
• What does a process for discipleship look like?
• And a lot more…

Here’s a video promo for the book on YouTube that give more of an idea of what Simple Student Ministry is all about.

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

June 12: Next week will be a more relaxed, laid back conversation. No featured guest, just a bunch of us youth workers talking about whatever is on our hearts: asking questions, seeking advice, praying for each other, and whatever else is brought to the discussion. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

He’s asked me to make all 350+ pages of his work, “Issues and Answers,” available to you for free! This curriculum is intended to be a teaching guide to help youth workers and parents provide biblical answers for some of the tough issues in our society. In the introduction, Rol explains the format as:

“…a topical listing of 47 issues alphabetically, the Biblical background on the issue, the basic conclusions of Biblical teaching surrounding the issue, a statement of the youth’s culture prevailing perspective on the topic, and bibliographical helps for further study plus an interesting bit of trivia to add a little ‘seasoning’ to the subject matter.

The issues covered are:

• Abortion
• Alcohol
• Authority
• Bible (The)
• Birth Control
• Church (The)
• Cloning
• Clothes/Fads
• Counseling
• Cults/Occult
• Dancing
• Dating
• Death and Dying
• Death Penalty
• Depression
• Devotional Life
• Discipleship
• Divorce
• Drugs
• Ecology
• Evolution
• Euthanasia
• Food
• Gambling
• God
• Homosexuality
• Marriage
• Modern Day Religions
• Money-(Stewardship)
• Music
• M.T.V.
• Parent-Child Relationships
• Peer Pressure
• Pets
• Politics
• Pornography
• Pre-Marital Sex
• Racism
• Sabbath/Sunday (The)
• School
• Smoking
• Sports
• Suicide
• Swearing
• Tattoos/(Body Piercing)
• War
• Women’s Rights

Obviously, some of the topics are open to a lot of interpretation based on your theological background. I promise Roland Boyce will not take it personally if you disagree with his conclusions on any of these issues!

IMPORTANT: Each lesson has parts that are in different documents. The main lesson is clearly titled as such, but supplemental statistics for each lesson can be found in the “issues and answers stats.doc” document, and a teachable activity/exercise for each lesson along with the lesson’s aim is found in the “Life Labs” document.

ALSO IMPORTANT: Pastor Roland Boyce is providing this to you for free, but he would greatly appreciate hearing your feedback about it, especially if you use it with your groups. Please email him at rboyce@alexandriacovenant.org with your thoughts, recommendations, suggestions and encouragement.

Download “Issues and Answers” Youth Group Curriculum

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Jeff Borton, co-author of a brand new book, Simple Student Ministry. He’ll lead us in a discussion about simplifying our student ministries. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Animoto.com is the easiest to quickly create professional looking video slideshows from all the pictures you’ve collected of your seniors over the years. Upload your photos, add your own soundtrack, Animoto analyzes the music, and melds it with the photos in a way that feels somewhat like MTV video.

A free account will get you unlimited 30-second slideshows, so if you want something longer than that you’ll have to pay $3 per video or upgrade to an All Access account for $30/year. Alternatively, I heard some churches are scoring free All Access accounts through Animoto’s “For A Cause” program. (Click on “a cause” at the bottom of the screen on their site.)

Here’s a video I made a couple weeks ago mostly with Animoto.com for our Volunteer Appreciation Sunday at church. (I used iMovie to put our church’s intro and outro on it.) Check out our Volunteer Appreciation video on YouTube.

[ Visit Animoto.com ]

The problem with youth ministries

Too many youth ministries are busy and crammed full with programs and calendars, as if having a lot of people involved in a lot of stuff somehow equals spiritual growth. We strive for the wrong goals, measure our ministries by the wrong standards and strive to give kids an overload of spiritual “opportunities.” Maybe these values are not explicitly stated as such, but they often lead and guide our ministries whether we realize it or not. The result is a youth ministry with a lot of independent programs all somewhat functioning in their own separate silos. How much more effective could our youth ministries be if every program helped teens move through a process of discipleship that was clearly defined and easy to understand?

A better solution

Simple Student Ministry presents a clear process for strategic youth discipleship that seems to coincide a lot with Andy Stanley’s book, 7 Practices of Effective Ministry. After pointing out the draining, frustrating and ineffective strategy most youth ministries take for growing disciples, Jeff and Eric proceed to lay out several principles that have the potential to change all that. It starts by bringing clarity to the discipleship process, focus to the programs, and placing those programs in alignment with each other in a way that helps students move through a discipleship process. In Andy Stanley’s book, it’s a little like “defining a win” and “thinking steps, not programs.”

Jeff and Eric also give a lot of practical examples of what this simplified student ministry looks like in many different church and para-church contexts around the country. Basically, the results are same: a simple student ministry increases life-change exponentially, not because there’s anything magical about the strategy, but because you’ll finally have a clear and focused ministry that’s aligned with itself and with the church that is moving people toward Christlikeness in a clear and focused manner.

My criticism and questions

However, my thoughts about the book are not without criticisms or questions. For example, most of the churches that are featured in the book see evangelism as part of the discipleship process, which I wholeheartedly agree, but their approach seems to be largely a “bring your unsaved friends to our church turf so a speaker can share the gospel with them.” (I’ve expressed reasons why I’ve abandoned this form of outreach in an earlier post.) Also, the assumption seems to be that spiritual growth is a straight-forward linear process. I struggle a bit with the idea that moving teenagers through a process of programs can make them a more devoted follower of Christ. We all know that the graph of spiritual growth over time is never a straight upward arrow. It’s ups, downs, setbacks, stumbles, growth spurts, and failures over and over and over again. So how do teens move through a linear strategy for discipleship when the growth process itself is not necessarily linear?

Talk with Jeff yourself!

These questions and more I’ll be asking Jeff Borton himself this Friday during our LIVE YM Talk when we talk more about Simple Student Ministry. If you’re free this Friday (June 5, 2009) at 2:00 PM eastern time, Jeff and I would love to have you join us. Bring your own questions and thoughts and share them with us during our open conversation. The conference phone call is open to anyone who wants to call in and join the conversation, or whoever wants to just listen in online and participate via the live chat room. Find the phone number and the chat room link on the LIVE YM Talk page.

[ Buy "Simple Student Ministry: A Clear Process for Strategic Youth Discipleship" on Amazon ]

1) First of all, tell our readers a little bit about the work you do online (what blogs, websites, social media accounts, youth group sites, etc., do you manage?).

• Life In Student Ministry [Blog. HQ for YM Mentorships, YM training videos, LIVE YM Talk, Freebie Fridays, etc.]
• OnlineMissionsTrip.com [HQ for Online Missions Trip]
• MinistryQuestions.com [Recent project, details below]
• MinistryWebsites.biz [Side business that will hopefully keep future projects free]
• @rockinp on Twitter [Twitter]
• Tim Schmoyer on Facebook [Facebook]
• YouTube [YM Training videos, my youth group news, and personal videos]
• AlexandriaYouth.com [My youth group's site that is quickly becoming old-school.]
• …and other sites and ideas I’ve abandoned (like PlugRug.com)

2) Life In Student Ministry runs like a well-oiled machine. Where do you find inspiration for fresh content, and how far in advance do you prepare for each post?

Inspiration comes from almost anywhere: various conversations, my wife, issues in my own youth ministry, other blogs, and totally random thoughts from the Lord.

The preparation for posts really varies. Sometimes I’ll sit down with an idea, crank it out and publish it within a couple minutes. Other times I start with an idea, save it as a draft, and come back to it from time to time as I think about it. Right now I have 40 drafts started for blog post ideas, some of them dating back to 2006. So, there’s definitely not a set process of what I write and when I publish.

3) How much does the Life In Student Ministry community contribute to the content you deliver on the site?

Again, it varies. As previously mentioned, the content at Life In Student Ministry is a combination between a lot of different places. Sometimes the comments spark an issue that needs greater attention, so I’ll blog about that. Other times it’s an email from someone. Posts also are based on an ongoing need or question I see. And still other times it’s something that’s never been addressed before I think needs to be talked about. Other times it’s an old issue that has my own spin on it.

4) A search for “student ministry” on Google brings up Life In Student Ministry as the third result. What effort (if any at all) or marketing do you put into the site to attract new visitors?

A couple years ago I started reading a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online. Based on some of the advice I read, I made some changes to my site’s structure, which helped, but the ranking mainly comes from three things:

• Consistent new content over time
• Incoming links from other sites
• Blogging about roughly the same topic over and over again

I’ve also found that some of the conventional SEO wisdom out there is totally dead wrong in regards to my site. Not sure why, but some standard SEO practices actually kill my site’s Google traffic for sustained periods of time. That’s why it’s helpful to track site stats and experiment on your own a bit without swallowing whatever the “experts” say.

As far as marketing is concerned, though, I’ve never spent a dime on advertising or anything like that. Not only do I not have the money nor the interest to do that, but social networking is both better and free! I create content primarily for people, not Google. If people like it, they talk about it with others, post links on their own sites, and share it in their own way. Google has ears everywhere and picks up on that.

5) Your most recent project is MinistryQuestions.com. Can you tell us where you got the idea, and what the response has been like?

The idea for MinistryQuestions.com came from two places, actually.

I used to get a fair amount of youth ministry questions showing up in my Inbox. Instead of answering them privately, a long time ago I started a Q&A feature on my blog where I’d publicly answer some of them. However, the questions quickly began to pile up and before long no one was getting the answers they deserved. I also found that most of the time people gave better advice in the comments on my blog than I did in the post, which was great, but it made me start thinking through a better system for answering questions.

Around this same time I started the Youth Ministry Mentorship Program, which was great, but after the first round generated almost 200 applications, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see there was a huge need among youth workers — to be able to ask ministry questions and be mentored one-on-one. Since the mentorship is limited to however many mentors are on the team (currently 16 of us), I wanted to figure out a way to put the mentorship online where an open community of youth workers could encourage, mentor, and support each other.

MinistryQuestions.com is a response to both of those situations. It took months of dreaming, planning, and a huge financial investment to make it happen, but so far the Kingdom impact has been totally worth it. Many people are embracing the site and investing into each other’s ministries, which is awesome to see. I know I’ve been blessed tremendously through the people there! In the first week of its launch, it had over 30,000 hits, which was great!

The future vision for MQ is to have it extend into other areas besides youth ministry. It’s currently populated with youth ministry since that’s my primary audience, but hopefully over time it will grow to encompass worship ministry, children’s ministry, pastoral ministry, and more.

6) How do you balance time with your wife, your students, and investing in other student pastors?

I’m not really sure. Probably because I don’t have any kids of my own yet (first one due this August), but honestly, none of the areas seem to be lacking. I’m very conscious about putting my wife first, my ministry second, and my sites last as a hobby. I don’t really have much interest in watching TV, going out to movies, or other things like that, so the time most people spend on entertainment and such I spend developing content online. It feels so much rewarding than keeping up with TV shows.

It will be interesting to see how this changes in August when my first kid is born. Life In Student Ministry and other projects may slow down. Who knows.

7) On average, how much time do you spend updating, creating, and sharing content on the web each week?

Hmm… Fridays are my day off from the church, so I create most of it then and post it online throughout the rest of the week. My wife is usually at work on Fridays, so it doesn’t detract from our time together. So, maybe 10 hours a week, give or take, of course.

8 ) How supportive is your church of the things you are doing online?

Honestly, I don’t think they even know about most of the things I do online. Some of the staff have seen parts of it, but none of them know about all of it. As I already mentioned, I don’t really promote my content outside of online social networking, so I’ve never brought it up and they’ve never asked. I’d be fine if they knew, but I’ll wait for someone else to bring it up.

9) Lastly, do you have any advice, tips, or recommendations for youth pastors who have a passion for helping each other like you do?

