Although I never would’ve admitted it out loud, my actions indicated that I valued teaching and worshipping with other people’s kids more than I did with my own.

Rob Rienow of Visionary Family Ministries shares a similar story. In the video below we both discuss our stories of conviction in youth and family ministry and how it’s brought us to where we are today with leading our own families spiritually.

Rob also shares a few ideas for how you can get started with leading your own family in worship.

Be sure to check out Rob’s message on, “God’s Grand Vision for the Home.”

Out of that approach came a conversation about how we can best spend the church’s budget dollars to serve families. Is it to hire staff? Is it to run certain programs? Plan events? Buy curriculum? Something else?

My local network of youth workers here in the Cincinnati area had that discussion and we came to some interesting realizations about what’s contributed the most to change in our own families and how we can use budget money to replicate that in the lives of other families. I share what that is in this video.

As someone who’s attended the D6 Conference for the past several years, I’m not only encouraged by the family conversation that’s taking place, but also by the heart of those behind D6. They’re truly serving ministries the best way they can to help facilitate a conversation around family ministry that influences the trajectory of how we reach and serve people.

Below is a list of sessions you can watch and listen to for free for the next 4 days, May 1-4, at D6Days.com. On Sunday, this all goes away.

My Session Recommendation

If you only have time to watch one of these, I highly suggest watching Rob Rienow’s sessions called, “A Church Philosophy for the Generations.” In it he walks through many passages about how scripture says we are to pass faith to the next generation. I probably took more notes during that session than any of the others. In fact, I think I ended up writing down almost everything he said! It’s been 6 months since I heard him give this talk at the D6 Conference and I’m still processing it.

Definitely watch it, but do it soon because on Sunday D6 Days is over.

Here’s other sessions that are available:

Videos (Main Stage Sessions)

• Timothy Paul Jones: Don’t Be Impressive! Be An Impression
• Lydia Randall: Balancing Busyness in Ministry
• Rob Rienow: A Church Philosophy for the Generations
• Dave Stone: 3 Gifts for Your Kids
• Leneita Fix: Connecting with the Urban Heart

MP3s (Breakout/Lab Sessions)

• Tim Kimmel: A Grace Based Approach
• Walker Moore: The Orphan Heart
• John Trent: Where Do I Start? Finding the Plan that Works for You
• Diana Pendley: What I Wished I Knew My First Few Years in Ministry…25 Years Later
• Tim Smith: Creating Healthy Habits at Home
• Bob Davis: The Importance of a Kiss. A Model of a Healthy Marriage

Watch and listen to these sessions at D6Days.com until Sunday, May 4, 2014.

But the text messaging landscape has changed a lot since I first started using TXTSignal. Obviously, students are still texting just as much as they always were, but today flip phones are no longer the main device students are using. Instead, it’s smart phones that take texting usuage to different levels (although, am I the only one who still misses T9?).

Fortunately, TXTSignal is doing an amazing job at keeping up with the technology. A couple key updates those guys have made since the last time I talked about them.

• They have a new mobile version of the service that’s optimized for smart phones and tablets. Login, send a txt to your entire youth group, or to just the parents or leaders. Respond to a couple of the replies you get while you’re in there, too.
• The desktop version has an updated and refreshed design, as well.
• Import contact info to quickly setup your text message list.
• They also have keyword texting, also known as, “text to join.” Setup a keyword for your youth group and simply tell them to text JOIN with your keyword to 94033.
• The web page that students, parents, and leaders can optionally use to sign up, unsubscribe, and update their info recieved a facelift and become customizable, too.

It’s probably worth noting that it’s the only text messaging company that has a policy in writing that they don’t share, sell, nor resell any account or contact information. Others companies say they don’t, but only TXTSignal has built it into their privacy policy.

But here’s the best part: if your TXTSignal account is for a ministry, email their support team, tell them I sent you and you’ll get 10% off the monthly fee. Of course, start with 30 day trial, first and see what you think.

And just in the interest of full disclosure, I am not a TXTSignal affiliate nor am I sponsored by them. In fact, I get no kickback at all from this post. Although this may sound like a commercial, I just really love their service and feel like it’s a great communication tool for youth workers. Enjoy!

I recently received a question from a pastor who asked this:

I need some advice on how to get things going for youth who have lost interest in church. I’m looking for ways to find a good way to teach the youth and children God’s Word. I am supposed to find a curriculum for the children, as well as the junior high and high school youth. I thought I’d ask you for your advice.

My response:

Personally, I don’t believe that starting a youth program is the solution to getting youth interested in church. Plus, ultimately the goal isn’t to get them interested in the church, but rather to train them to become people who are willing to give up everything to follow Him. I’m sure you’d agree. If that’s the case, then loving His church (which, as you know, is different than loving church services) will come as a result rather than being the goal itself. So rather than measuring their interest level and participation in church, maybe we should be measuring something else and putting a different system in place besides programs and fun events to help them get there.

Thankfully, scripture has already given us both the measurement and the system, not just for youth but for believers in general.

What we measure is fruitfulness. It’s the blessing God gave to Adam and Eve (to be fruitful and multiply) and is reiterated throughout God’s Story as how we evaluate our leaders (Matt 7:20) and even the result of the Holy Spirit in our lives (Gal 5:22). It’s what happens to the seed when it’s tossed on soft soil. Etc…

God’s system for passing fruit to the next generation, especially spiritual fruit, is the family. Again, this is traced throughout the Story, starting in the garden when He gave that blessing to a family (Adam and Eve), chose to bless the families of the world through a family (Abraham), and reiterated throughout the Passover teachings (Deut. 6:6-8, 20-25) that it is “permanent law that you and your descendants must observe forever” (Ex 12:24) for the purpose of passing faith to children.

I know many would disagree with me, but I strongly believe that the solution for spiritual apathy among youth and children is not to start new church programs or find some curriculum, but to:

1. Ensure that the Lord has captured the hearts of their fathers.
2. Disciple the fathers to produce fruit so they have a faith that’s worth passing to their wife and kids. (Most teens have the same faith as their parents — teens just don’t attempt to hide weak faith and aren’t motivated my social expectations of the church.)
3. Help fathers deepen their belief in their spiritual role in the family (not just learn more about it, but actually deepen their belief).
4. Equip them to pass that faith, especially fathers who never had it passed to them from their fathers.

So rather than treating the symptom of spiritually apathetic teens, treat the root. Yes, devote your time and energy to teens who are spiritual orphans, but realize that creating a spiritual orphanage is not the long-term goal, especially not for teens who have parents who are already believers. By dealing with the youth issue through the fathers and families, you’re not only honoring God’s design for family and passing faith (many churches have the audacity to think they have a better system), but instead of influencing a single generation of students, you’re potentially altering the trajectory of a family tree.

God’s designed for every teenager is to have built-in youth leaders at home in the form of their parents. Yes, sin causes God’s system to break down, but I believe we should do our best to honor it as much as possible while longing for the day when He will restore all brokenness.

To fulfill the request of the church’s leadership, though, maybe see if you can have some fruitful dads lead the class and have them talk about their faith, remembering that the role of a pastor is not to do the work of the ministry for the people, but to equip them to do it so the body becomes mature (Eph 4:11-13). If the fathers need a springboard for that, maybe consider having them start in Genesis and work through God’s Story.

Sounds basic, but scripture in the hands of fruitful parents who are following the leading of the Holy Spirit is one of the most powerful things teenagers can ever experience.

What percentage of your church’s budget goes to training and equipping leaders and Sunday school teachers vs. parents?

How much of the money is designated for creating experiences where children are separated from their parents vs. bringing the family together?

When kids are at home watching 25 hours of TV in a single week and only getting that same amount of Bible teaching from church in an entire year, I wonder if it might be more fruitful to shift the bulk of our time and resources to the home instead of church programs and events.

While we cherish those 25 annual hours at Red Door Church, our pastor added up the hours the team invested into those 25 hours.

If you have four people on staff for kids (2 full time and 2 part time)…

• That’s 120 hours of work each week for around 30 minutes of teaching.
• It’s 6,240 hours of work for 25 hours of teaching each year.
• If those people earn around $20/hour, the church spent $125,000 a year going into those 25 hours, not to mention the costs for supplies, curriculum, production, snacks, crafts, etc.
• Before you realize it, a quarter million dollars were spent for those 25 hours of church programming and teaching.

Of course, you could boost the 25 annual hours to a higher number when you consider the investment into relationship building times and events, but even if you double the number to 50 hours per year, the main point stays the same when you consider the amount of time the parents have (or could have) with their kids, or the fact that scripture establishes the family as God’s plan for passing faith to the next generation.

Joshua Lennon, our pastor at Red Door Church, felt it was a wasteful use of resources: “What would it look like to set the parents up for success instead of the teachers? What if we helped parents use their thousands of hours each year to disciple their kids?”

We’re already attempting to integrate the family into Sunday morning services, but we want to take it further than that.

We’ve actually been talking about this very thing on Sunday mornings for the past few weeks. It’s always been a part of our DNA, but we think it’s important to continually remind parents and the congregation as a whole what we value and how those values are executed in our community.

Here’s the intro video we used before the message for the past two weeks at Red Door Church.

Equipegration is what “equipping” and “integration” looks like for us. Here’s our pastor’s messages on it if you’re interested.

QUESTION: How does your church’s time and resources reflect its value for the family unit? What would it look like for your church to further equip and integrate the family?

Does your ministry do anything to give “spiritual orphans” some “spiritual parents” in the absence of it at home? If so, what does that look like like for you guys? Share your ideas for others in the comments below!

While the business world is actively accepting social media and using it to effectively communicate their messages, the church is often lagging behind in how it uses sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and more. In this book, Terrace helps leaders understand why the church may be resistant to social media and how we can use it in powerful ways.

I have two copies to give away! If you’d like one, watch the video for instructions.

Parents as Spiritual Leaders

As I’ve already discussed, we’re already very intentional about setting up the parents to be the spiritual leaders of their kids, not their pastor, a youth pastor, nor a small group leader. While those people can play an influential role in the spiritual development of a child or teenager, we believe that…

• The family is God’s design for passing faith to the next generation.
• The family is God’s plan for revealing Himself to the world.

Because of that, we want to uphold and honor the parents’ spiritual role in every way possible. So when it came to determining what guiding principles were going to direct a vision for family-based student discipleship at Red Door Church, it had to be built on that foundation.

The problem is, when you start down the road of having the “So what does that look like for student discipleship?” conversations, you actually bump into a lot of limitations with the typical church system. I mean, you can’t program Bible studies for families to do at home and you certainly can’t go to their homes and make sure it happens. But even if you could, is that even the best way for discipleship to happen in the home? And what do you do with all the students who don’t have parents who are even believers in the first place?

Those are all questions we’re still wrestling through, but we’ve come up with some guiding principles that must be true of whatever we do with student discipleship at Red Door Church. (And notice, we’re not using the term “youth group,” which, in our minds, has a different goal in mind.)

We actually kicked off our first student discipleship group a few weeks ago, which is the implementation of these principles. I’ll discuss that more of what that looks like for us in a blog post next week.

Our Principles

We believe every family should have…

1. A Great Big Vision: The family needs a picture of what God wants them to be and do. We want fathers to seek the Lord for the answer to, “What’s the vision for your family?” and, “What’s your discipleship plan for your children?” The default plan for today is for the church to do it.
2. A Strong Marriage: This is so essential for a strong family. When a marriage starts breaking down, so does the rest of the family. It’s not just divorce that violates God’s plan for the family, but it’s also any marriage that does not reflect Christ’s love for His church.
3. Growing Parents: Spiritual growth in the family starts with the parents. We feel that it’s the parents’ responsibility to initiate and set the spiritual tone of the home.
4. Growing Kids: As parents take their faith seriously and reinvest that into their kids, students should grow along with parents who are setting the example and leading the way.
5. Open Air: Family relationships should be such that students and parents can have open and honest communication with each other. A strong, growing family means that teens can look to their parents for guidance, advice, and to discuss the most important things in their lives.
6. Fun: Families are supposed to enjoy each other. An element of planned, intentional fun makes it easier for family members build solid, lasting relationships.
7. A Village: No family is intended to grow in isolation. We all need to be surrounded by a community of others who will support us, encourage us, challenge us, celebrate with us, and grow with us.

At Red Door Church, we want to partner with students and parents to provide the training and relationships necessary to make this a reality. I’ll share more what that looks like both for the parents and the teenagers in an upcoming post.

Wow, it’s been almost five months since I’ve posted here! I miss you guys and all the youth and family ministry conversations we used to have. What happened?

Well, many things, actually.

1. Life caught up with me. Turns out having 3 kids is a lot different than having 2 kids, especially when they’re all 3 years old and younger. Whew!
2. I transitioned out of my full-time job at Epipheo. Their web video series ended that I was overseeing, so I started a new business called Video Creators that’s designed to change lives through YouTube. Thankfully, the Lord is blessing it and I’ve been able to support my family off it full-time now for the past two months, but man, getting a small business off the ground and profitable (no loans!) to a full-time income within only a few months is crazy task.
3. Honestly, I’ve been learning a lot about the Biblical perspective of family, especially from the Old Testament patriarchs, and it’s had a lot of implications for how I lead my own family, which has taken a lot of time and energy, as well. The higher my view of family grows as God’s design for passing faith to the next generation, the deeper my belief grows for how important my role is as a father to my children. And the more implications that has for how I spend my time both with my family and outside my family.
4. The whole family thing has also led me to think about youth ministry from a pretty different perspective. I think youth ministry is still important and necessary, but I’m wondering if the belief system behind the traditional model is actually leading us to some wrong conclusions about how and why we do youth ministry. I’d love to flesh out what I’m thinking for you guys, but I’m still wrestling through what I deeply believe about all of it and feel that sharing poorly formed thoughts may be rather unfruitful.
5. My wife and I have also been leading the new family-based youth ministry at Red Door Church, the new church plant we’re a part of. The summer was full of vision casting, brainstorming, planning, meetings, and more, and then two weeks ago it finally launched! Woohoo! I have a lot to share with you all about that. I just have to find time apart from my business, family, and student discipleship to do it. (Ha!)

What have you guys been up to? What have I missed? Hopefully later this week I can share with you all the seven guiding principles that drive the family-based student discipleship at Red Door Church, but until then I’d love to hear what God’s been doing in your life, heart, and family.

Oh, and if you’re going to the D6 Conference in two weeks, let me know. I’d love to connect with you there and catch up!

An LISM reader commented on that post and asked this:

Tim, have you ever hosted a Family Discipleship Workshop with your church family? I can’t help but think it would be beneficial to not only discuss why family discipleship is important, but to spend a good chunk of time actually making a plan. I think most parents (and ministers) want to disciple their family but struggle with the “how” and “what” to do. Do you have suggestions on how a church might conduct a workshop like this?

I appreciate the heart behind this question. Of course we all want to do whatever is in our power to strengthen families around us.

Reconsider Parent Workshops

However, I wouldn’t reduce something like this to a weekend workshop. I have been to workshops like this and have seen that just giving parents tips, tricks, and ideas often does them a disservice. It’s not equipping them — it’s short-circuiting the process. When a family takes our ideas home and finds that the struggle continues, they become discouraged and revert back to their normal way of life, often being less likely to try it again in the future.

It’s important to understand that the struggle is necessary. Instead of trying to reduce the struggle for families, we should encourage the struggle and encourage them through it.

The Struggle Starts with Us

But what does that look like?

The best thing we can do is to work through that struggle in our own families first. I’m not talking about giving it a week or two to think about it, but actually diving into it for a few years.

• Evaluate how you make decisions and why you make the decisions that you do.
• Take a hard look at what your family’s actions. Are they aligned with what you believe is truly most important?
• Invest into spouse to ensure that they are set up to succeed in your family.
• Formulate and execute a team vision for your family that capitalizes on each family member’s spiritual giftedness.
• Learn what works best for discipling your spouse and children.
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

We don’t have to be perfect at all these things, but we at least get to a place where our family has something of substance to offer. Then we should invite other families to join our family life. We need to model for them why we do what we do and how it works for us without implying, “This is how you can do it, too.” Obviously, every family is different, so let them discover that through the struggle just like we did. They’ll take much more ownership of their family and their vision that way, too.

Helping Other Families in the Struggle

Here’s what a few families have modeled for my wife and I that have really helped us with our struggle of family vision and discipleship.

• Meet with the dad to regularly to hear how the struggle is going. Don’t offer tips and tricks. Just listen to him, encourage him, and ask good questions that help him discover what’s happening in his heart and in his family.
• Invite his family into your family’s rhythm by joining you for dinner every week for an ongoing basis. Treat him and his family like observers, not as pupils who should be taking notes.
• Take his family on your family’s weekend camping trip or invite them to spend the weekend at your house. (When was the last time you had a good ol’ fashioned sleep over anyway?)
• I know a family that invites other families to live with them for 3 months at a time to really model family relationships, parenting disciplines, spiritual development, marriage communication, and more.

The point is to spend time together and let your family rub off onto theirs. This does a far better job at ensuring the parents will succeed in family discipleship than giving them a weekend crash course.

And if you do it with the vision of pouring into families who will then turn and pour into other families, you’ve multiplied your family’s impact and will eventually impact more families than you would through a weekend workshop anyway, both in this generation and in future generations.

QUESTION: We all need to surround ourselves with families who are further ahead than we are. Who can you invite into your family to help you grow?

“Dad, show me in the Bible where it says how far I should go on a date.”

“Dad, my friend had an abortion. What happens to that baby?”

Even though the Bible doesn’t deal with these issues directly, it does delve in the lives of real people who dealt with many of these issues. Noah got drunk, Elijah struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, and David faced issues of adultery and murder.

Issues and Answers, FREE!

In the absence of such a resource, he decided to write one himself. His book, “Issues and Answers: A Handbook Providing Biblical Answers to Questions of Children and Youth,” is now complete and he’s giving it away completely free!

Each chapter in the book follows this format:

• Biblical Synopses
• Modern Reasoning
• Responses
• Resources
• Fact
• Life Lab

At 300 pages long, it’s definitely more in-depth than your average ebook. This could work great as a resource to distribute to the parents in your church or even to use as curriculum for your youth group.