• Just start doing it. Life In Student Ministry started as a personal blog one night in 2005 because I was bored and didn’t feel like playing video games. I threw WordPress on it and started blogging about nonsense with my mom and dad being the only readers. But as I continued to write, I tended to write about what I’m most passionate about: youth ministry. Over time it morphed into what it is today. I certainly didn’t set out to create what it is today. Others started connecting to it slowly and I realized that the Lord was giving me an opportunity to use it to serve Him.
• Do it for the long haul for the right reasons. Too many people have a great vision for something, but stop because they’re not becoming as popular as quickly as they think they should be. Or, they think that because they’re only helping 1 or 2 people that it’s not worth their time. Just like youth group, be a good steward with the 1 or 2 people God has sent your way and you’ll be blessed to serve others later.
• Be different. Seth Godin writes about this a lot and it’s absolutely true: don’t copy ideas someone else is already doing — no one talks about that. Do something unique for the kingdom. Meet a need no one else is meeting. Do something that’s extraordinary, something worth talking about and sharing with others. Build the kingdom in ways no one else is. That’s where the YM mentorship came from, MinistryQuestions.com, YM training videos, Online Missions Trip, etc.
• Start off small and invest as it grows. Don’t discount yourself because you think you need to start your ideas with a lot of big fancy equipment, an amazing website design, or a huge audience. Start simple and build from there if your idea takes off. For example, I started the weekly YM training videos with nothing more than my Macbook’s iSight webcam and iMovie. Now that iTunes downloads and views are over 1,000 per video, I’ve invested in an hi-def video camera and an good mic. Same with the LIVE YM Talks every Friday. I started those with my little gaming headset that sounded awful, but the idea took off, so I invested into a better mic and recording software. Even my website’s design a little over a year ago was hideous, but as traffic grew it was worth investing into something better.
• Have a plan for making money. I know this sounds weird, but new ideas often come with a price tag. Of course you’ll need to start cheap like I just mentioned, but as your idea grows, you’ll need to invest into a better webhost (or increased traffic will knock you offline like it did to me), better equipment, or even have to pay designers and web developers. Adsense supported most of my projects until I decided to provide all the books for the YM mentorship to the mentees for free, and more recently when MinistryQuestions.com required almost $1,000 up-front just to get it started. Since I never want to charge a penny for a single thing I do to serve the Lord online, I need to find other ways to finance ideas. For example, MinistryWebsites.biz is an attempt to generate funds to keep my projects online. Unless you have a lot of extra money lying around somewhere, I advise you also come up with a plan to keep the finances of your ideas out of your personal bank account as much as possible.

A young girl was learning the fruits of the Spirit, so her father asked her to recite them to him. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and remote control,” was her reply. That’s not exactly right, but it is much closer to the truth than we may realize. You see, “self” control doesn’t mean that self is IN control. It means that self is UNDER control – under the control of the Holy Spirit.

We are born without self control. Babies can’t control their muscles to walk or to feed themselves, they can’t control their bowels and they certainly can’t control their emotions. Control needs to be learned – physically, emotionally and even spiritually. This fruit really should be called SPIRIT control, not self control.

So what does Spirit control really look like? It is the ability to rule your personal life so that you are not dominated by sin (Romans 6:12). It is the ability to control your self life from within by spiritual means (2 Corinthians 10:3-4).

For the Christian self-control is a spiritual grace. In the secular world we often associate self-control with willpower. Self-control or willpower would embrace such things as dieting, quitting smoking, exercise, gambling, alcohol, work habits, ethics, and living within your means. These are only just a few; each of you can add many others to this list. In our Christian walk nothing is ever accomplished by our own personal works, efforts, or merit. The entire Christian life is a walk of grace in total surrender and dependency upon the Holy Spirit. It comes by grace through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, not by any personal effort on my part other than total surrender and obedience to Him. Christian self-control always honors Jesus, not myself.

Remember, self control (really Spirit control) starts within, not without. It is not just controlling our actions, for it starts with controlling our thoughts. What is in our heart comes out through our mouth. Spirit control doesn’t just help us keep our mouth shut, it shows us how to have a proper attitude in our heart.

Imagine if you started your car and noticed white smoke coming out the tailpipe. You wouldn’t get a new tailpipe because that isn’t the problem. The tailpipe only reveals the problem. Rather, you would do some engine work. In the same way, your habits only reveal what goes on in your heart.

If you have a habit of gossiping, the problem isn’t gossip; the problem is malice or envy. If you have a habit of blowing up, the problem isn’t your temper; the problem is rage, hatred, and bitterness in your heart. If you have a problem with pornography or infidelity to your spouse, the problem is lust in your heart. The base sin in all these is pride which is idolatry. Any time something is put before God it is idolatry, and idolatry begins in the heart.

Everyone needs the fruit of self control. Paul needed it as well (Romans 7:19-21). Victory came when He let the Spirit control him (Romans 8 follows Romans 7). And we need it daily, even hourly (2 Corinthians 4:16). It isn’t just for the “big” things in life but for everyday things like our actions and speech (James 1:26). Spirit control – don’t leave home without it.

Scripture
1 Corinthians 9:24-27, “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is self-controlled in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”

II Timothy 1:7, “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.”

Reflect

• How would your life and ministry be different if you were always under the total control of God’s Spirit?
• Think of a time in the past week when you would have responded differently to something in your life or ministry had the Holy Spirit been in total control of you?
• Think of some areas in life where you need God’s Spirit control. Pray specifically for each area and the control you need in it. Remember to pray throughout the day as these issues arise in life.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• Why do churches have youth ministry in the first place?
• What’s the best approach to youth ministry?
• Some interesting studies on adolescence.
• Both practical and theological implications.
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

June 5: Jeff Borton recently wrote a book titled, “Simple Student Ministry”, and will talk with us about some of the concepts he explains about bringing our ministry into clarity, movement, alignment and focus. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

A mystery ramble is a trip I take my high school youth on. They do not know the destination or the activities. I give them a packing list and a “fake” schedule. The schedule is not subtle clues about what we will be doing. The youth director before me started this and I have was his main chaperon before taking over. We have been to St Louis, Gulf Shores, and Ohio. We have done both a week long and a long weekend (Thursday-Monday) it depends on your group and where you want to go on the length.

Last year we ended up in Ohio in Amish country. They toured an Amish house, rode in a horse and buggy and really got to know about their culture and religion. We ended at the Alive Festival.

I find churches or friends along the [route] to house us [and] cut down on the cost.

We always try to do some kind of service project in the community we stay in: clean up trash, help with a church function etc.

This is an amazing trip to get kids to know each other better, work as a team, and see unique places along the way. Its fun to find unique things to do in other states.

On the day that we leave I give all the parents a sealed envelope with all the details of the trip. When and where we will be and all the contact stuff.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Mike King from YouthFront. He’ll lead us in a discussion about adolescent development and how it impacts growth and learning. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Ok, raise your hand if you’ve ever actually read that little FBI warning at the beginning of a movie! Well, lucky (and unlucky) for us that little warning has absolutely nothing to do with showing a movie in a youth ministry setting.

Over my years in youth ministry I have moved through the following progression when it comes to the issue of movies and copyrights.

• intentional ignorance on the matter of copyright law
• learning a little about it and then not really caring too much
• taking the copyright issue pretty seriously

About 7 or 8 years ago, when everyone was rocking Napster (the illegal predecessor to napster.com) I began to do some research on the reasons why breaking the music copyright was so bad. Hopefully, all of us are now on board with that issue by now, but that issue got me thinking about other areas of copyright law.

I’ve realized that as a representative of Christ in my community and as a model for my church, I need to “play by the rules” in order to not only live a “life that is above reproach,” but simply so I’m not stealing from others.

On to talking about movies, though…

Common Misconceptions

1. The FBI warning says that I can’t charge money for people to watch the movie so my event is ok.
The FBI warning actually pertains to an individual showing a movie within their home.

2. As long I am using the movie as a church event I am within the copyright laws.
This is a false statement because the only instance in which a movie may be screened, outside of a home, without a license, is in a non-profit educational setting with “face-to-face instruction.”

3. If I make a lesson out of the movie I want to show I will be within the copyright laws.
A non-profit educational setting has previously been specifically defined as a non-profit academic institution. The main activity of a church is not academics.

4. My church has the CVLI license, so we can show movies at any church event that we do.
This license only pertains to a church showing movies “in its facility(ies.)” This means that if you have a current CVLI license, you may show any legally obtained movie in your church property. (See points 1 and 4 on this page at CVLI.com.)

Also, the CVLI license only covers those movies “produced and/or distributed by CVLI affiliated motion picture companies only,” according to point 6. But you may be able to contact the motion picture company and get written permission to show the movie. As the copyright holder, if it is the copyright holder, it can waive its rights and grant a church or ministry permission to show the movie. If you want to do this, do it well in advance, the process is s l o w.

5. I can throw up a sheet, a PA system, and a projector to show the movie in the back yard of the church because I am within the church property.
The CVLI license specifically says that movies can be screened in its facilities. Upon speaking to a representative at CVLI, I pressed for clarification of “in facilities.” The answer that I got was that you would most likely be within the spirit of the agreement if the movie was screened outdoors only if in a secluded area where there was no chance that someone from the general public would see or hear any portion of the movie that was being screened.

6. Since I’m not charging a fee, I am showing the movie inside of my church, and I have the CVLI license, I can advertise my event in any fashion that I want.
In case you missed reading point 4 of the CVLI terms, “No specific titles, or any characters from such titles, or producers’ names will be advertised or publicized to the general public unless authorized by certain producers.”

Much more info on this topic can be found at:

• http://www.cvli.com/about/terms.cfm
• http://www.copyright.gov
• http://www.mplc.org/faq.php

So what should you do!?

• Make sure that your church has a current CVLI license.
• Only show movies at a youth ministry event within your church or at a camp location that has its own license since the license is restricted to a physical location.
• Invite a few students over to your house, where you show a movie inside, with out any advertising of any sort through your church.

It is possible to still do a movie event for the public, you’ll need to procure a license from mplc.org but make sure you follow their guidelines.

I hope this helps clear up some of the movie copyright confusion. Of course, there are a ton of other areas that I could have addressed, but I’m not a copyright lawyer, I’m a youth pastor. So, I am not giving you any legal advice on this matter, just a few tips and pointers. If you have questions about your situation it would be best to chat with your church’s attorney or speak directly with an attorney who specializes in copyright law since this is a very in depth area of law (which you noticed if you checked out copyright.gov).

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Chris Szulwach is a youth pastor in Liverpool, NY. Chris has 11 years experience as a volunteer, para-church staff, and as a pastor.
Blog: CoffeeWithChris.com | YouthMinBlog.com
Twitter: twitter.com/CoffeeWithChris

“Programs” does not equal “ministry”

First of all, I didn’t mention this in my previous post, but notice that the title was not, Seven Benefits of Shutting Down Youth Ministry for the Summer, with the absence of the word “programs.” In no way am I advocating that we stop ministry, just that was slow down our programming. Remember, programs do not equal ministry. Programs are tools of ministry. They’re here to help us do ministry, but programs are not the ministry.

Programming slows down, not ministry

Second, notice that I said that we don’t stop ministry programming altogether during the summer, we just slow it down. Putting programs on hold does not mean that we put ministry on hold, too. Ministry takes place in a variety of ways outside of programming, like one-on-one time with kids, hangouts at your house, or just stopping to pray for them. Some would say that this kind of ministry is much more effective than the programming aspect of ministry.

Some critics of my previous post say that Jesus never stopped his ministry and neither should we. I totally agree. If you want to use Jesus as an example, though, I’d also point out that He never ran any programs from his church/synagogue either. That’s not to say that programs are bad or that they’re not found elsewhere in scripture, just that there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing different tools during the summer than the highly programmatic ones. We’ll be going on bike rides, having kids over to play Xbox, spontaneously meeting at the bowling ally, grabbing ice cream at Dairy Queen, playing Ultimate Frisbee, going to the movies, taking road trips, swimming in the lakes, etc. None of it is scheduled, we just wake up one morning, call up a couple people and go for it. And while we’re together, us adults model Christlikeness and speak Truth into teens’ lives through our normal conversations. That kinda sounds more like Jesus’ style of ministry to me anyway.

For the programmatic people…

That said, here’s what the programming side of our youth ministry will look like this summer:

Weekly Jr. High Bible studies at my house: My wife and I lead these together. Attendance is typically pretty low with about 5-8 teens, but that’s the way we like it. The kids who comes are sometimes different kids each week, too, depending on their family’s vacation schedules and what else is going on in their lives. The Bible study is pretty laid-back and relaxed.

Weekly Sr. High Bible studies at someone else’s house: One of the high school groups has opted to continue throughout the summer meeting in someone’s house. The group will be open to any 9th-12th grader who wants to participate.

Monthly Wake ‘n Ski: As I mentioned in a comment on my previous post, our community has a lot of lakes, so many of our church members have boats and big-boy water toys. One Sunday a month our group gets together to spend the afternoon out on a lake water skiing, wake boarding, tubing, wake surfing, etc. We stop for dinner to have burgers while I or another leader shares a short faith story with everyone.

CHIC: This is our denomination’s tri-annual international high school student conference in Knoxville, TN. I won’t be going this year since my wife is due with our first baby two weeks later, but a full busload of our high school kids are attending the week-long conference in July with an outstanding team of adult youth leaders.

MUUUCE: Every August we take a busload of jr. highers away for a three-day retreat. We meet up with many other denominational jr. high youth groups and have a blast together. We go to a baseball game, a water park, amusement park, play on inflatables, and just have an incredible time bonding. It’s perfect for the incoming 7th graders to connect with us, get to know us, feel comfortable with us, and be super energized for the school year of jr. high ministry.

Two Parent Dinners: I blogged about this back in March, so check out that post for more details, but basically we have two open-house dinners planned at my house for parents to come hang out with me and Dana. We get to listen to them, answer questions, and also challenge them.

Monthly Worship Experiences: The youth ministry is not in charge of this, but we do partner with our church’s worship director to pull it off. Every month we have a night of worship at church that’s intended to be highly participatory and experiential. It’s open to the entire church and our community at large, so I really like the inter-generational mix that shows up to worship. Our teens do a fabulous job leading different aspects of the experience.

One Outdoor Movie Night on the BIG screen: We hang a big white sheet on the side of our house and setup a projector and sound system from church in the driveway. Kids to come over at dusk and watch a movie on the BIG screen with their own lawn chairs, blankets, bug spray and snacks. Here’s a picture of my setup I posted on Twitter last year. Always fun!

Canoe Trips: There is also one jr. high canoe trip and one sr. high canoe trip this summer. We all car pool to a river, rent a couple canoes, they drive us upstream and we paddle back. Another great time to bond, talk, and help kids transition into jr. high or high school ministries.

Rock The River Tour: A couple kids and parents thought the Billy Graham’s Rock The River Tour fit well with our strategy to take kids deep and wide, and since one high school student was willing to head it up, I let her go for it. That will happen in August.

One Parent Information Meeting: Before the school year starts up again, we have our big annual parent meeting where we recap last year’s ministry, talk about what we learned, and, based on that, what’s changing for next year. We give an overview of the calendar, answer questions, introduce the other youth leaders, and do a whole lot of vision casting.

Youth Leader meetings: I usually don’t do too many of these during the summer, but a couple years ago we made some significant changes to certain aspects of our ministry and the fruition of that starts next year. So, we need to have a couple youth leader meetings to make sure the train’s momentum keeps moving in the right direction. We also have a mini youth leader training conference with a couple of other churches in our community.

Other summer ideas

Looking for other summer youth event ideas? Check out my blog post from last year on the top 5 summer youth events that cost under $5 total.

Some of the things we talked about:

• Unique challenges and opportunities of high school ministry
• Helping freshman transition into high school
• Ways to keep upperclassmen engaged in youth group
• Balancing marriage and ministry
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

May 29: Mike King is talking with us next week about adolescent development and how it impacts their growth and learning. It should be a great discussion to help us know how teenagers grow and learn and how we can best capitalize on that in youth ministry. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Luke has this to say about the game:

This game works better outside, but can be played in a gym. A single game can take anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour depending on how strategic the students get. I’ve brought this to every camp/youth group I’ve worked at and it’s always been a hit. In the summer we get face paint and go Braveheart style, it’s pretty intense.

Download “Whip ‘n Strip” instructions

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Joshua Griffin, high school pastor at Saddleback Church, and he’ll lead us in a discussion about working with high school students. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Since then we’ve added weekly summer Bible studies at my house that my wife and I lead without the help of other adult leaders, so at least there’s something regular for kids throughout the season, but that’s about it except for a couple big trips (one for sr. high, one for jr. high). Still no Sunday School or traditional youth group meetings.

I actually converted to being a strong supporter of slowing down and even ending youth ministry programs during the summer for several reasons besides low attendance and irregular schedules.

1. It provides time for me to pull back to a birds-eye view and refocus on the big picture. All year long I’m staring at the ministry from so close-up that I get cross-eyed and don’t always remember the big picture of our ministry. It’s easy to get bogged down in running individual programs and loose sight of the overall direction of our ministry as a whole. When you drive at full-throttle for so long, it’s hard to notice subtle shifts in direction until you stop to widen your perspective and take a look at the map.

2. It gives me time to properly evaluate the ministry. It’s hard to work in an annual evaluation of the entire ministry when there’s no real break for doing so. It’s even harder to think objectively, pray and talk through necessary adjustments and changes when the programs just keep running and running without a pause. You don’t fix a car without first shutting it off.

3. It gives adult leaders a well-deserved break so they’re rested and energized for the fall. There’s no substitute for a team of rested and energized youth leaders! They all work so hard during the school year, they serve so sacrificially, and give so much of themselves to teens that the summer is a great time for them to just relax and recharge. They tend to stay on the youth team longer and avoid burnout when they have the summer break. And anyone who works in youth ministry knows that longevity for youth workers is essential to life-change.

4. It allows me to do a lot of vision-casting for the fall. After proper evaluations have been conducted and we have a plan for improvement to take kids deeper and wider, I have most of July and August left to cast that vision, communicate it with parents, teens and leaders. It’s a time for everyone else zoom out to a birds-eye view of the ministry, too.

5. It provides a natural transition when we re-launch in the fall. It kind of provides us with a clean slate for when normal ministry programs do start up again. We can make changes, cut things and add other things to the ministry without a lot of complaints because everything is new again. Plus, when we launch everything in the fall, there’s always much more excitement and energy. Momentum builds very quickly.

6. It provides sufficient time to hang out with kids while they’re not in school. You could say, “Kids aren’t in school during the summer, so that’s the time to rev up your youth ministry!” That may be true in your community, but here in Alexandria, Minnesota, it doesn’t really work that way. So instead I see it as a goldmine of opportunities to spend one-on-one time with kids every day. Instead of trying to keep kids busy with programs that may or may not be spiritually influential, I’d rather focus on relationship building with individuals and in ways I know will be spiritually influential.

7. It’s my time to read, self-educate, and do miscellaneous projects. The school year is so busy that I tend to put “continuing education” off to the side. Youth and adolescence changes so rapidly that it’s different almost every 6 months! What I learned about youth ministry back in Bible college years ago hardly applies to today anymore. It’s very important that I continue to read, study, learn and don’t become an obsolete youth leader. It’s also a great time to jump on those projects that otherwise would always be on back burner (like rebuilding our group’s website, organizing the office and cleaning out storage closets).

Do your youth ministry programs slow down or pause completely during the summer? We’d all love to hear why in the comments below.

[ UPDATE: To add some clarification to this post, read the follow-up of what our summer youth schedule DOES look like. ]

Not too long ago Lifeway did some extensive research on why 18 to 22 year olds drop out of church and their views on eternity. Generally speaking, they found that teens graduating from high school were pulling away from faith and church due to a host of reasons and influences, including life changes and biblical illiteracy.

So they started asking questions like, “What must a graduating high school student know, understand, or believe in order to take ownership of their faith and remain grounded in God and His Word after high school? How can we help that take place best?” What they came up with is a pretty holistic approach to student ministry that involves a couple key ingredients.

1. The example of Jesus’ life

Lifeway focused on the Sermon on the Mount and Luke 2:52, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” and broke it down into three main goals they want to see happen in the lives of teenagers.

1. Know: Upward Development. Jesus grew in favor with God. The Sermon on the Mount breaks this down into discipleship and Lordship.

2. Own: Inward Development. Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature. The Sermon on the Mount breaks this down into character and discernment.

3. Known: Outward Development. Jesus grew in favor with man. The Sermon on the Mount breaks this down into relationships and influence.

2. Parents and the Home

Every study I’ve ever seen, both formal and informal, indicates that parents are easily the #1 spiritual influence in a teenager’s life, which makes sense because that’s the way God established the family to work in the first place. Lifeway found this to be true, as well, and wanted to capitalize on it. So as they worked on putting together a comprehensive approach to student ministry, they knew they had to integrate both the home and the church.

The Compilation: Known Curriculum

Once the goals and strategy were set in place, it took on flesh in the form of the Known curriculum. Lifeway has seriously done a tremendous job of packaging an entire six year Bible course for jr. high through high school that flows from their research and their vision for students to “grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” It pretty much includes a ready-to-go youth ministry, complete with Sunday morning lessons, Wednesday night lessons, games, options for creative ideas, planned events, parent meeting, student journals, worksheets, deeper theological training sheets, devotionals and more. I don’t think they’ve left a single thing out!

Known is split into quarterly packages for fall, winter, spring and summer of each year. Each package spends a month focusing on know, own or known aspects of the strategy that incorporates studies that’s a nice blend between topical and exegetical approaches.

My Criticism

The assumption is that teaching specific content from a stage or in a small group is the answer to all the teen dropouts from church and biblical illiteracy. I agree it’s critical to have solid content, but I guess I’m wondering if our delivery mechanism is part of the problem, not necessarily the content we teach. Maybe we need to teach more through real-life experiences than sitting under florescent lights in church classrooms. Yeah, we all try to help students talk through ways the key scripture passage applies to their life, and then we naively assume that they leave and actually do it. Maybe the way we are communicating the solid content just doesn’t connect with teens. I don’t really have many solutions, just thinking out loud, but I do believe that teaching should become more experiential because teaching through experiences is where real-life and faith can truly intersect. That could be a different topic for a later blog post, though.

Of course, the other thing to be careful of is that it doesn’t become a crutch as a canned “one size fits all” youth ministry. That’s true for any youth ministry curriculum, not just Known. Regardless of what curriculum you use, you must contextualize it for your kids and you must never use it as an excuse to shut off your vision casting and direction for the future. Otherwise, your ministry will definitely get stuck in a rut and become focused on its function rather than its identity. But again, another blog post for another time.

That said, I am seriously considering a switch to Known in the fall for our high school meetings on Sunday mornings. Of course I’m going to run it by some youth leaders and a couple teenagers first, but I do believe it has potential and is definitely worth the $149.95 for a quarterly digital download bundle at least to try it out. It seems to fit in our Deep and Wide strategy pretty well.

For more information

Check out Lifeway’s website for more information.

• Know. Own. Known. Student Strategy
• Known Curriculum

Recording: Interview with Lifeway

Download this episode

Subscribe to Life In Student Ministry in iTunes

Do you remember the chant from childhood: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” It isn’t true. Everyone has sometimes been hurt by words. We are hurt by lying words. We are hurt by unkind words. We are hurt by angry words. Words can hurt us. That’s why God wants His people to be gentle.

Gentleness is possibly the most misunderstood virtue. Many people think of gentleness as being weak, timid, or passive. This is not the biblical understanding of gentleness. The Greek language in which the N.T. was originally written, was a precise & expressive language. When the Greeks developed a word, they not only gave it a careful definition, but they almost always illustrated it. Their definition of gentleness was “power under control,” and they illustrated it with the picture of a horse that had been tamed. Gentleness to them was a powerful animal with its power completely under control. Have you ever watched a 2000-pound horse pull logs? That big, strong Belgium horse was strength under control.