Alphabetical Listing of Issues

1. Abortion
2. Alcohol
3. Authority
4. Bible (The)
5. Birth Control
6. Church (The)
7. Cloning
8. Clothes (Fads)
9. Cults/Occult
10. Dating
11. Death and Dying
12. Death Penalty
13. Depression
14. Divorce
15. Drugs
16. Ecology
17. Evolution
18. Euthanasia
19. Food (Eating Disorders)
20. Gambling
21. God
22. Homosexuality
23. Marriage
24. Modern Day Religions
25. Money (Stewardship)
26. Music
27. Parent-Child Relationships
28. Peer Pressure
29. Politics
30. Pornography
31. Pre-Marital Sex
32. Racism
33. Sabbath/Sunday
34. School
35. Smoking
36. Sports
37. Suicide
38. Swearing
39. Tattoos (Body Piercing)
40. War
41. Women’s Rights

Download, “Issues and Answers,” by Roland Boyce

These lessons have resulted in many changes over the past two years. I’m very excited about the implications they’re having for me, my family, my ministry, and especially my walk with the Lord.

Here’s a few questions I wrestle with that have led to a lot of changes in my own family and ministry over the past two years.

How would you answer these questions?

1. Do you have a stronger vision for your youth ministry than you do for your family?
2. Where does most of your best creative energy go: to the youth ministry or to your family?
3. Do you pour more energy into spiritual conversations with church members or with your family?
4. Does your family feel like ministry is something that unites you together as a team or something that just pulls you away from them?
5. Do your actions reflect that your family is your primary ministry and passion?
6. What’s your discipleship plan for your spouse and children?

These questions point to something far greater than youth ministry. I think you can pick up on what that is.

This isn’t about keeping the two in balance with each other — this is about tipping the scales completely in favor of what’s greater.

The line-up of free sessions you can snag this weekend include:

Videos

• David Platt – The American Dream and the Gospel
• Brian Haynes – What is Family Ministry?
• Richard Ross – Reaching the Heart of the Next Generation
• Garnett Reid – Leaving a Legacy that Matters

Mp3s

• Ed Stetzer – Attitudes and Practices That Lead to Robust Spiritual Formation
• Michelle Anthony – The Transforming Power of Christ for a New Generation
• Rob Reinow – Transforming Youth and Children’s Ministry
• Sean McDowell – Equipping Young People With a Biblical Worldview
• Voddie Baucham – Equipping Parents to Do Their Work
• Beth Guckenberger – Equipping Women to Be Agents of Reconciliation

You can find it all on the D6 Days site from now until this Sunday.

My family ministry processing

I’m excited to attend the D6 Conference in Louisville later this year. As some of you know, I’ve been wrestling through a lot of issues surrounding family ministry for the past two years. While I’ve been relatively silent about those issues here on LISM, I’m hoping to start talking about them soon. I first need to understand what family is within the context of my own family before I feel like I have anything to offer publicly about it. And, not surprisingly, the more I dig into what I believe about family and the implications it has for my own family, the more I feel like I have less to offer. Funny how that works.

In the meantime, check out what D6 is doing this weekend over at D6 Days. Hope it blesses you all!

What response would you expect from a typical youth pastor?

“Why, of course! In fact, we have several programs and small groups that are designed to do just that for you and your kids!”

But stop and think about what just happened in that natural transaction.

There’s several things we could pick apart, but let’s boil it down to this:

If the youth pastor deeply believes that the family is God’s design for passing faith to the next generation, why does the church and its programs become the automatic solution for this problem?

Instead, what would happen if a youth pastor said, “No ma’am, I’m sorry, I cannot replace your husband’s spiritual role in your family and neither can this church, but I will do everything I can to pursue your husband.”

This might be the best youth pastor those kids ever had. In fact, that youth pastor may influence an entire family tree instead of just a mom and two teens.

What we deeply believe about family will influence how we do youth ministry.

Shamus Staubach, the youth pastor at Lakeside Christian Church, shared an idea that I think is brilliant.

He said one of the things they’re trying to do is bring all the parents together each Sunday to discuss what the youth group will be teaching a month from then. The idea is that if the youth ministry can first teach it to the parents and talk practically with them about how they teach it to their kids, then by the time the teens come to youth group they’ve already heard it taught at home for the past month.

There’s a couple things I like about this:

• It gives parents and youth leaders a regularly scheduled time to meet together, link arms, and discuss what’s being taught to the kids, both at home and at church.
• It gives the church the opportunity to train parents to be spiritual leaders, to encourage them, and put them in a “support network” of sorts without making it feel like an AA meeting.
• It puts the parents in the position of being the primary spiritual teacher for their kids because now the youth leaders are supporting and teaching what kids have already heard from their parents. This is the exact opposite of giving parents a take-home sheet of discussion questions that supports what you teach their kids instead.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you could tweak this. The main question I asked Shamus was about who sets the agenda for what’s being taught: the parents or the youth ministry? He said at first they wanted the parents to set the topics, issues, and scripture passages so they could play a more supportive role, but they quickly learned that many of the parents are very out of touch with what was actually happening in their kids’ lives. So now it’s more of a collaborative effort between the youth ministry and parents that tends to favor the opinion of the small group youth leaders.

QUESTION: How is your youth ministry working to ensure that parents are the primary spiritual leaders for their teens?

One of the ways we’re serving is by being a part of a team that’s developing the youth ministry. This won’t be a normal, typical youth ministry, though. As I’ve discussed in the past, we take very seriously God’s plan for the parents to be the spiritual leaders in their house. In fact, we integrate it into everything we do, especially the Sunday morning worship experience. That means whatever our youth ministry looks like, it has to revolve around bringing parents and teens together instead of naturally separating them.

We’re still in the process of brainstorming what that will look like, but I think we’re on the right track.

A few weeks ago our team of youth leaders “to be,” parents, teens, and our pastor got together to start hashing some of this out. We asked the question, “What important aspects should be a part of this youth ministry?” and the results were actually very surprising and unexpected to everyone in the room.

In the video below, I share what we discussed in that meeting and some of the unexpected conclusions that will influence our parent-centered youth ministry.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! Thanks for lending your voice to invest into the future youth ministry at Red Door Church!

This post is a bit overdue, as any of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter know, but I’m excited to share that two weeks ago my wife gave birth to our third child! We had a little girl and named her Halle Journey Schmoyer.

As with our other two children, we gave Halle a name that we hope projects an identity on to her as she grows up.

“Halle” is the first 5 letters of the world Hallelujah, the universal word for worship that we’ve encountered on every international missions trip we’ve been on. My wife and I hope her life reflects a life of worship, even cross-culturally.

And “Journey” reminds us (and later, her) that we are all on a journey to a city, a New Jerusalem, that is coming (Revelation 21:1-2). Each of us plays a small character in a small story inside of God’s bigger story that culminates in this city. We want Halle’s hope to rest in being a faithful character in God’s bigger story as together we journey to that city.

If you’d like to see our family vlog of Halle’s birth, you can watch it here on YouTube (totally safe for work, I promise! haha). We also have the video of our family of five coming together for the first time. Halle’s older brother and sister are enthralled with her! It’s so much fun to watch the kids interact. Too many of those pictures are already on Instagram. :)

For those of you who followed along online, thank you for your prayers and support while my wife went through the labor and delivery! Both her and the baby are home and doing great. Now all we need is sleep.

AGREE OR DISAGREE: You’re passionate about youth ministry, but what you’re truly passionate about is actually something much deeper inside you. Youth ministry is just how you express that passion.

The comments that followed proved to provide a lot of fodder for thought.

My take? Our passion for youth ministry is actually fueled by something else. We say we’re passionate for teenagers, for their families, and for being a spiritual influence in their lives, but there’s actually something deeper in us that drives that passion. Youth ministry is just how we express it. You’re not actually passionate about ministry in and of itself.

Once you identify what that deeper passion is, chances are good that there are several other ways you could express that passion outside of youth ministry and find it to be just as fulfilling.

It sounds a bit blasphemous at first. “What?! Pursue something outside of youth ministry?” *gasp!*

But here’s what I learned once I started expressing my deeper, driving passion in other ways besides youth ministry: it complements my ministry efforts in amazing ways I never anticipated. In fact, I understand ministry and how I express that in my life far greater now than I ever have before. Sometimes it just takes looking at the driving passion through a couple different lenses to really put it’s ministry expression into focus.

Furthermore, it frees me up to be more flexible to other ways God may want to use me. Seeing what the passion truly is removes a lot of the tunnel vision that naturally occurred when I was serving in full-time, vocational ministry.

As a result, ministry is now a much more integrated part of who I am than ever before… because it’s driven by a deeper passion.

QUESTION: What is it that you’re truly passionate about that fuels you in ministry? How else could that passion be expressed outside of youth ministry?

Rather than trying to write about the bags and how families use them during the service, I figured it’d be easier to just show you. Here you go.

If you have other questions about these bags or family ministry in general at Red Door Church, comment below and ask. In the next week or two my pastor and I will shoot a follow-up video that gives a bigger picture look at family ministry here. Your questions will help us make that video as helpful for you all as possible.

And if your church intentionally integrate teens and children into worship services, I’d love to hear what that looks like for you guys. Comment below and share! Thanks!