For example, water that’s under control would be water rushing through a dam turning turbines, generating electricity to light a city. Water out of control would be a flood destroying everything in its path. A disease out of control can devastate the body and kill its victim. But a disease under control can produce vaccines & save thousands of lives. So when you think about gentleness, think about power under control, anger under control, our emotions under God’s control.

The Life Application Bible states concerning gentleness: “Gentleness—Humble, considerate of others, submissive to God and his Word. Even when anger is the appropriate response, as when Jesus cleared the temple, gentleness keeps the expression of anger headed in the right direction. Gentleness applies even force in the correct way.”

The fruit of kindness is showing love and compassion to others. Goodness is an inner spirit of love and holiness that show itself in doing that which benefits others. Gentleness, then, is tenderness but not weakness. It is power, but power under control. Examples would include Jesus’ dealings with the woman at the well (John 4), the woman caught in adultery (John 8 ) and Zacchaeus the moneychanger (Luke 19).

DeSales once wrote, “Nothing is so strong as gentleness,” and “Nothing is so gentle as real strength.” When you are producing the fruit of the Spirit you will find you are strong enough to be gentle. What a perfect picture of Jesus. What a wonderful goal for us!

Scripture
1 Timothy 6:4, “…he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions.”

1 Peter 3:15, “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…”

Reflect

• Think of some times when others showed you gentleness. How did it feel? How were you affected?
• Think of some times God has been gentle with you. Thank Him for it.
• Who do you know that needs gentleness but doesn’t deserve it? Will you commit to show them gentleness anyway?
• Who can you show gentleness towards today? Make plans as to who and how you can show gentleness.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• How parents view the role of the youth pastor
• The importance of capacity
• Things that help and don’t help parents assume responsibility
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

May 22: Joshua Griffin is talking with us next week about working with high school students: the unique challenges, opportunities and values that high schoolers present and what that means for our youth ministries. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Below is the list I used for this year’s photo scavenger hunt. You can see some of the pictures here. Not all the groups got their pictures turned in, but it’ll give you an idea anyway.

1. Everyone in your group sitting in one chair together at the house of someone from your group – 200 pts.
2. Someone in your group juggling two or three balls while at least 5 strangers watch and applaud – 250 pts.
3. Your group with an outdoor sculpture – 150 pts.
4. Everyone in your group laying on the ground, spelling out a word with your bodies – 200 pts.
5. A group photo with one member from your group dressed in very formal attire – 350 pts.
6. Something that begins with the letter Z. (No made-up words) – 300 pts.
7. Someone from your group on a motorcycle ride – 350 pts.
8. Your group posing a scene from a Disney movie in the middle of the mall – 400 pts.
9. Your group doing exactly what a sign says. (Your group may not create the sign.) – 200 pts.
10. Fit your entire group under a picnic table – 400 pts.
11. Group picture with someone in a uniform – 300 pts.
12. Create a work of art with sidewalk chalk in a public parking lot – 500 pts.
13. Picture of someone from your group wearing a blue Walmart vest, greeting people and handing out yellow smiley face stickers to strangers – 500 pts.
14. Someone from your group pumping gas for a stranger – 250 pts.
15. Your group with someone 85 years or older who is holding their ID with birth date – 400 pts.
16. Your entire team simultaneously drinking from the same soda can with straws – 250 pts.
17. Your entire team being chased by another Journey team – 150 pts.
18. Your entire team in the dark with each person shining a flashlight on their face – 400 pts.
19. Your entire team in a boat – 250 pts.
20. Two people from your team helping a stranger fold clothes at a laundry mat – 400 pts.
21. Two members of your team bagging groceries for strangers at someplace other than Walmart – 350 pts.
22. Your entire team giving a group hug to a Fleet Farm employee – 350 pts.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Mark Matlock and he’ll lead us in a discussion about shaping youth ministry around parents. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

As I was thinking through a little of what I’ll be teaching at both events, a couple things came to mind about what makes someone a good presenter on a stage. I am definitely no expert, but I do watch people when they present and see a couple common traits among the ones that I appreciate most. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

1. Know your content and know it well. I don’t mean memorize a script because people can tell when you’re just reciting something no matter how much emotion you try to infuse into it. Know your main ideas, the direction of your message, and be able to talk as if it’s a one-sided conversation, not a school report.

2. Be passionate about what you’re teaching. Passion isn’t something you can fake or muster up. Passion isn’t necessarily a loud voice or an energetic stage presence. It’s something that everyone can sense, but no one can quite put their finger on it because they can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice because it’s obvious that you’ve put your lesson into practice in your own life long before you delivered it to them.

3. Use God’s Word to point out sin and weaknesses in people’s lives. Communicate God’s Word clearly and let Him convict. I learned this over the past several years by listening to my favorite podcast preachers: Craig Grochel, Perry Noble and Mark Driscol. People, including myself, are tired of watered-down messages that remind them of something they need to do or change without pushing them to do it in ways that might otherwise be offensive.

4. Use God’s Word to encourage people in their spiritual walk. The best messages I remember are the ones that both convict me and encourage me. If it’s all conviction every time I listen to someone teach, I feel depressed and unmotivated. But when it’s coupled with encouragement, the conviction can sink in without wallowing in it.

5. Be vulnerable. I know most teachers don’t think of themselves as the expert, so be intentional about communicating that. Let your audience see windows into your failures, your weaknesses and your struggles, and how the Lord is working or has worked in you through those areas so it encourages others. Plus, people respect what you have to say when they know you’re being real with them.

6. Saturate your messages in prayer. Need I say more?

7. As you prepare your messages, approach God’s Word with fear, trembling, and deep respect. The old adage is true, “Familiarity breeds contentment.” This is God’s-breathed Word, not just spiritual Mother Goose rhymes. Don’t take it lightly. It’s a huge privilege and responsibility that will incur a stricter judgment upon yourself (James 3:1).

What else do you see in certain pastors that makes them good teachers from a stage?

It’s no secret that my wife and I are big Dave Ramsey fans. We spent 15 months paying off $21,521.66 of debt on a combined take-home pay of about $39,000/year, which doesn’t really work mathematically, but somehow it worked when we started keeping track of our money and living on an extremely tight written budget every month. God did amazing things to bring us to where we are today with a completely funded emergency fund and now savings for our kid’s birth in August. Soon we’ll start saving for a down-payment on a house, too. Because we no longer have any payments, we’re able to securely drop my wife’s income so she can be a stay-at-home mom when our child is born. Exciting! (A video of my wife and I sharing more details about our financial story can be found here.)

Since Dave Ramsey’s teaching has alleviated a lot of stress and pressure on me and Dana and our marriage, we thought it would be something important to teach high school kids as they start getting jobs, earning an income, and saving for the future. Me, Dana, and two other high school small group leaders have all made a lot of financial mistakes and wanted to help some teens avoid those same “normal” mistakes by having a biblical perspective on money and how it works. Naturally, we looked into Dave Ramsey’s Generation Change curriculum for youth groups and decided to try it out.

Generation Change

• At $169 for an 8-person start-up kit, it’s definitely pretty expensive. If they dropped the tshirts and charged half the price, I think the value would be more reflective of the kit’s contents.
• There’s 4 lessons total in the kit, each with an accompanying two-part DVD. Every lesson is supposed to take about an hour, but we found that with all the discussion, questions, stories, examples, and everything else that came up in the group time, each lesson really took about two hours. We ended up spreading it out over 8 weeks comfortably.
• At first our high school kids were a little leary of talking about such “grown-up” stuff, but after we got into the series, they really started appreciating it and were very thankful for it by the time we finished.
• Although the curriculum is laid out very clearly and is very easy to follow, it’s not something that could be given to just any youth leader and expected to go well. It definitely must be taught by leaders who agree with Dave Ramsey’s principles and are actively following them with their own personal finances. In fact, that’s where most of the value came for our group, as me, Dana and the other leaders put real-life flesh on the principles being taught with examples from our own mistakes, misconceptions, and even greed. All of us leaders were very transparent about our personal finances, which really helped the kids a lot. Without a passionate leader, the curriculum will probably have little to no affect.
• The DVD sessions are very well-done and professionally recorded. Most of it consists of Dave sitting with a group of teenagers, teaching one of the 4 major principles for about 7 to 10 minutes.
• The curriculum isn’t really as anti-debt as what you’d probably expect from something that comes from Dave Ramsey. Of course credit cards and school loans are addressed, but the emphasis is clearly on changing teens’ perspective of money. Themes like materialism, personal self-worth, giving to others, and saving are much bigger issues than debt.
• It would be easy for a curriculum like this to be really heavy on the nerdy stuff and really light on scripture, but fortunately it is not like that at all. Every lesson digs through scripture in addressing the financial principle and raises discussions from those passages. The curriculum does not really address the mechanics of money and how it works, but it is easy for the leader to include that kind of teaching if the kids are interested, like they were in our group.
• Generation Change is clearly geared toward high school students. I wouldn’t even attempt to do it with jr. highers.

Since it is over-priced, I recommend that you not purchase a student kit for every person going through it. Take the 8 student kits that are included with the leader’s kit, of course, but purchasing additional kits for each teen is not absolutely necessary. Give them a pen and legal pad instead if you really want them to write things down. The leader’s guide and DVDs are sufficient to teach the curriculum.

Oh, and remember, you can’t purchase Generation Change with a credit card. Debit cards only!

Summary

Generation Change is strong on helping communicate a biblical perspective of money to high school teens and it does so in a very practical and engaging way. It’s very well done, very professional, and very easy for any leader to follow and teach. However, it only gets three stars because it feels overpriced for the content, even when you stretch four sessions out to be eight.

Semper Fidelis is Latin for “always faithful.” It is the motto of the City of Exeter in Devonshire, England, and is a testimony to the city’s loyalty to the British Monarchy. Queen Elizabeth I wrote a letter to The Citizens of Exeter in 1588 suggesting they adapt this motto because of their faithfulness in supporting the British fleet that had defeated the Spanish Armada. It has also been the motto of the United States Marine Corps since 1883, and it is the title of the official March of the Marine Corps composed by John Phillips Sousa in 1888. Christian Disciples are called by the Holy Spirit to be “always faithful,” and Semper Fidelis would be an excellent motto for us to adapt as well.

Just what does this word for “faithfulness” mean? How can we define it? That is very easy for it is the same word as that used for “faith.” Faithfulness is staying true to someone or something, being trustworthy, being someone who can be counted on. A faithful person is one whom can be trusted and depended on. Trustworthiness is the characteristic of the man who is reliable.

God is faithful (Psalm 119:138; 1 Cor 10:13; 2 Thes 3:3). Jesus is often called “faithful” (Rev 1:5; 19:11). He is faithfulness personified. He is totally reliable, trustworthy and steadfast.

Faithfulness, life love, joy, peace and all the other fruit, is something that will be shown outwardly to others. It doesn’t stay inside, it expresses itself visibly in our lives and actions. First of all, we are to be faithful to God. He has been faithful to us so why wouldn’t we be faithful to Him? He should be able to depend on us.

Then, too, we are to be faithful to others. We are to be loyal and dependable to our families and friends, to our church and employers. The Golden Rule still applies – treat others the way you want to be treated. Do so and you will be showing faithfulness to them.

Scripture
1 Cor. 4:2, “Moreover, it is required in stewards, that a man (woman) be found faithful.”

2 Thes. 3:3, “The Lord is faithful, who will establish us and protect us from evil.”

Hebrews 13:5, “I Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

Reflect

• How dependable are you? If you were God, would you trust yourself with important Kingdom work?
• Do you have a reputation for being a loyal and faithful friend? To whom can you show that faithfulness today?
• Are you as faithful to those who are a drain on you as you are to those who contribute to your ministry? If not, confess that and ask God to help you be faithful to all, not just those from whom you benefit.
• We grow in faithfulness by learning the Word of God (Roman 10:12) because the better we know God the more we will want to serve Him. Spend some time reading the Bible today, not to prepare a message or lesson, but just to listen to God speak to your spirit.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• The biblical roles of youth pastors, parents and the church in nurturing teens
• The modern approach of youth ministry
• What youth ministry should look like
• Leadership issues
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

May 15: Julio Nieves is talking with us next week about soul care for youth workers, everything from personal time with the Lord to seeing professional Christian counselors. We’d love to have you join our conversation! See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join us.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

However, my lesson was on Matthew 9, specifically on Jesus’ illustration of the wine skins. I used the video called Spilt Milk from 36 Parables and most of the lesson that accompanies it, but I only used it as a guideline since I wanted to explain more about Jesus’ message within the larger context of Matthew 9. My lesson notes below are free for you to use, but I didn’t write down most of my message about Matthew 9 itself, so you should study that passage on your own before teaching it.

New Wine Skins Lesson
New Wine Skins Survey

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Julio Nieves and he’ll lead us in a discussion about soul care for youth workers. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

I concluded the night by doing a bit of vision casting for the fall and asked them to take a survey evaluating our high school ministry based on our deep and wide ministry strategy. I’ll make the survey available as a free download for this week’s Freebie Friday in case you’re interested, but here is a general summary of the results from my group.

[UPDATE: The survey and my lesson are now available to download.]

The evaluation results

• Kids who claimed to have experienced significant spiritual growth over the past year are also the same kids whose parents have regular spiritual conversations with them at home. These kids also said that the #1 influence on their spiritual growth is their parents. No huge surprise there, but it’s good to have it in writing.
• Students who claimed to have experienced little to no spiritual growth over the past school year said their parents have infrequent or no spiritual conversations with them and that their friends are the primary influence in their lives. I guess that’s okay as long as they have solid friends, but how mature can their peers possibly be?
• Our sr. high large-group gathering (game/worship followed by me teaching with interruptions for small group table discussions) was almost unanimously “a little bit” influential in their spiritual growth this year. Follow-up questions indicate that it is not due so much to my content as much as it is due to how it is delivered. The teens want to talk, discuss, and control the conversations themselves. They want to ask their own questions and have less structure. But they also want more depth and they want it to convict them, not just let them feel okay.
• Almost every teen comes to our large-group gathering because of friends, which tells me that if a couple key people stop coming, the meetings would drop to 0 attendance really fast.
• Conversely, the high school small groups were almost unanimously “pretty influential” to “it helped change my life” because they say that they feel safe, people are open with each other, and they talk about how God’s Word interacts with their daily life.
• Most of our kids are not really having spiritual conversations with unbelievers because they’re afraid and nervous. The “go wide” aspect of our strategy/vision/values/purpose/mission isn’t really taking place in kids’ individual lives.

My response

Based on this, I’m talking with the other pastors at my church about ditching sr. high large groups to create another small group that’s more of an open-forum discussion of life issues while I pray that somehow I’ll be able to join their conversation and take it deep into His Word without the prep I’m used to. However, there are a couple things I need to consider:

• Jesus’ had his small group, but he also saw value in teaching to the multitudes. He didn’t do it the way the religious system called for in his day by using a synagogue, rather he taught from hillsides and boats off-shore, essentially, where people were already gathered. Because of Jesus’ example, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to eliminate large-group teaching times completely, but something must change to make those times more effective in facilitating spiritual growth.
• Although our small groups are highly influential, do the large-group teaching times play a part in making those groups effective? Maybe the large-group time is what sets the biblical context and background for the small groups to have their effect.
• I’m not sure how teens defined “spiritual growth” when they filled out the evaluation. It’s possible that some kids equate spiritual growth to an emotional feeling at a camp or conference, in which case, their input about spiritual growth in the survey may or may not be helpful or accurate.
• An open-forum/deep theological format may be appealing to teens, but part of leadership is knowing what teens needs to hear and think through because they may not know what they really need. We often have to give kids what they need, not just want they want.

I think the next step is to have several of the high school teens over for dinner sometime to talk about these results and the future direction of our high school ministry in the fall. I’m also going to experiment with their “open forum/deep theology” discussion approach in our summer small groups here at my house. But that’s only the beginning. If we keep the large-group meeting time, the changes have to be deeper-rooted than re-microwaving the same large-group ministry or just trying to a different format. I’ll be sure to let you all know what comes from it.

1. The pressure is to perform — have big events, lots of kids involved in activities and bible studies. I have trained sr. pastors about how to work with their youth leaders and I know they often feel the same pressure to perform. Sometimes the pressure is self-inflicted, sometimes not. Youth pastors feel it, too, and unfortunately it’s the teens who feel the results of it.

2. The adults and parents who pay my salary are looking for a youth ministry like the one they experienced when they were in grade school, even though that was 20-40 years ago. Today youth ministry sometimes means doing very “non-performance” based things, like not coming into the office in order to spend the day with a kid instead, or taking kids deep into the Word as the group shrinks because it’s not solely entertainment anymore. I’m not sure why people think that having kids involved in programs somehow equals spiritual growth. To me, that means we’re just keeping kids busy.

3. Perhaps my biggest frustration is that parents are often not taking ownership of their kids’ spiritual growth. They outsource it to the “experts” (i.e. church youth leaders) expecting us to make their kids grow. I’m not sure how that can be possible, though, when parents are just as spiritually apathetic as their kids, except they hide it at church on Sunday mornings. Their kids, on the other hand, don’t feel as much of a need to put on a church show each week. Then, when they graduate and are finally on their own, they decide that church and a relationship with God isn’t worth their time because they never saw it at home. I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle that cannot be won until parents own up to their own responsibility to grow and model Christ for their kids, and to initiate spiritual conversations with them.

Thankfully, my sr. pastor gives me the freedom to fail, to think outside the box, and to not follow the performance-driven ministry model that leads me to nothing but frustration. Actually, based on my suggestion, all of the pastors in my church meet every week to pray and help me think through some of these youth ministry issues. We went through “Ministry Mutiny” by Greg Stier together, now we’re reading “Youth Ministry 3.0” by Mark Oestreicher, and next we’ll do “Inside the Mind of Youth Pastors” by Mark Riddle. The best part about it is that the entire church is starting to think along the same lines about how we do (and don’t) do ministry. Essentially, it’s not as much about doing something as much as it is about becoming something: a community of believers.

Of course there are many more challenges than what I mentioned above, some of which are discussed in more detail in an old 2006 guest blog series called, “Issues in Youth Ministry: What needs to change?”

What are your toughest challenges in youth ministry?

We all have heard about the person who gets 3 wishes and we wonder what we would ask for were we given the opportunity. However, that has only ever happened once in history and that was when God gave Solomon one wish for what he wanted. Instead of asking for riches or power, Solomon asked for wisdom to rule God’s people – a very wise choice on his part. God thought so as well for not only did he grant Solomon great wisdom, He also promised he would make him wealthy. Solomon ended up wise, wealthy and very popular.

Wisdom is something we all should ask for, were we given a wish by God. Nothing is more important than being able to make wise choices and godly decisions. What’s nice to know, though, is that God will give us wisdom if we ask for it (James 15). It’s available for us as well. God promises it.

So then why do we make some very foolish decisions and destructive choices? Simply because we aren’t using God’s wisdom, we are using our own human understanding and that is very undependable. Even Solomon did the same thing when he took 700 wives and 300 concubines and turned to idolatry. He tried to find satisfaction in women, work, pleasure, riches., etc. – but none of it succeeded. He wrote about this in the book of Ecclesiastes. Even very wise people can err when they go by their wisdom instead of God’s wisdom.

The choice is ours. How we can ever think we know more or better than God is mind-boggling. But too often we do. Thankfully God is patient to forgive, restore and even turn use our bad choices to bring about good (Romans 8:28). Each day, though, we should ask God to grant the one wish He delights to give – godly wisdom.

Scripture
Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.”

Proverbs 3:13-15, “Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her.”

Proverbs 9:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

1 Corinthians 3:18-21, “Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.’”

James 1:5, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”

Reflect

• Think of some times when you made decisions or choices without consulting God and going by His wisdom. What were the consequences?
• Where do you need God’s wisdom in your life today? How will you know if you have it?
• Take a few minutes now to pray and ask God for His wisdom in all your choices and decisions in life. Thank Him for it.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• Where to find youth ministry jobs
• Tips for the interviewing process
• Questions to ask both the church and yourself
• Some warning flags to watch for
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

May 8: Next week’s featured guest will be a surprise. He’s a guy you’ve seen around Life In Student Ministry before, so it will be a treat. Keep your eye on the LIVE YM Talk page for details to be released later this week.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

If you’re considering a missions trip this summer, be sure to make personal time in the Word and in prayer a central part of the trip. In our case, we didn’t give the kids a devotional book or anything — just God’s Word and some private quiet time. But if you would rather give your kids something to use, HCBJ Global has a FREE 30-day devotional ebook on missions called, Be the Voice and Hands of Jesus. It’s very well-done, professionally designed, and follows the traditional format of a verse or two with an explanation, story and application. Here’s a list of the devo titles:

• Day 1 - Jesus Reached Out to the Unexpected
• Day 2 - Jesus Mobilized Others to Reach Out
• Day 3 - Jesus Acknowledged Faith
• Day 4 - Jesus Prayed Before Choosing Partners
• Day 5 - Jesus Touched People with Power
• Day 6 - Jesus Welcomed Interruptions
• Day 7 - Jesus Recognized an Open Heart
• Day 8 - Jesus Didn’t Follow the World’s Priorities
• Day 9 - Jesus Felt Great Compassion
• Day 10 - Jesus’ Hands Looked for the Lost
• Day 11 - Jesus Allowed Affirmation of His Ministry
• Day 12 - Jesus’ Voice Spoke the Truth
• Day 13 - Jesus Accepted Persecution
• Day 14 - Jesus Loved Difficult People
• Day 15 - Jesus Was Confident in His Treasure
• Day 16 - Jesus Counted the Cost
• Day 17 - Jesus Prayed for Unity
• Day 18 - Jesus Demonstrated Authenticity
• Day 19 - Jesus Made Priorities
• Day 20 - Jesus Honored Sacrifice
• Day 21 - Jesus Asked People To Trust Him
• Day 22 - Jesus Engaged the Whole Person
• Day 23 - Jesus Encouraged Commitment
• Day 24 - Jesus Championed the Poor
• Day 25 - Jesus Is the Bread of Life
• Day 26 - Jesus Transformed People
• Day 27 - Jesus Saw Potential
• Day 28 - Jesus Asked for Courage
• Day 29 - Jesus Promised His Presence
• Day 30 - Jesus Did the Impossible

You’ll have to part with some personal information in order to download the ebook, but it’s worth it. You’ll also get:

• 30 Day Household Prayer Guide
• Worship Music (MP3, Sheet Music and Powerpoint Slides)
• A downloadable sheet that helps you to plan your next outreach project
• Voice and Hands Video: A downloadable video that shares about what it means to be the Voice and Hands of Jesus

Get “Voice and Hands of Jesus” devo book and more!

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Mike Kupferer and he’ll lead us in a discussion about finding the right youth ministry position. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

My goal in this was: 1) to refocus on how I can best spend the limited and valuable time I have with teens while they’re still in jr. high and high school; and 2) to find what was in common with the tasks I felt change lives and use that common denominator to help focus and refine the ministry for our big launch in the fall. Not surprisingly, most of the things in the “Absolutely worth my time” category are relational and are not task-oriented.

You may disagree with how I rated some of my tasks, and that’s fine. I go back and forth on some of them myself. If you and I were able to sit down and have a face to face conversation, you could hear my heart and why I evaluate some things the way I do. For most of them, I just went with my first gut reaction without wrestling back and forth a whole lot. Otherwise, it would get way too complicated.

Regardless, I’d love to hear your reaction to some of the tasks below. How would you rate them for you and your ministry? What day-to-day ministry items are totally worth your time and what items are just busy-work to appease tithers, your sr. pastor, or even yourself?