What’s included in the $97 bundle

The $97 bundle features youth ministry resources from 9 different producers. Here’s a bit of what you get for your $97.

• $100 gift card to Doug Fields’ DownloadYouthMinistry.com
• 8 Bible study videos from YouthMinistry360.com that get students talking (valued at $96)
• 5 of the best skit videos from the church drama team, OneTimeBlind (valued at $75)
• 3 training videos from Mark Moore on, “How To Lead A Missions Trip,” “Four Things You Need to Know About Volunteering,” and “Master Secrets of Youth Ministry.” (valued at $187)
• 6 jr. high sets of curriculum from JuniorHighMinistry.org (valued at $120)
• Pre-made youth and children’s ministry logo templates ready to be customized for your ministry (valued at $245)
• 5 six-minute Bible study videos with leader guides from YouthBytes.org (valued at $100)
• 24 weeks of youth ministry curriculum from 14:6 Ministries (valued at $80)
• A 12-week teaching series titled, “There’s An App for That” (valued at $300)
• 40 HD youth ministry programming countdown videos from David Kuo (valued at $249)

So far that value adds up to over $1,500, but Only144.com always works up a couple last minute deals that they throw in at no extra cost.

Bonuses for the first who take the deal

If you’re one of the first to jump on the deal, there’s a couple added bonus perks.

• The first person who orders will win an Amazon Kindle.
• The first 10 people who order will win Burning Lights CD from Chris Tomlin.
• The first 20 people who order will win 99 Thoughts for Youth Workers, by Josh Griffin.
• The first 100 people who order will win Kung Foo Master Secrets of Youth Ministry Video, by Mark Moore and Bryce Hansen.

If you want to learn more details about each of these resources, you can find it all at Only144.com when the deal goes live at noon eastern time this Friday.

[ Full Disclosure: This blog post is sponsored by Only144.com ]

Situations to Consider

Several times over the past couple months I’ve talked with youth workers who felt like they couldn’t make the decisions they needed to make concerning their ministry situation because of the financial implications it would have for their family. Other youth workers I know are just downright underpaid, but can’t move to a better paying position for legitimate reasons.

My advice to youth workers in both situations is this: start a side business.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea for most people in general because who knows what will happen five years from now. Since side-projects that generate an income can often take several years to build, five years from now you may wish you had started building a supplemental side income earlier.

Being in the position I’m in now, I’ve found that financial freedom outside the church gives me more freedom inside the church. It’s great! Now I get to serve for free at a new church plant because I get paid outside the church. The freedom that brings for me inside the church is amazing! I feel like I can be so much more effective in pretty much every way.

Common Objections

I realize as soon as I say, “Start your own side business,” most people think, “Yeah right, I can’t do that!” To be fair, some people can’t just because they’re personally not wired for it. But others don’t even consider it for the following reasons.

1. “I don’t have time to take on another project.” And that’s probably true. What I do (and many entrepreneurs I know) is just take whatever I do for fun and find a way to monetize it. Both blogging and spending time with my family was something I already did with my limited free time. Now they both provide a passive part-time income for my family. To quote Dan Miller, “Turn your play into your work so you never have to work another day in your life.”

2. “I know nothing about running a business.” Yeah, I didn’t either. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds. With the exception of tax implications (depending on what you do), most of it is common sense. Find a good tax guy, read a few books (I’ll suggest a few in a second), and pursue your idea.

3. “I don’t want to take loans to launch my idea.” Most entrepreneurs I know who make seven figure incomes never took a loan. They started with an idea, took it as far as they could with the limited resources available to them, and slowly built it over time. For example, my first videos were created with nothing but the iSight webcam on my Macbook Pro. The money I made from those first videos I later reinvested into better equipment.

Turning Your Passion into Profit

You’re passionate about youth ministry, but what you’re truly passionate about is actually something much deeper inside you. Youth ministry is just how you express that passion. It’s the symptom of something else.

If you can identify that “something else,” chances are you’d be equally as excited about expressing that passion in other ways, too, ways you could monetize to provide a little income on the side and still be true to your passion. I can tell you personally that expressing that passion in multiple ways has certainly benefited my effectiveness in each of the other ways.

Books To Read

There a couple books that were helpful for me as I turned Life In Student Ministry and YouTube from my play into my work. I highly recommend these first two books whether you’re interested in starting something on the side or not.

No More Dreaded Mondays: Ignite Your Passion–and Other Revolutionary Ways to Discover Your True Calling at Work
This book asks good questions that, if you wrestle through them, will help you discover ideas you’re really passionate about and how to turn those ideas into an income. It’s written by a Christian guy, so he views work from a biblical perspective and talks a bit about what a biblical understanding of work really is and isn’t. This was probably the most helpful book for me out of all the bunch. I highly recommended it.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
This books discusses personal productivity whether you work for yourself, someone else, or at a church. The author tells some of his story of transitioning from jobs that sucked the life out of him to starting his own business. He shares a lot of valuable lessons that he learned along the way. Although his lessons can (and should) be easily implemented into both your youth ministry and business, it’s more about taking a different perspective on how you work and your productivity.

Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business
This book gives you ideas for how to spread the message about your product or service in ways that don’t cost you a lot of money, which is perfect for us as youth workers, right? Marketings may sound technical and complicated to those who aren’t familiar with it, but it’s really just a lot of common sense. A lot of the principles in this book can also carry over to promoting your youth ministry.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
There are a lot of great lessons to learn about starting and running a business here. One of the big classics about being an entrepreneur, including what it means to be an entrepreneur, some of the big myths surrounding it, the kind of people you need to surround yourself with, and what you need to have in place for your efforts to be successful.

“To any church elders out there, would you want your son-in-law to take a job that pays what you pay your youth pastor? Hopefully the answer is yes.”

There’s two problems to this issue:

1. Out of all people, church leaders who make hiring and budgeting decisions should know what the cost-of-living is in that area and compensate their youth workers accordingly. Why would a church even hire someone for an amount they know the youth worker can’t support their family on? Shouldn’t the question be, “How much can we bless someone who’s coming here to bless us and our families?” instead of, “Can we budget for a youth worker and not have it affect the rest of our budget too much?” (I know no church really asks that question out loud, but it feels that way sometimes to some youth workers.)

2. However, there’s an equal amount of responsibility that falls on the youth worker who accepts a full-time job for $30,000/year and then struggles month-to-month because of it. If you’re married and have kids, why would you accept a job that won’t support your family? Even if it’s the perfect church with the perfect job opportunity, what about saving for your kids’ education, your retirement, and regularly paying the babysitter for date nights out with your spouse? It’s not the perfect job if it’s not what’s best for your family.

Before you take a position, there’s always a lot of negotiating room. If the church has decided that they want you, you can usually negotiate your salary package. It’s not about being greedy — it’s about being responsible for your family and your future. Once you accept the position, a lot of that negotiating ability goes away, so take advantage of it while you can.

Even if you can’t negotiate salary because the church’s budget is very firm with legitimately no wiggle room, you can negotiate other things, like time off each week to pick up another job or to start your own business. Maybe negotiate six weeks of vacation instead of two so you can use the time for your family. Or something else. Be creative.

The point is this:

1. Churches, bless your youth workers financially.

2. Youth workers, put your family’s needs first.

Where It All Started

Wow, what a ride the past couple years have been! After 12 years of vocational youth ministry, an unfortunate church situation brought that to a screeching halt. With no job, I quickly turned to Life In Student Ministry into a full-time income for my family while my wife and I served as volunteer youth leaders at a different church in town. Over the next two years, there were plenty of interviews to do for other youth ministry positions around the country and I even had a couple offers, but none that my wife and I ultimately accepted. So I kept searching.

During that time I started to dive into something that had been a hobby of mine for a while: the YouTube community. And before long, YouTube and online video in general became a significant chunk of my income. I began training online video marketers and creators through the videos I created for ReelSEO.com, doing YouTube audits for national TV networks, and cranking out 6 or 7 personal videos every week.

Moving to Cincinnati

One opportunity led to another until almost a year ago one of the owners of Epipheo, a storytelling company that often shares those stories through online animated videos, emailed me and said, “Hey, I ran into a couple times on the Internet today, both for your youth ministry stuff and your online video stuff. I don’t know if you’re looking for a job or not, but if you are, I’d love to talk.” I wasn’t really looking for a job that wasn’t related to youth ministry, but since being self-employed relies heavily on networking, I gave him a call. We ended up talking for two and a half hours, not about online video, but about youth and family ministry.

To make a long story short, I took a full-time job at Epipheo helping them develop an on-going YouTube strategy. In return, they gave me both tremendous flexibility to continue to make my family my primary ministry as well as the opportunity to learn from them what home ministry even looks like.

Introduced to Red Door Church

After relocating to Cincinnati to be closer to Epipheo, Dana and I made it a high priority to quickly settle in a local church community. Thankfully the Lord enabled that to happen through an article my mom read in a magazine called, On Mission. She ripped the article out, mailed it to us, and introduced us to a 2 year old church plant in Cincinnati called, Red Door Church. We loved the stories of how they were integrating family and ministry together. We also thought it was interesting how closely their founding pastor’s story resembled ours: a fired youth pastor with a strong vision for family ministry. So, we decided to check it out.