[ RSS and email subscribers, you may need to visit this post to see the embedded list. ]

• This Sunday 56 jr. highers are giving their testimonies in church via video that I have to finish shooting and editing.
• There’s an end-of-the-year jr. high party next week I’ve barely starting planning
• Sr. high ministry evaluations need to be written and handed out
• My youth budget receipts need to be balanced and turned in (they were due last Monday)
• The summer youth schedule needs to be handed out next and I haven’t even started putting it together
• A news email needs to go out with reminders and updates about things going on this Sunday and next week
• I need to write my lesson for Sunday night’s sr. high large-group meeting

And that’s just the beginning of it!

So this afternoon when a prayer meeting with other local youth pastors was drawing closer, I looked at the clock and thought to myself, “There is no way I can make it to that meeting this afternoon. I have way too much to do. I don’t have time to pray today.” Then I paused and thought, “Wait, did I seriously just think that?” I chuckled to myself and realized my priorities were totally out of wack. Just the fact that a thought like that crossed my mind was very convicting. What else could possibly be a better use of my time than spending time in prayer? Sure, I’m busy and a bit stressed right now, but shouldn’t that be the very time I stop to pray instead of trying to haul through it in my own strength?

Needless to say, I put everything on hold and went to that prayer meeting. It was great! Us youth pastors met at a local church and car-pooled to a park where we talked, shared, and prayed together. Then, to top off the day, I destressed by meeting up with brother and cranked out a 37 mile bike ride with him in the country farm land. Nothing like riding through God’s creation to put everything back in perspective again.

Are you too busy to pray today?

I love the community that has surrounded the site! It’s such a wide variety of men and women who are serving in the trenches, encouraging each other, supporting each other, and investing into each other’s ministries. It’s already been an invaluable resource to me as I am challenged by other people’s challenges and forced to think through ministry scenarios I never considered before. And the longer time goes on, the more it grows into an incredible bank of collective wisdom and experiences.

Here are some great questions to check out. Some of these questions are resolved or closed, meaning the question is no longer open to new answers, but some of them are still open for your input.

• How do I tell my teens I’m resigning? [closed]
• Student stopped coming: give it time or approach him about it? [closed]
• Has anyone ever took their graduating seniors on a senior trip? [closed]
• Pregnant teen
• Dealing with suicide
• Do you allow volunteers to take their kids on youth events?
• Girl cutting herself after her mom’s death [closed]
• Implementing change [closed]

Here’s my own latest question: How do you help jr. highers transition into high school ministry?

Here’s a couple interesting debates, too.

• Large group format is a necessary component of youth ministry
• To drink or not to drink? [closed]
• A youth pastor should be the servant of the senior pastor, and execute his vision for the youth department. [closed]

Stop by MinistryQuestions.com and ask your questions, give your input, and bless others as they bless you.

Who can figure God out? First, He says His people need to be holy and set apart from sin. Then He says that a man who was an adultery, murderer and admittedly poor father is a man after His own heart? So which is it? How can both be true? Yet they are, aren’t they. David is called a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). Yet David’s sins are apparent, and they aren’t minor.

Perhaps we should ask just what it means to be a man after God’s heart, for that is something for which we all should aspire. Obviously we’re not talking about sinless perfection. Paul seems to come the closest to this in the New Testament, and clearly wasn’t sinless, either – before or after salvation. So what does it mean to be a person after God’s own heart.

I think it means having a heart the same as God’s. Therefore having our desires, our motives, our goals, our values and our priorities line up with God’s. It means loving what He loves, hating what He hates, and looking at life as He looks at life. It is having His biblical world view of things in our minds and His love or righteousness and hate of sin in our hearts. You may see it differently, but I’ll stick with that definition because, in effect, it means being like Jesus. That is God’s ultimate goal for all of us – to be more Christ-like.

So can we be a man or woman who is after God’s own heart but still sin? Of course. John clearly reminds us that we won’t stop sinning (I John 1:8, 10) and Paul experienced this in his life as well (Romans 7). That means that you and I can be after God’s own heart. After all, a heart is internal, so its not external actions God is most concerned about. Just being like God externally is hypocrisy and we know how God feels about that. But if my heart beats with His heart, for the things His heart beats for, then I am after God’s own heart.

Oh what a wonderful goal in life, what a worthy dream to follow, to have a heart like God. That should be the desire of each and every one of us. What could be better than to have the mind of Christ and the heart of God?

Scripture
1 Samuel 13:14, “But now your kingdom will not endure; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people, because you have not kept the Lord’s command.”

Acts 13:22, “After removing Saul, he made David their king. He testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’”

1 Peter 3:3-4, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”

1 Corinthians 2:16, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

Reflect

• In what ways have you seen your values and goals line up with God’s in the years since you became a Christian?
• Where do you struggle most with being Christ like in thoughts and actions? What can you do about it today?
• Spend some time in worship thanking God that you can become more like Him and for His perfect, wonderful character to emulate.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• The value of an academic ministry training
• How to find training if you can’t afford Bible college or seminary
• If you really need formal youth ministry training
• How to know what school to go to for training
• The most influential aspects of formal training
• Teens who are deciding between Bible college versus secular college
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

May 1: Next week’s featured guest is Mike Kupferer and he’ll lead us in a discussion about finding the right youth ministry position.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Paul will most likely publish his work, so download it while it’s still free.

Download “The Cure for the Common Youth Ministry” ebook

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Matt McAlack, a youth ministry professor, will lead us in a discussion about academic youth ministry training. College, seminary, do you need it, where should you go, what happens afterwards, and more. We’ll also talk about the future of formal youth ministry training. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Activity Ideas

• Community tree-plantings: municipal parks, side-walk shade trees, urban tree plantings, etc.; also flower gardens
• Trash pick-ups: local parks, “Adopt A Spot” public-right-of-ways, stream banks, etc. Always wear protective gloves!
• Flower or Veggie garden: community designated spot or church property

General Tips/Tricks

• Connect with local and state authorities; NGO’s or wildlife refuges for activity ideas or jumping on board an established one. NGO’s and wildlife refuges always welcome volunteers and are often planning events themselves.
• Always get explicit permission from the municipality if public lands involved.
• Check out Americorps, the “domestic Peace Corps” where I served. Trained personnel are available at no charge to help plan your own project or get you involved with one of theirs.
• Donations: Large companies have budgets for “social responsibility” requirements. Search their web pages or talk to the store manager. Giants like Home Depot and Lowes are will be able to provide you with lawn/leaf bags, plants, shovels etc., also grant money for larger projects. Contacting the store manager for simple items like lawn/leaf bags. Ask for donations from local “mom and pop” garden centers, too.
• Other local businesses may contribute if you have a set plan and give them proper credit for their contribution. By telling other members of the community that this local business supported a community project, it sends a strong message about that business’s commitment to the well-being of its customers.
• Fostering Stewardship: Set the example! You, as a youth leader are responsible for feeling a strong sense of stewardship in the first place and passing in on to your group. Not everyone may bite, but guaranteed you’ll at least a few who really latch on. Do background research on the project and similar projects, and give examples to your group about successful projects elsewhere and how that community has benefited. Before/after photos are especially helpful! Also, keep track of the process. If you are doing tree plantings for example, take photos before, during, after, and waaay after to show your group and new members how your trees have grown. Talk about difficulties encountered and how it makes each person feel to see the positive changes they’ve contributed to their environment.

Schedule activities on a yearly basis (i.e. every Earth Day have an activity). Or every October have one just because. If it becomes and annual event, you are more likely to keep youths interested and involved, and new ones will see that the older kids think it’s cool too. Eventually, parents and other church members will become more supportive of your efforts as they see their children looking forward to “this year’s event.” You can also solicit the general public to volunteer at an event as well. Ask them to bring a non-perishable food item too.

Also, connect with the spiritual side of embracing the world around you. Take some time to reflect on the day’s activities. Put your palm on the trunk of an old tree or young sapling. Think about the many years that old tree has “seen” come and go, how it has weathered the impacts of humans on earth, “seen” changes in it’s landscape, and been powerless to defend itself in a changing environment. Think of how this new, young sapling has so much life to live, and could very well outlive you. Give it hope for a long, healthy life by promising to do your part by keeping the air, water, and soil it needs to live clean. In turn, that tree will help keep the air, water, and soil you need to live, clean, too. We’re all connected in one-way or another. God put us on this earth to do great things, and He gave us a magnificent planet to work with. Respect the earth and care for it as God would have you nurture your own children.

I would love to share ideas with you, I have many!! Contact me at kdacanay2@yahoo.com.

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Kira Dacanay is a Master’s Candidate at the University of Rhode Island in the Department of Marine Affairs, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resource Management from Rutgers University, NJ. She completed 1700 hours of community service work with the AmeriCorps NJ Watershed Ambassador Program in 2007 and worked nearly 2 years with the NJ Department of Environmental Protection prior to beginning her Master’s degree. She enjoys connecting spiritually with the natural world and strives to improve her stewardship of the great resource that God has provided.

This MSNBC news video is worth watching.

[ht Inetta Smith via email]

We all have choices to make in life: decisions about how we will adjust to what happens to us and attitude modifications as our faith gets stretched. For most of us these come in the form of negative, painful life experiences. For a few, though, like Saul, it comes through very good things happening.

Saul’s only claim to fame was that he was tall and good-looking, so everyone thought he would make a good king. But Samuel was a shy introvert, insecure and fearful of the spotlight. That’s why he hid when they wanted to make him king. We all know his story, how he was impatient and disobedient and eventually lost his life and his throne because of not obeying God. Instead of trusting God when he found himself in an rough place, outside his comfort zone, and asking God to help him rule the people, he let his fear and insecurity control him.

Thus his whole focus was on protecting himself, keeping control of his power, watching out for anyone who may have been a threat to him and reacting instead of acting. Envy, jealousy and manipulation characterized his life. Some times he would turn to God’s prophets for guidance, but more often he would turn to pagan gods for help. What a sad waste of a life.

So why did God choose him to be king? God wanted to show the people that judging a person solely by their outward appearance is wrong. God also wants to teach Saul that He could be trusted to be there for Saul and to help him rule as God wanted him to. Sadly, neither Saul nor the people learned their lesson.

Sscripture
1 Samuel 16:7, “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.’”

Philippians 4:19, “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

Psalms 23:1-5, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

Reflect

• How often do you form opinions of someone by their appearance and your first impression of their personality? How often have you been wrong about the person when doing so?
• When are you most guilty of judging someone by outward appearances?
• How do you respond when put in a situation that is outside your comfort zone?
• How sensitive are you to criticism? How often do you find yourself jealous or envious?
• Ask God to help you see today’s challenges as opportunities to trust Him for your needs.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the things we talked about:

• Experiential education
• Enabling community
• The process of changing to 3.0
• Joining God in His work
• Cliques and small groups
• Contextualizing ministry for sub-cultures
• A lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

April 24: Next week’s featured guest is Matt McAlack, my old youth ministry professor from Philadelphia Biblical University. He’ll lead us in a discussion about academic youth ministry training: college, seminary, do I need it, where to go, what happens afterwards? Join the conversation LIVE next week!

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Download “Leadership Learnings from Bloggers” ebook

[ht to @terracecrawford via Twitter]

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Mark Oestreicher, President of Youth Specialties, will lead us in a discussion about his book, Youth Ministry 3.0, and many of the concepts he writes therein. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

These lists could be a lot longer, but here are a couple to get you started. I’d love for you guys to continue these lists in the comments below.

Current problems

1. Youth leaders are not internalizing the Word themselves before they teach it to others, and thus a disconnect between real life and faith is unintentionally communicated.

2. Parents are not being the spiritual role models their teenagers desperately need.

3. Youth ministries are too wrapped up in “doing” ministry rather than “being” ministry. Ministries find their identity in their function instead of seeking the Lord first for their identity and vision and then letting function flow from that.

4. Youth leader don’t pray enough. If we truly believed in the power of prayer, we’d spend more time in prayer than anything else.

Future challenges

1. Perhaps the biggest challenge for youth ministry in the next several years will be defining what community is, and then somehow enabling it to organically take place. The Internet and youth culture continue to change how people view relationships and how they interact. Since we are made in His image and one of the core essentials of that is relationships, we know that community will never go away, but the church’s ideology will either have to shift or be intentional about making a stance. Forming small groups and telling the participants to talk to each other for a couple years is not necessarily community.