To shorten the story even further, a couple weeks ago Dana and I agreed to take a more formalized role at Red Door Church to help them develop a ministry strategy for birth through college with a focus on youth ministry. It will be a new and unique challenge for us because this strategy does not have a typical starting point.

Red Door’s Approach to Family Ministry

Red Door’s focus on family ministry means that they don’t really have stage-of-life ministries established. On Sunday mornings there is intentionally no specific programming for ages 4 years old an up. Everyone sits with each other at circle tables where parents are given a bag of resources to teach their kids during the service. The resources go along with the pastor’s message, so as my wife and I listen to his teaching we turn to our children and teach it to them. It’s the only church service I’ve been to where it’s appropriate to talk with your family while the pastor teaches. The learning experience becomes especially fun when there happens to be teenagers, grandparents, or another family sitting at our table and we all teach and learn together.

As Dana and I start to develop an overarching family ministry strategy at Red Door Church, the question our pastor posed to us is this:

“How do we do youth ministry in a way that brings teens and their families together, not separates them?”

He’s not saying that teens can’t have their own time and place, but that the youth ministry overall should facilitate spiritual leadership from the parents, not assume or take that role from them.

While I love using that as our starting place, I’ve never built a youth ministry on that foundation before. Every youth ministry I’ve been a part of separates the teens from the parents and puts discipleship in the lap of a paid youth pastor or volunteer.

Looking Back

It will be a fun journey to explore! I’m thankful to be able to pursue some of these questions at a place like Red Door Church and that I have a job at a place like Epipheo that provides the opportunity for me to do so.

Looking back on the past few years, it seems like God moved me out of one ministry to give me the time to develop the skills I’d need to support my family so we can serve in a new church plant in Cincinnati for free. I had no idea that’s what God was doing at the time, but it makes sense now. And I’m glad He did it.

A few years ago when I started working for myself, I told Dana, “I’d love to be able to support us with my own income and move to a church with a limited budget where I could serve for free.” It looks like God had that in mind for us, too. If I were to craft exactly the church and the ministry position I’d like to fill, what we’re doing at Red Door Church is pretty much it exactly.

Help Us Get Started

I’ll do my best to bring you all along on this journey, probably mostly via video posts since that’s a lot quicker and easier for me than writing a blog post. Hope that’s okay.

In the meantime, I’d love for you guys to help my wife and I get started on the right track: What does a youth ministry look like that’s built on bringing teens and parents together spiritually? Comments below are greatly appreciated! Thanks!

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Becoming a youth volunteer is, without question, one of the most rewarding parts of my life. I love coming to our youth worship service and see students passionately worshiping God, sharing Christ with their friends, and serving in their community. Getting to know them, and becoming a guide to them on their walk, lets me play a small part in Christ’s story for their life. As a Christ Follower, who could ask for more than that the ability to purposefully plant seeds in someone’s life?

Having a youth pastor that equips us effectively as volunteers really allows us to fulfill the potential we have. We are able to have relationships with our students without worrying that we will not have what we need to disciple them as we walk with them through their student life. Over the years (and through a few different ministries), I’ve realized that there are five things that a youth pastor can give to guarantee the success of their adult volunteers:

Prayer

This may seem like the obvious first choice, but prayer over your volunteer team is both essential and critical to your ministry’s success. Youth leaders are on the front lines of the fight for teenager’s souls, and are typically the ones seeing the damage and scars teenagers have first-hand. Knowing that they have someone in a leadership role guiding them, directing them, and praying for them allows the leader to focus more on building the relationships that may ultimately change that student’s life. Let your volunteers know regularly that you are praying for them – sometimes, a simple acknowledgement is enough to get leaders through their roughest patches.

Accountability

Leaders are people, too. We go through struggles, hang-ups, and trials just like any other person. Having another person in which to share those burdens will allow leaders to focus more on their true mission: leading students to Christ. Take the time to meet and listen to your volunteers one-on-one, even if it’s just for coffee or a quick lunch. It’s also a great way to get feedback from your volunteers – some of the best ideas I’ve had as a volunteer came from an idea session with our youth pastor, and I know that if I have a problem I can turn to chase for encouragement and guidance.

Access

The youth ministry may be controlled from a leadership team or committee, but letting volunteers know what’s going on is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. If there’s huge changes coming up, keep the volunteers in the know – if you’re able, even let them provide input. As mentioned before, volunteers are typically the ones that are in the trenches, and can provide valuable insight as to what’s going well (and not going well) in the ministry. It will also give them a sense of ownership – meaning that they may feel the call to step up to take more responsibilities.

A Heads Up

Some of my most turbulent times in youth ministry occurred when the youth pastor didn’t know what was going on. A lot of times, in previous ministries, the youth pastor wouldn’t let us know until immediately before our weekly service that there was a change in plans. This led to a lot of confusion in the leaders and, ultimately, meant we weren’t able to perform as we should have. A quick heads up – via email, Twitter, text, or even Facebook – letting volunteers know about changes ahead of time is always better than being blindsided and confused. As for a long term schedule, having a week-to-week (or at least month-to-month) listing of events allows volunteers to prepare their schedules in advance, meaning you have more attendance and buy in to any events you want to have.

Encouragement

A simple thank you goes a long way. We get regular emails from our youth pastor reminding us of the difference we make in students’ lives. Sometimes we even get stories from the students themselves, letting us know that a student decided to follow Christ, or that they had accepted a call to ministry. It really allows volunteers to put their work into perspective, see tangible results of their hard work, and goes a long way in preventing “volunteer burnout.”

The Bottom Line

If you could boil these five ideals down even further, I would say that the most important things a pastor can give to their volunteers is face time and knowledge. A volunteer who is spirit covered, prepared, and who is encouraged to take ownership in the ministry, is one that can truly be used by God to change student’s lives.

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Mitch Canter is a youth volunteer at Rolling Hills Community Church in Franklin, TN. He writes his thoughts and musings at ThatYouthLeader.com and can be found on twitter @studionashvegas.

The calendar for Advent starts on December 2nd (sorry I’m getting this to you a bit late!) and ends on Christmas Eve!. Since there are four weeks in Advent, Robbie’s Advent devotionals cover four themes for each week:

• Waiting
• Expectancy
• Joy
• Peace


The advent devotions contain a Scripture for the day, a thought, some questions, and then a prayer exercise. It’ll work great as something to go through as a family leading up to Christmas Day.

It’s completely free, so download it here and thank Robbie for sharing this with us!

Download the 2012 Daily Advent Devotional

How we answer this question is critical to knowing why we are teaching specific things and also to becoming more more effective at whatever our answer to that question is.

From my experience, it seems like a lot of teaching in these groups revolve around teaching information about God and His Word, which is great and very necessary. But at some point I think we make the mistake of assuming that because people know something that they must then believe it.

It’s an easy mistake to make because often we equate belief with, “giving mental consent that something is true.” If that is how we define belief, then yes, they may believe it. But what if we define belief a bit differently?

A lot of us ask the question, “Why do teenagers live one way at school and another way at church? Why don’t they live what they believe?” Actually, teenagers live exactly what they believe. It’s just that what they profess to believe doesn’t line up with what they actually believe. What we deeply believe affects everything else about us.

What if teaching revolved not around, “How much of God’s Story do you know?” but also revolved around the question, “How deeply do you believe this story?”

I think this is exactly what the American Church needs. “If I deeply believe that this is true, then what should be different in my life? And if that difference is not there, then do I really believe this?” It’s not simply about asking these questions, although that is a great start, but also teaching in a way that is directed toward increasing our belief, not just increasing what we know.

QUESTION: How can you teach God’s Word in a way that addresses how deeply we believe it more than how much we know about it?

Listen to Josh’s story and share in the comments below what advice you have for him in this situation. I know it’s not unique to Josh, but sometimes moving forward with a solution to this kind of disconnect is easier said that done. Often it’s rooted in values and beliefs that are not easily changed. So how should Josh move forward with this? Your advice could be invaluable for others around the country who are experiencing the same thing. Thank you!

While at D6 I sat down with Peder Eide to talk about how to lead our families in worship. He travels the country as a worship leader who focuses on helping families worship together both in church community and privately in the home. From his experience, he shares with us his perspective of family worship, how to lead it, and ideas for getting started.

Personally, I feel a lot of responsibility in this area, probably to the point of even feeling some pressure to “get it right.” I’ve been writing about that at MinistryFamily.com and have a lot more I want to share about it, so I sat down with Mark Matlock, Executive Director of Youth Specialties, and asked him about his discipleship plan for his family.

Mark’s response is both helpful and liberating. In a nutshell, ministering to my family isn’t as much about what I do with them as much as it’s about who I become in front of them. I have a feeling the same principle applies to our ministry in the church.

Out of those relationships I heard about local youth ministry networks in the area. Some of them are doing some pretty amazing things, but the youth workers I met desire for there to be a local youth worker network that revolves around building genuine friendships, encouragement, and trust.

A few of us met to discuss the idea of starting a youth ministry network that revolves around those values. What would it look like for youth workers to come together to share life together in a way that impacts each of us personally, our students, and the families we serve? If we truly believe that youth ministry happens best in shared-life community and that we can accomplish more for the Kingdom together than we can apart, how would that express itself in a community of local youth workers?