2. Somewhat related is that our communication and teaching styles may need to change. Rather than lecturing from a stage or even discussing in a classroom small group, perhaps teaching will need to change to a community-driven experience that interacts with the real world.

What problems do we have? What future challenges do you see for youth ministry? Perhaps most importantly, how are you addressing these problems and challenges in your youth group?

1. It’s very emotional, unlike any other job. You’ll experience the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows.

2. It’s very messy, and always will be as long as you work with people who are just as imperfect and sinful as you are.

3. It’s constantly changing. Youth culture never stays the same from year to year, and neither do the kids, values, nor worldviews. Youth ministry must always morph along with it. As soon as you think you have a handle on it, think again.

4. It requires strong vision casting. Any leadership position does, but leadership in youth ministry does especially. Your leaders, teens, parents, church and community all depend on it.

5. Don’t think you need to do it all. In fact, the ministry is healthier when you enable others to serve instead of taking responsibility for every youth event, trip, fundraiser, small group, idea, and strategy that furthers the vision.

6. No matter what people at your new church say, don’t make deep rooted changes in the ministry until after two years of building trust and respect.

7. Live a life that is above reproach in everything. Eventually even “little things” will come to light and you will be held to a higher level of accountability for it (and rightly so).

8. Kids really don’t care how “cool” you are or how well you know scripture as much as they care about how much you love them as individuals, not as a group.

9. Have a firm grasp on what your values are in ministry and make sure they’re are aligned with a church’s written and unwritten values before accepting a paid youth ministry position there.

10. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t see results and life-change take place right away. Sometimes it takes years, and even then you won’t always hear about it.

What do you wish someone would’ve told you about youth ministry before you got started? We’d all love to hear it in the comments below.

We seem to hear a lot about servanthood today and how God wants His people to be servants. Naturally we all consider ourselves to be servants. We believe we put others first and sacrifice for the needs of those who aren’t as well off as we are. And that may be true. But in the Bible there is the story of a woman who truly was a servant.

Ruth wasn’t a Jew. She was from Moab. When her future husband came to her country to live and asked her to be his wife she thought life would go on like it had for others. But that wasn’t the way God had it planned for her. Her husband, brother-in-law and father-in-law all died because they were out of God’s will in leaving Israel and turning to Gentiles. Thus Ruth found herself a young widow. Women then who weren’t married didn’t have many options, certainly no wholesome ones.

The smart thing for Ruth to do would be to return to her home town for she was young enough to remarry and have a husband and family. However her mother-in-law, Naomi, had no one so Ruth stayed with her. Ruth loved Naomi and her God as well. She committed herself to both of them, even though it meant moving to a strange land and living as an outsider in a foreign culture. In addition, this culture was one in which men were forbidden to marry Gentile women. So what future was there for Ruth in Israel? Still, she went.

Fortunately, God has provided for the needs of the poor by saying they could go into fields after they had been harvested and collect any grain that had been left. It was hard work, but at least there would be something to eat. So that’s what Ruth did to provide for Naomi and herself. It wouldn’t provide enough for the months ahead, but at least they could eat while the grain lasted.

Ruth was willing to give up everything to serve Naomi. She did it out of love. God saw this and smiled on her. So did Boaz, who owned the field where she gathered the grain. Boaz was so impressed by Ruth’s service to Naomi that he married her. God blessed her as well. She had a son named Obed who had a son named Jesse who had a son named David. Thus Ruth the Gentile widow ended up as an ancestor of Jesus Himself. Ruth was willing to give up everything to serve God. But when a person does that, God always out gives them. God always blesses those who are willing to serve Him. Jesus was the ultimate servant, and we’re never more like Him than when we are serving.

Scripture
Ruth 1:16-18, “But Ruth replied, ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.’ When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.”

Matthew 20:26-28, “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Mark 9:35, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

John 13:14-16, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.”

Reflect

• When your friends think of those who are servants, will you come to mind?
• Who is it hardest for you to serve? Why?
• When is it hardest for you to serve? Why?
• What can you do today to improve your service to others?
• Pray and ask God to give you opportunities to serve others and Him today.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the issues we talked about:

• Collaborating with youth workers online
• Partnering with youth workers in your community
• How to start a local youth worker network
• Ideas for reaching your community together
• The importance of having a vision for your ministry
• A lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

April 17: Next week’s featured guest is Mark Oestreicher, the President of Youth Specialties. He’ll lead us in a discussion about his book, Youth Ministry 3.0, and the direction youth ministry needs to go in the future. Join the conversation LIVE next week!

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Best of all, though, is that their materials are all very high-quality, useful and looks amazingly professional. You usually won’t get a transcript or an outline of the actual lessons, but after you see all the graphics and promo tools they provide, you almost don’t even care. For each series, they usually include things like high-res posters, postcards, flyers, count-down timers, PowerPoint background, movie loops, Photoshop files, promo videos, and more.

Visit StuffICanUse.com

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Ryan Neilson, the guy behind Pastor2Youth.com, will be leading us in a discussion about Collaborating with other youth pastors/ministries. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

The cycle of youth culture

It’s really not surprising to me that this is happening. It’s the cycle of youth culture. Teens gravitate to something, usually under criticism from adults, until it becomes common and mainstream. As the adults eventually start adopting it themselves, teens gradually move on to something else.

Remember that, in his day, Elvis Presley was greatly criticized for his gyrating hips and the moral values his followers were adopting, but eventually his music became common among adults, parents, and teens alike. So, teens moved on to other flavors of rock and roll. As those flavors became mainstream with adults, teens moved once again to alternative rock. And so on…

Mark Oestreicher, in his book, Youth Ministry 3.0, summarizes it well:

Youth culture has become the dominate culture…. Middle-aged and younger parents listen to the same music their teenagers listen to (or, at least, used to listen to)…. Clothing brands cross age barriers…. Adults are all over Facebook and MySpace. …youth culture cannot stand by while it becomes completely commoditized and commonplace. That rubs against the essential fabric of adolescence…. Teenagers’ constant need to differentiate from the adult world… drives them to new, “other” ways of connecting, coping, and creating. Every time some aspect of youth culture becomes commoditized and mainstream, accepted by adults and culture at large, teenagers tweak it in a new way for themselves or create a whole new category. Case in point: All Web-watchers and adolescent speculators were still convinced that teenagers were going to continue using email and online chat rooms to connect with each other virtually, but teenagers slid out from under that and embraced instant messaging. Then we adults… were shocked… that teens would slide out from under our assumptions about their IM use and move to texting as the most common form of social networking. (Pages 65, 66, 68.)

It’s impossible to predict what teens will move toward next, but I will take the liberty of going on record to say that the general population of teens will move away from Facebook in the next two years.

This is becoming more and more evident as young adults like Julian Smith are annoyed that grandparents are joining Facebook. In his popular video, 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, Julian says there should be an age limit to Facebook (1:14 in the video).

Some teens I know still love Facebook and use it daily, but not everyone. Actually, what prompted me to write this blog post a couple months ago was a conversation I had with a teen who said he closed his Facebook account because there’s too many adults there and it’s too bloated with random features he doesn’t care about.

So what’s next?

I have no idea what they’ll gravitate toward as teens stop checking Facebook multiple times a day and start checking it only once a day, eventually checking it a couple times a week and then only once in a while, but I think it will have a couple elements:

1. It will not be tethered to a computer. Although Facebook has a mobile version and features, it’s still largely bound to a computer. As teens become more and more mobile and as smart phone data plans become more common, their networking will move to a mobile device that connects to a computer rather than the other way around.

2. It will still enhance and lead to face-to-face socializing. When the telephone was gaining traction, the criticism was that people would no longer meet face-to-face to talk and the dangers of miscommunication from not seeing body language would create a lot of problems. Today we all know people still continue to meet face-to-face anyway. The telephone just extended our communication. Oddly enough, however, that’s the same argument that was made when I was younger and email and IM was gaining traction, except that those communication methods didn’t even have talking involved! But yet, here we are today still meeting in person, despite all the text messaging and social networking sites. Remember, God has created mankind with an innate need for relationships, primarily with Himself, but also with each other. That face-to-face component will never go away, just the expressions of it change as technology and youth culture continues to develop.

One possibility of something teens might gravitate toward is something like Loopt, a social service that utilizes the GPS capabilities of newer phones to show you where your friends are in proximity to you, what they’re doing, and quickly contact them so you can meet together face-to-face. (This Apple commercial explains it a bit more.) Whether or not it will reach the widespread acceptance like Facebook is yet to be seen (I kinda think it won’t).

Whatever teens move toward, though, it will initially come under criticism from adults just like MySpace and Facebook did. Soon enough adults will accept it and cause the teens to once again move elsewhere, but thus is the cycle of youth culture and all the subsequent challenges of youth ministry.

What do you think?

Do you think it will take teens longer than two years to move to something else? Shorter? Will Facebook be able to keep up with the morphing trends in culture and adolescence? Have an idea of what they’ll move toward after Facebook? Would love to hear from you in the comments below.

We’re going to play a round of Scattergories together and whoever wins the round gets the free 6 custom tshirts. Here are the details:

Submit ONLY ONE word in each of the 12 Scattergories fields that begins with the letter T. You earn 1 point for each word that no one else submits (each word must be a valid word found in a common English dictionary). Whoever earns the most points wins 6 custom-printed one-color front t-shirts from MinistryMonkey.com. In case of a tie, finalists will be assigned a number and a random integer from random.org will determine the winner. Only one entry per person will be accepted. MinistryMonkey.com and Tim Schmoyer will be the sole judges of the contest and all submitted entries. The winner will be announced at MinistryMonkey.com’s blog on Monday, April 13, 2009.

The Scattergories card will be taken offline on Saturday, April 11, which means you have only a couple days to fill out your Scattergories card and win the tshirts!

[ CONTEST ENDED ]

One of the favorite New Testament stories for children is The Good Samaritan. Everyone knows how the Samaritan responds to another in need. That is why he is called “good.” But what exactly does “good” mean other than the opposite of “bad” how would we define good?

Goodness is defined as praiseworthy character; moral excellence. The Bible speaks often of the goodness of God (Ex 33:19; Rom 2:4). God’s goodness consists of righteousness, holiness, justice, kindness, grace, mercy, and love. Goodness is also one of the fruits of the Spirit that should characterize Christian believers (Gal 5:22). Christians are called to goodness, even as God the Father is perfect and good (Matt 5:48). Goodness differs from the previous fruit, kindness, in that kindness is an outer action and goodness is the heart attitude that causes that action.

When used of God, “goodness” sometimes is used as a summary of all His attributes (Exodus 33:19). Goodness is all God is. To the extent that we are “good” we are like God. When we are lovable, virtuous and righteous we are like God.

Goodness can not be separated from holiness. Holiness of life will always expresses itself in always of doing what is in the best interest of others. Moral Goodness is not optional, to keep the Commandments and God’s Word must be a high priority. We must conform to all God’s laws and principles. Holiness is not listed as a fruit of the Spirit, for it is part of goodness. When we are holy we are good, when we are good we are holy.

There is a difference between being good and doing good. Being good comes when God’s Spirit indwells us at the moment of salvation. Doing good is the acting out of that inner goodness in everyday life. Being good is the holiness of Jesus that God gives us at salvation. Doing good is living a holy life in all we think, say and do. In essence, only God is good. But when He lives in us then we have His goodness, the fruit of His Spirit, which works through us.

The “good” Samaritan is a fine example to all of us of what happens when God’s goodness reigns in the heart. His love flows out of us to those around us. The good Samaritan wasn’t unique – we can and should all be like Him when God’s Spirit lives within.

Scripture
Psalms 25:8, “Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.”

Romans 15:14, “I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another.”

Reflect

• What comes to mind when you think of holiness? Where would you say God’s holiness is most evident in your life? Where do you need God’s help to be more like Him?
• Think of some ways you can show God’s goodness to others through your actions today. What are they?
• Ask God to fill you with His Spirit today and have Him manifest the fruit of goodness in your life.