Out of those conversations came the Northern Kentucky Youth Worker Network! While we are fairly young, I have a feeling this group is quickly going to become something very amazing in ways we do not foresee.

On November 1, 2012, we’re meeting for lunch at Panera Bread in Crestview Hill, KY, at 11:30am. We’d love for any youth workers in the Cincinnati area who share our vision to come hang out with us. We’ll talk a little bit about the vision for the network and begin to get to know each other. Personally, I don’t know of a better place to be than with a group of youth workers who share common values and a common vision for teens and families.

If you think you’ll be able to meet with us for lunch, it’d be great if you’d indicate so by commenting below. And if you’re not local to the Cincinnati area and are thus unable to join us, I’d still love to hear your stories and advice for starting a network like this. We’re all new at this. Thank you!

In our conversation, Mike talked about some of the behind-the-scenes in their new approach to discipleship, including:

• How to help church members walk down an intentional discipleship path.
• The significance of getting parents spiritually involved with their kids.
• Redefining the role of pastors and the role of church members in their faith community.
• The surprising affect this has had on their college ministry.
• And much more…

It’s quite an inspiring story that reveals a lot about the assumptions we often make concerning discipleship in the church.

QUESTION: If you could design discipleship in your church to look however you deemed appropriate, what would it look like? What would you change? What would you keep?

Mark paints with a broad brush intentionally. Wide enough that it includes everyone, vague enough that you can reflect if it’s true for you or not.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Mark’s observations in the comments below.

(1) All the vision in the world falls short without a culture of engagement in a community.

(2) Vision is often put in danger by true engagement & mobilizing a community.

(3) People who take responsibility for their community will naturally want to shape the vision, as well.

(4) Which is why so many mature disciples who own their faith leave the organized church.

(5) For many to step away from the traditional church is a step toward ownership, discipleship & Jesus.

(6) This of course isn’t an answer. ppl need community, but the org church is a barrier to discipleship in this way.

(7) When the org church is the perfect place for visionary disciples if it can learn to get out of their way.

(8) this will require community leaders who see themselves as learners/disciples along with the church.

(9) Leadership then arrives from what was previously considered unlikely sources and the kingdom of God benefits.

Does the organized church indeed get in the way of mature disciples who need ownership of their faith and faith community? Should church leaders view themselves primarily as learners/disciples along with the rest of the community? How risky is it for the faith community for the leaders to take a more hands-off approach with its vision?

You can follow Mark on Twitter: @RiddleGroup.

When I started the series I was working as a part-time youth worker in a small church with an even smaller youth ministry budget. I really couldn’t afford to spend a few hundred dollars on curriculum, training, nor tools. It was frustrating, even disheartening, to see so many valuable resources for my ministry locked behind a price tag I couldn’t unlock.

So I started Freebie Friday. I figured I probably wasn’t the only one in that situation and instead of complaining about it, I’d offer a solution. Since I couldn’t afford to buy resources, I had to develop all of them myself. Why not freely with others what I created?

But after a few years of doing so, I started to feel like something just wasn’t right. Sure, it was good for receiving praises of thanks from many people and for growing blog subscribers, but it felt like I was contributing to a sense of entitlement and consumerism among youth workers. It felt like the continual free resources were enabling youth workers to not think beyond the next freebie that came out. Instead of developing a vision for their ministry, they were jumping from one free lesson to the next.

I also felt like the skills I developed by creating youth ministry resources out of necessity were now not as important for others to learn. Why go through the learning process of developing a plan for your lock-in when you can just download one from here?

Obviously, this isn’t true for everyone who’s used one of my 300 weekly resources. Many youth workers only use free resources that help drive forward God’s vision for their ministry. Others use them as a reference point or a visual example for something else they’re working on. Free youth ministry resources can bless a lot of people and ministries.

However, I’m feeling more and more than I should end Freebie Friday. The kicker for me is that most of the resources I have to offer are ones that do not move youth ministry as a whole in a direction I think it should go. It perpetuates a trajectory that is based on ministry beliefs and strategy that I question today.

As much as it is difficult to end a series that I invested into for 5.75 years of consecutive Fridays, I feel like this is the right thing for me to do. This Thursday evening is going to feel very weird indeed when I don’t have a Freebie Friday post to sit down and draft.

The Lord has been doing a lot in my heart, especially the past few months. He has surrounded me with people who challenge me, who push me deeper into His Word, and who are helping me have a bigger-picture biblical understanding of family, ministry, and work. It’s been stretching. It’s prompted my wife and I to make changes in many areas of our lives, some of them easy, some of them not. (More about that coming on our MinistryFamily.com blog. Subscribe there for some personal stuff I’m drafting.)

Whenever I come across free youth ministry resources that really does propel this essential area of ministry forward, I’ll definitely post it here, although I probably won’t wait for a Friday to do so. In the meantime, feel free to browse through 300 free youth ministry resources here. Maybe there’s a few that you missed over the past several years that could bless you and your ministry.

If there are any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the comments. I love our discussions there!

Wow. This week marks 300 consecutive weeks of a free youth ministry resource every Friday! For 5.77 years I have not missed a Friday in trying to resource youth workers to serve teens and their families. Crazy!

Unfortunately, the 300th week also marks the milestone of the final regular Freebie Friday here at Life In Student Ministry. I’ll still post free youth ministry resources that I think are worth passing along, but this will be the last regularly scheduled post in the Freebie Friday series.

Why am I concluding such a long-running blog series? I’ll share more about this decision next week.

To wrap us up, my friends at Youth Ministry 360 have contributed several resources all bundled into one download. Here’s their message for you:

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YM360: We’re pumped to be part of helping Tim celebrate the 300th Freebie Friday! As people who work with youth ourselves, we’ve benefited from Freebie Friday’s over the years. It’s a real privilege to be a part of the final Friday giveaway. A big thanks, Tim, for the invite.

We’ve attached a few different free resources. Check out the summaries below.

If you have any problems with the files or any questions, please give ym360 a call (888.969.6360), or live chat us at https://youthministry360.com.

• Guide To Writing Bible Studies: Occasionally, we’ll be asked to teach youth ministry classes on the ins and outs of writing Bible study curriculum/lesson plans. As a result, we decided to take the content from these classes and turn it into a short e-booklet for youth workers.
• 5 Devotions For Students On Holiness: These devotions also teach students the undeniable call of Scripture to live holy lives, empowered by the Spirit and making a difference in the world for Christ’s sake.
• Reversing Course: A lesson from Jonah’s life designed to help students identify what running away from God looks like, and how to move toward living out God’s will in their lives.
• The New You: This lesson out of Ephesians is designed to help your students see that they are a “new person” in Christ, and commit to embracing God’s call to righteousness and holiness.

Download the YM360 Resource Pack!

This conference will be particularly interesting for me because I’ve been processing family ministry from a youth ministry perspective for several years now, but it’s only been in the past year or so that I’ve been approaching family ministry from a family perspective. Hearing church leaders talk about family ministry at D6 this week will undoubtedly be a collision of those two perspectives for me.

One of the guys I’ve been bouncing some of my family ministry thoughts off of is Heath Hostetler, a guy in the Epipheo network where I now work full-time. Our stories are very similar except he’s about 10 years head of me, making the lessons he’s learned especially valuable to me.

I sat down with Heath and talked with him about several things:

• Lessons we’ve learned from stepping out of church ministry.
• The “American Church Story” and how it influences how we do ministry.
• A clearer understanding of what the “church” is and isn’t.
• How scripture views “calling.”
• What all this means for how we do youth ministry.
• How youth pastors should begin to approach family ministry.

I’d love to hear your feedback about our discussion in the comments below. This is still very much a learning experience for me, so hearing your thoughts and reactions is helpful for me and others who read them. Thank you!

You can watch to the interview above or download it in iTunes.

1. Play the audio of this interview     

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2. Play the audio of this interview     

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My friends over at Youth Ministry 360 think it’s really important for teenagers to spend personal time in the Word on a daily basis. So they teamed up with On Track Devotions to create a digital resource that helps students do just that!

The daily youth devotions for the month of October focus on loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. Right now you can download it for free after creating a login for their site.

A couple thoughts I have about these devotions, and they both rest on your involvement in this process as a youth worker, or, even better, getting their parents involved.

• This devotional easily lends itself to a private Facebook group that you and a few students join to discuss each day’s devotional together. Not only does that help provide some accountability, but these devotionals naturally lend themselves to discussion that could take place online.
• These devos are typical in that they help students make a commitment to something that, in my opinion, mostly resides in the realm of, “I just need to try harder to actually have meaningful time with the Lord.” This ultimately just leads to greater frustration. However, if coupled with a youth leader or parent who can help them see this as something more than just a rote exercise, developing the spiritual discipline of time with the Lord becomes extremely valuable.
• The devotionals encourage students to study the passages using the observation, interpretation, application bible study method, which is great! This is the method I always use myself. However, to be effective, each of these steps takes some skill that’s usually developed through training. Otherwise it becomes more of a “fill in the blank” thing than a Bible study method. Work through each of these steps with your students. Teach them how to observe things beyond the surface level, how that leads to accurate interpretations, and thus application from the text that’s lead by the Holy Spirit.

An excellent book to learn how to student God’s Word through observation, interpretation, and observation is Howard Hendrick’s, “Living By The Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible.” (Amazon affiliate) I turned this book into an 8 week “How To Study The Bible” series for my high school students a few years ago and they loved it! There’s something totally invaluable about teaching teenagers how to study God’s Word for themselves. The confidence alone does wonders for their Bible study habits!

All that said, here ya go. Getcha self some student devos to use with your group for October, completely free.

Go download, October’s On Track Devotions for Students from YM360

We’re asking superficial questions

A lot of the family ministry conversation seems to revolve around, “How do we minister to the family as a unit?” and, “How do we help parents take spiritual responsibility for their families?” While these are noble questions, I feel like we’re only getting as far in the conversation as the depth of the questions we ask.

There are more fundamental beliefs that are actually driving these questions and the direction we feel we need to go with family ministry. The questions we ask are actually rooted in our belief system about the church, the role of the family, and the responsibilities we hold as pastors.

If we ask better questions, I believe a lot of the “how to” questions will become self-evident.

Asking deeper questions next week

As I head into the D6 Conference next Tuesday (September 26-28), I’m hoping to hear speakers who are addressing the deeper issues of what we believe about the church and ourselves as leaders. I expect those types of conversations will be extremely helpful for me. But even if we don’t get there, the normal family ministry conversations will still be helpful in that I’ll hopefully understand a bit more clearly where the church is coming from and the beliefs we hold that lead us to ask the questions we’re asking.

Participate here…

I’d love for you to join me in this thought-journey next week! While I’m at the conference I’ll be tweeting @timschmoyer a lot and posting thoughts to the Life In Student Ministry Facebook Page. It’d be great if you’d process with me some of the things I hear and see, especially during the sessions that are streamed live online. I’ll be pretty active in the live chat adjoining each of those live video sessions, which you can watch for free here. Check out the schedule for when those sessions will be live streamed from the conference.

I’m also a part of a larger social media team for the conference, so you’d really like to remotely immerse yourself in the D6 experience, follow these people, as well:

• Brandon Baker: Blog | Twitter
• Amy Dolan: Blog | Twitter
• Eric Thomsen: Blog | Twitter
• Jonathan Cliff: Blog | Twitter
• Dale Hudson: Blog | Twitter
• Chris Spradlin: Blog | Twitter
• J.L. Martin: Blog | Twitter
• Matthew Guevara: Blog | Twitter

I’m looking forward to immersing myself with you in the discussion next week. I trust the Lord will be glorified as it helps our ministries be more honoring to Him and to the people He places before us.

Back in 1999 I wrote this talk based on James 3. The passage is so visual when talking about the tongue and the words we speak in regards to a ship’s rudder, a small spark, and a horse bit, that it pretty much demands the use of a visual presentation and tangible objects.

Below are my Word Document notes and PowerPoint presentation, but I also had with me in person the rudder from my windsurfing rig and a box of matches to add to the visual nature of this passage. (I couldn’t get a horse bit from anyone.)

I wrote it with some personal examples, which I’ve removed for the sake of sharing this publicly, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add in stories of your own. I’m sure we all have examples to share when it comes to how other people’s words have affected us, both positively and negatively.

I hope it blesses you and those in your ministry!

Download, “Tongue Tied,” youth group lesson

Below is a youth group lesson plan you can download and use sometime when teaching about discipleship and giving up everything to follow Jesus. The purpose the study is to help young Christians realize that following Jesus doesn’t require a few changes — it causes drastic changes.

It looks at a few examples of that in scripture, like the Rich Young Ruler, the Pharisees, and the disciples. It discusses what they left and didn’t leave behind and the implications that had for their relationship with Christ.

Hope it blesses you, your ministry, and the teens and families you serve!

Download, “Give It Up,” youth group lesson outline

My friend, Terrace Crawford, is starting the next round of his youth ministry coaching network and the deadline to sign-up is today! If you’d like to receive 6 months of one-on-one youth ministry coaching, training from youth ministry thought leaders, and a lot of other perks, definitely check out his youth ministry coaching network today.

Terrace also contributes a sheet today for Freebie Friday that helps you assess yourself as a youth worker and identity some areas of weakness in your ministry. It gives some questions you should think through concerning your ministry that will lead you to some action steps you can take today. He says this about the youth ministry assessment questions:

“I have a lot of conversations with other ministry leaders and spend time coaching other leaders, particularly youth workers, who consistently overlook common problems areas because they aren’t aware of some of the blind spots.

I’ve developed a helpful list of 10 questions that you can use to help you assess your ministry leadership a little better.”

You can download his assessment sheet below. And if you’re like to be a part of his youth ministry coaching network for the next 6 months, check some more details about it on his blog.

Download, “10 Assessment Questions,” for youth workers

In 2007 I heard Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv share a message titled, “Blessed to Share His Story.” In it he outlines 4 unlikely evangelists, people who you would never expect could share Christ with someone, yet they did. If any of your students feel insecure about sharing their faith, there’s a lot they can learn from these four unlikely evangelists in scripture:

1. The Samaritan woman
2. A guy born blind
3. Dorcas
4. Peter

I re-worked his message for my youth group and am happy to share my youth group lessons outline and the PowerPoint presentation with all of you.

The lesson contains several personal stories, which you’ll obviously want to substitute for stories of your own.

The download includes the Word doc of my notes, the PowerPoint presentation, and the Photoshop file of the image I used for the PowerPoint presentation in case you want to modify it at all.

Download, “Blessed to Share Christ,” youth group edition

I’m excited to invite others to join us in partnering with this family in a very simple and basic way that most of us can easily afford.

I’d love it if you took 3 minutes to hear this pastor’s story, a bit of what we’ll be doing to equip this family with food, income, and reducing soil erosion above his church, all with 500 fruit trees.

If $25 sounds like a reasonable gift to support this pastor, please do so here. And thank you so very much!

Last week Josh Robinson, the youth pastor at “Church at The Springs” in Ocala, Florida, posted the youth leader training handbook they use at their church. It’s based on the free volunteer handbook at StuffYouCanUse.org and contains a lot of good stuff you could take and use in training your own youth leaders.

The 15-page volunteer handbook starts with a, “Who We Are,” section and then covers the follow:

The Basics

• Partnering with Parents
• Vision & Strategy
• Structure
• Ways to Serve

Small Group Leaders

• What is a small group leader?
• The 7 Essentials of a small group leader
• Creative Ways to Connect with Families

A Few More Things

• Sharing the Gospel
• Baptism
• Stay in Bounds
• Code of Conduct
• One Year Commitment

You can download the youth leader training manual below in PDF format and use it as a template for your own youth leader training manual.

Download the youth leader training handbook

It seems like a lot of churches approach family ministry as tweaks or a new spin on their existing programs, but it’s obvious that what a church truly believe about family influences much more than programs. It’s apparent in how they recruit volunteer help, what they expects from members, and even how they conduct worship services.

A big question I’ve been thinking about lately is this:

What is the role of the family in the local church? And is that different from the role we typically have them fill?

When I asked this on Facebook yesterday, I surprisingly got almost no responses.

The only person who responded actually is a friend, Matt Reeve. He pointed out that churches are basically taking one of three approaches to family ministry:

1. The Family-Integrated Ministry model is characterized by its removal of age segmented activities with all families, infants to parents, worshipping together.

2. The Family-Based Ministry model maintains the age segmented programs and activities of most churches, yet intentionally provides curriculum, activities, and events designed to draw the generations together.

3. The Family-Equipping Ministry model may retain youth ministry and the Sunday School hour, but every activity and function of the church is focused on championing the parents as the primary disciple-makers in the children’s lives, while at the same time the parents recognize and embrace the church as an active partner in the process.

What’s interesting to me is that each one of these models actually reveal something about what that model believes about the role of the family in the local church.

As youth workers, I feel like we need to back off of all the “how to” family ministry integration we’re pursuing and answer a more fundamental question, “What is the role of the family in the local church?” After we have a clearer understanding of what it is we believe about family and the role a family should play in the church, only then can decide the practical implications of how to appropriately integrate the family unit into the church’s ministry.

QUESTION: What do you think each family ministry model says about the role of the family in the local church?

I came across this small group lesson plan on my computer the other day. The file date says it’s from 2004! I don’t remember if I wrote it or someone else did, but it looks like it’s geared toward small group of teenager girls.

The lesson discusses our self-image, how we view ourselves, and what we think about ourselves in contrast to how God sees us. Obviously guys deal with self-image, too, but the lesson seems to be more fitting for girls.

If you have a small group of girls and want some ideas of how to start talking about self-image and self-esteem, this might point you in the right direction.

Download, Self-Image Small Group Lesson

Pixar: 22 Storytelling Tips

Emma Coats was a Storyboard Artist at Pixar Animation Studios and now directs films in Hollywood. From time to time she tweets rules and observations about storytelling. Here are 22 of her top tweets about telling stories.

You can take and immediately apply most of these tips to your next talk at youth group. If you do, I’d love to hear how you did it in the comments!

Perhaps #14 on the list is my favorite because it means so much for why we tell God’s story the way we do:

“Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.”

Tip #4 is equally as relevant to telling God’s Story because her story outline is the exact story we see laid out in scripture.

“Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.”

Definitely go read all 22 of her storytelling tweets and start applying those principles to how you tell God’s Story to teenagers.

Understanding the story aspects of God’s Story

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, some of my co-workers at Epipheo are among the world’s most talented storytellers. I love learning from these guys, especially how it applies to telling God’s Story because God’s Story really is the most life-changing and captivating story ever! The guys I work with really have a of fascinating insights into how we tell and live out that story.

A few weeks ago one of my co-workers actually taught about that very thing at a local church here in Cincinnati. His message is titled, “The Story of God,” and it contains several epiphanies about the power of God’s Story and the implications it has for how we live our lives. The next time you a half hour, definitely listen to it. You’ll understand God’s Story much differently than you probably do now. And it may just change your life… and then your ministry.

Listen to the mp3 of,

While at a first glance we may look like an animation studio that makes cool videos, at heart we are actually a storytelling company. Every day we help our clients tell their stories in engaging ways.

As I work with our world-class storytellers to tell the stories I’m overseeing for our upcoming YouTube web series, I’m continually having more and more epiphanies about how powerful story really is. And, perhaps more importantly, I’m learning how telling God’s story well has eternal implications.

It used to be that I was paid to tell God’s story to my youth group, but now I see how I struggled to really tell His story, the most life-changing story that exists. It’s humbling how my poor storytelling perspective of God’s narrative impacted the way I taught God’s Word and the eternal implications that may have had. (I’m so thankful for a God who always works in spite of us, never because of us!)

There’s a lot about storytelling I plan to discuss here on LISM in the near future because I’m learning how essential storytelling really is for ministry, but this business article on, “Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon,” is a great place to start. Definitely read it from a ministry perspective.

Here are a couple take-aways that stand out to me from that article in regards to how we tell God’s story.

…humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data dumps,” dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with “Once upon a time…”

[Research] repeatedly shows that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.

The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them.

When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.

The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

Perhaps there’s a reason why the majority of scripture is narrative. And maybe it’s not by coincidence that Jesus taught with so many stories. Maybe we should, too.

QUESTION: What would happen if your teaching time at youth group turned into a story time instead?

Either way, the power of story is undeniable. The days of teaching from a fact perspective where we pit God’s truth against someone else’s truth is losing its effectiveness, if it was really ever effective at all.

In this video, “Is the Internet changing how we talk about faith?” two YouTubers discuss this question in about three and a half minutes.

QUESTION: How do you use the power of story when teaching?

Instead of haphazardly moving from event to event, lesson to lesson, and meeting to meeting with little correlation or direction between them all, these youth ministries now have a clearer focus on what God’s specific vision is for them and how to implement it in a way that is sustainable long-term.

So far this ebook has only been available as a PDF from The Life In Student Ministry Store, but it’s now approved for publication in the iBookstore and for Amazon Kindle!

If launching your youth ministry in the fall with a clear focus on what God wants to do through it and where He wants to take it is something you’d like to develop, this will give you very practical steps to do that either from scratch or to fine-tune what is already in place.

“Tim Schmoyer’s little ebook 30 Steps to a Focused Youth Ministry is a rare treasure, because it over-delivers on its promise. Tim nails one of the embedded problems facing ministry people who are searching for vision and direction—we all too often “try to cook someone else’s recipe using completely different ingredients.” This step-by-step plan for finding, implementing, and evaluating your own God-given ministry vision will not only change your ministry’s trajectory, it has the horsepower to change your life.”
— Rick Lawrence, Executive Editor, GROUP Magazine

Check out a more detailed description of the ebook and a video about it on the LISM store page for, “Focused Youth Ministry.” You can pick up the PDF version there or get it for your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone at the places below.

Now that we’re in August, most youth ministries are winding down from the summer and looking forward to the new school year launching. It felt like it was a long way off just a few weeks ago, but now the school year doesn’t seem that far away considering all the prep that needs to be done before then.

Hopefully part of your prep includes youth leader training for the new school year. It’s always a good idea to kick off the year with leaders who have the right frame of mind, a correct view of youth ministry, and are ready to minister to students and teenagers.

This free lesson from LeaderTreks’s Square One series, The Purpose of Youth Ministry, will help your adults have a correct view of youth ministry. Many adult volunteers think youth ministry is the ministry of the church to students when in reality youth ministry is the ministry of students to their world.

To snag this download you’ll have to part with some personal information and sign up for their email list, but if you’re not already familiar with LeaderTreks, being on their mailing list is something you should probably do anyway. (They’re not giving me any perks to say that, either.) They do amazing things to help you turn the teenagers in your youth group into leaders.

Download, The Purpose of Youth Ministry, leader training

But that felt very wrong because I regularly hear people in the youth ministry world saying, “Don’t give up! It’s worth it! Your kids need you! Set a faithful example for them to follow!” I felt a strong sense of guilt for coming to a place where I was okay with not being paid to do youth ministry. I felt like I must somehow turn my back on some sense of “calling” and pursue something less noble, less honorable, and less fulfilling in order to provide an income for my family.

But I’ve learned over the past two years that that simply isn’t true. I’ve learned that…

• Serving as a youth group volunteer provides tremendous ministry opportunities that I never experienced as a paid guy.
• There are plenty of kids outside the church who need to be reached. Ministry to them is sometimes easier when they know it’s not your job.
• My spiritual gift of being a pastor/shepherd feels like it is used to a much fuller degree both as a volunteer and in personal ministry opportunities.
• Ironically, there is sometimes much more flexibility to serve teens and to connect with their families.

It’s important to remember that just because you’re not getting paid to do youth ministry doesn’t mean you’re any less of a youth worker because of it. It doesn’t mean you’ve quit youth ministry. It doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned something you feel the Lord has instructed you to do.

What if quitting meant you could serve teenagers and their families in ways you never could before? What if it would somehow make you more effective as a youth leader? What if it meant you’d reach kids who otherwise would never be reached? What if it provided new ministry opportunities that you never would’ve seen nor had time for in a paid position? What if it meant you could bless others in new ways? What if it meant setting an example to those around you of what it means to follow Christ even if it leads to new things?

Let me be clear that I am not saying you should quit your youth ministry job nor am I even recommending it. We definitely need solid people serving in those capacities. I’m talking to those of you who may be feeling that the Lord is leading you to step down, not because your ministry is unusually difficult or because you’re tired, but because He is stirring something in your heart. Yet you persist because you think it means abandoning youth ministry or pursuing something less noble. Remember, being a youth pastor is not the ultimate calling. Being exactly where God wants you is the ultimate calling.

It’s okay to quit. Maybe it just means the Lord wants to take your paid ministry experience and use it in other ways to reach His teenagers and families.

One of the things I loved about the D6 Conference last year was all the great training and encouragement that comes out of it for those who are exploring a more family-based approach to ministry. Unlike some conferences that sometimes feel like experts telling everyone how to do it, D6 feels more like a group of people who are still experimenting and trying new things to reach the family unit. Everyone has a lot of stories and hard lessons to share that hopefully benefit others so we can all link arms and figure this out together.

Thankfully, the D6 Conference is sharing a lot of those stories and training for free online. If your ministry is pursuing a family-based approach to ministry, D6 just posted three more videos from Alex McFarland, Fred Stoeker, and Doug Fields.

They also have 5 mp3 trainings you can download for free, as well. Just click on, “LAB MP3s” at the top of the page linked below. Those MP3 trainings are:

• Healthy Marriages and Strong Families: The Church’s Ministry
• The HERO Student Pastor: Winning in the Eyes of Middle School and High School Parents
• Aligning Ministries to Multiply Impact: Connecting Church + Home for Next Generation Teams
• Vision and Intentionality: Next Steps for Senior Ministry Leaders
• Magnetic Family Ministry: How to Draw Families to Your Church

To get all this free training in video and MP3, just go to the page linked below. There’s no registration, no parting with valuable contact info, no sales pitches — just a page with 3 videos listed and another page with 5 MP3s listed.

Go and get you some!

Watch the 3 family ministry training videos and listen to the 5 training MP3s!

Discipleship. Many of us would say it’s the goal of our youth ministry. We invest countless hours into developing it in the lives of our students and their families. It’s what some of us are hired to do: disciple kids.

But if we’re honest, there’s an elusive part about discipleship that sometimes leaves us wondering, “Is this really sinking in? Is there something missing here?”

One of the things I love about Greg Stier is his ability to identify some of those missing puzzle pieces and help youth workers fill the gaps in their approach to discipleship. And thankfully, he trains us however he can, including books, conference workshops, and even free webinars.

Their next free webinar is coming up on Tuesday, August 7th. The webinar will revolve around the missing link a lot of youth ministries have in their discipleship process.

Their description of the free webinar:

This short, interactive webinar with Greg Stier will explore the missing accelerant in the discipleship process and how the faith of your teens will grow when they are challenged in this one area. What is it? It might not be what you think…

If you attended Dare 2 Share’s Evangephobia webinar last year, then you’re already pretty familiar with the format and layout. It’s a free online youth ministry training session that features a live video feed of him teaching. There’s an adjoining live chat room, interactive polls, twitter feed, and more.

Plus, everyone who attends gets a free digital copy of Greg’s new book, Firing Jesus.

There are two times you can attend the live “