———————————————————————-
Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Some of the issues we talked about:

• What is mentoring?
• “Structured spontaneity”
• People who mentored us
• How to start a mentoring program
• How mentoring works
• What kids looks for in a mentor
• A lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

April 10: Next week’s featured guest is Ryan Neilson, the youth ministry veteran behind pastor2youth.com. He’ll lead us in a discussion about collaborating with other youth pastors/ministries. Join the conversation LIVE next week!

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Last week he published his notes for an Easter youth group discussion starter called, “Washed Clean.” It includes an object lesson, preparation and presentation tips, discussion ideas, scripture passages and two ways to help teens reflect on the lesson.

Check out a complete list of his youth ministry ideas for Easter.

Also check out last year’s Easter Freebie Friday #64, a free PowerPoint game called, “Peeps Trivia.”

“Washed Clean,” a Easter youth group discussion starter

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Joshua Griffin, high school youth pastor at Saddleback Church, will be leading us in a discussion about working with sr. high students. Check out this blog at MoreThanDodgeball.com. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

When we go into vocational ministry, we often use language like, “God is calling me to serve at this church.” Or, when we leave one ministry position and go to another, we say, “God called me away from that ministry to this new one.” Sometimes we’re clearly over-spiritualizing a situation, sometimes not.

But when we start to question the calling, let’s not confuse those emotions with ones of discouragement or insecurity. For example, if you had a lot of people encouraging and supporting you, would you still feel “called out” of ministry? If you felt affirmed by key people in your ministry, would your calling change?

Remember, our calling into ministry does not come from people, nor should it be retracted by people. It comes solely from the Lord.

If you’re doubting your call to ministry, don’t confuse it with feeling discouraged or insecure. Deep down, we all feel that in ministry.

Affirmation and encouragement are absolutely healthy and necessary things to have in your ministry, but never should we base a calling to ministry on the praise or opinions of others. Base your calling on the Lord’s direction in your life.

[ Read the full article over at YouthMinBlog.com ]

What do Pharaoh’s daughter rescuing Moses, Rahab helping the Jewish spies, David’s treatment of Mephibosheth and Elijah’s response to the woman whose son just died have in common? They all were showing kindness.

Kindness can be defined as God’s loyal love and favor toward His people. In the Old Testament, the word translated as “kindness” or “lovingkindness” refers to God’s long-suffering love — His determination to keep His promises to His chosen people in spite of their sin and rebellion (Deut 7:12; Hos 2:14-23). This attribute of God was shown through His divine mercy and forgiveness toward sinners when payment of sins through the sacrificial system was no longer effective (Deut 22:22; Ps 51:1).

In the New Testament, the Greek word translated as “grace” best represents the idea of God’s kindness or lovingkindness. Because God has been gracious toward believers, they should treat all people with kindness or grace (Luke 6:35). All people are created in God’s image and should be treated accordingly, no matter how badly they have twisted and deformed that image (James 3:9). Kindness is not an apathetic response to sin, but a deliberate act to bring the sinner back to God (Hos 2:14-23; Rom 2:4).

God wants us to be kind to others because He is kind to us. Our kindness shows His kindness to others, and in doing so we become more like Him. Whenever we show love or compassion to others we are being kind. To an extend man can do that out of their old nature, but to show real kindness requires the presence and power of His Spirit for it means being kind to those who aren’t deserving of it and may retaliate with hate. Turning the cheek in love can’t be done without God’s power.

How can we become more kind? First, we need to submit to the will of God (Philippians 2:1-8). If we can’t submit to God’s will we won’t be able to submit to the needs of others. Then, we need a teachable spirit (James 1:21). We need to be open to instruction to make us more like Jesus. If we think we know it all already we will never grow more like Him. Finally, we need to have a consideration and love of others (Ephesians 4:1-2). We need to be able to put ourselves in other’s shoes and be sensitive to their needs.

Kindness is love in operation so others can see Jesus in us. We deeply appreciate God’s kindness to others. Others can experience His kindness through us.

Scripture
Proverbs 14:21, “He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy.”

Ephesians 4:32, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”

Galatians 6:10, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.”

Reflect

• Who comes to mind when you think of people who are kind? What is there about them that makes them stand out from others? (Make a list of traits or characteristics.)
• How do you measure up to the list you just make?
• Are you so focused on leading your ministry that you neglect doing little kind things for others?
• Pick 2 or 3 of the traits you lack and pray about them, asking God to produce them in your life. Then make a list of things you can do today to meet these.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

• When your own children are in the youth ministry
• Should women be youth pastors?
• Handling cell phones in youth group meetings
• Reviving a youth group’s spiritual passion

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Next week’s discussion

April 3: Next week’s featured guest is Joshua Griffin, sr. high pastor at Saddleback Church. He’ll lead us in a discussion about working with sr. high teenagers. Join the conversation LIVE next week!

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Of course the music CD comes with a bunch of music tracks from various Christian artists, but it also has a 48-page booklet containing some great stuff from Dave Ramsey (on financial issues) and Francis Chan (about avoiding the spiritual status quo). The set also has a media DVD containing videos from the two aforementioned guys, along with clips of other advice and wisdom for the big transition in life.

I personally have never given these sets away as graduation gifts, but I’ll be happy to take a free copy to check it out. Use the link below to get your free copy and evaluate it as a potential gift for one or more of the seniors graduating from your ministry this year.

More information about the ConGRADulations 2009 CD/DVD/Booklet set

Order your FREE Interlinc ConGRADulations 2009 CD/DVD/Booklet set

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details.

My pastor asked me to look around at some other youth ministries and see what they set and use to evaluate their ministries. He suggested that I set up some “Key Result Areas” to use for our ministry here. I realize that some of this is dependent on personal context, but I would be interested to hear if any others, including you, have done work with KRAs. What are the KRAs of youth ministry that exist in almost any context?

I haven’t formally done anything like this before, but I do meet with the youth pastors in my community every Tuesday morning and talk. We did an informal discussion once about the percentage of students who are connected to our church in some way versus the percentage of students who are actually involved in the ministry. My ministry is at about 50-60% involvement, which I thought was horrible until the other guys said they were closer to 25-35% involvement. Now I don’t feel so bad.

But that’s the problem — we should never use other ministries for the standard of evaluating our own ministry. It’s not “how they’re doing” versus “how we’re doing.” And I know you’re not asking in a competitive sense, but for all practical purposes, that’s exactly where the focus goes. There’s nothing wrong with taking your community’s demographics into consideration as part of your strategy, but don’t use the success or failure of other ministries as a basis for evaluation. The danger is, if you happen to be on the top of the totem pole, you start to feel the same way I did: content. As long as there are still unsaved people in this world, I should never be content with my ministry’s “performance.”

Instead, I use scripture for the basis of our evaluation. 1 Timothy 2:3-4 says, “…God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” And the Great Commission in Matthew 28, of course, along with 1 Peter and Hebrews challenging believers to grow into full maturity, not stuck on spiritual milk. God wants 1,000,000% growth, not numbers who are involved versus not involved, as if that could somehow determine spirituality.

What I care about most, and I’m sure you do, too, is that I’ll hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” My ministry will never meet up to His standards, I know. As long as there are lost people in my community and believers who need to grow deeper in the Word, I’ll never feel like my ministry is “doing okay” or “meeting expectations.” It’s all about Him and what scripture indicates a ministry should do and what it should look like. So I’d encourage you to start there. Besides, no life-change or spiritual growth happens apart from the Holy Spirit’s prompting and conviction anyway. Whatever the Key Area Results are for my community, the Holy Spirit can (and wants to!) radically change that. Sometimes I think we approach ministry from a business perspective instead of a spiritual perspective.

What do you think? I’d love to dialog about this a bit because I’ve never really thought through a KRA before, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

NOTE: Obviously I know that careful ministry evaluations are important and very necessary — this post is not questioning that. Rather, it’s challenging the yard stick we sometimes use to measure our ministries and the conclusions we draw from it.

2. People don’t commit to programs. They commit to vision. People rally behind a vision, rarely behind a program. Passionately communicate the vision for your ministry and get people on board with that. When the vision is contagious and people understand how they fit into the big overall picture, then they become excited about the program that may guide them there. People want to be part of a movement, something that is significant and is bigger than they are. Where is your youth ministry going? How compelling is the direction? Are you passionate about it or is it just a statement typed on a piece of paper?

Programs are here to serve the relationships, the vision of your ministry, and ultimately to bring glory to God as a body of Christ, not the other way around. If you’re spending a lot of energy trying to get people to commit to your programs, you have it all backwards.

It should never be about the program in the first place.

The annual cost of those who run red lights is over $7 billion dollars. This includes medical bills, car repairs, etc. The average time saved by running a red light is less than 50 seconds. So why do so many do it? Impatience.

Patience is a fruit, a product of God’s Spirit. It isn’t part of the equipment we are born with. Have you ever met a patient newborn? No one has to learn how to be impatient. We are automatically made that way – its part of our self-centered sin nature.

A French proverb says, “Laziness is often mistaken for patience.” Perhaps the opposite is also true, patience is often mistaken for laziness. A mother once chided her doctor, when her daughter was ill and she was worried. “Why don’t you do something?” she asked. “I am doing something,” replied the doctor. “I am waiting.” Many of us have trouble determining when we are being patient and when we are being lazy.

We can define patience as bearing difficulties without complaint, trusting in a greater reason or purpose behind them. The Bible uses four different Greek words that are translated in various ways as patience. Each of these words emphasizes one aspect in one way or another of what we think of as patience. Paul said the fruit of the Spirit is “makrothymia.” This is a compound Greek word made up of the words “makro” meaning long, and “thymia” meaning anger. So literally it means LONG TO ANGER as opposed to “oxythymia” which means sudden anger. Longsuffering gives us the picture a person who in relation to those who annoy, oppose, or molest him, exercise patience. He refuses to yield to passion or to outbursts of anger.

What’s so great about patience? Why does God want us to be patient? One reason is because He wants us to be like Him and He is patient (2 Peter 3:9). Another reason is because He knows it is best for us to patiently trust and wait.

Every fruit I know of has a protective outer layer. We peel a banana or orange to eat the fruit inside. Others fruit like an apple or grape we will eat skin and all. The outer layer serves an important purpose; it helps keep the moisture inside the fruit, even in dry seasons. The outer peel will also protect the fruit and allow it to grow. If the outer peel or skin is broken or removed, then the fruit will rot and spoil. Patience is like that for the soul of man. Patience protects our hearts from becoming rancid—bitter and rotten to the core. God wants our lives to be sweet and appealing to others; that’s the purpose of the fruit of the Spirit to give our lives the aroma and taste of Jesus! The practical practice of patience restores and protects relationships. Godly patience enables us to show mercy instead of hate, to forgive instead of seek revenge. “Patience is the ability to put up with people you’d like to put down.”

Patience is love enduring; it’s love that lasts and won’t be broken by anger. We are to be patient; with a long fuse we give allowances for each other’s faults and shortcomings. It only comes from staying closely attached to Jesus, the vine (John 15:5). Then when trials come it means we place our faith in Him and default to His timing instead of taking things into our own hands (Romans 5:3; James 1:2-4).

Patience is not idleness; it doesn’t mean you do nothing. Patience is active. The patient man is always ready to meet his neighbor halfway; instead of building fences, patience builds bridges to maintain relationships. Further, patience is not simply a character trait or quality an individual may possess. PATIENCE IS A LIFESTYLE! It is a way of life that affects all our relationships. Patience is an expression of love because love is patient. Patience, being slow to anger enables us to live a good life. Patience will keep us from embarrassing ourselves by what we say or do.

Scripture
Ephesians 4:2, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

Hebrews 12:1-2, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Isaiah 40:31, “They that WAIT on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Reflect

• Would those who know you best say you are a patient person? Why or why not?
• What seems to make you most impatient? What can you do about that?
• Are there any particular people who seem to bring out impatience in you? Why?
• Ask God to show you any impatience you may have within you now, then confess it as sin and ask Him to fill you with His Spirit and patience.

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode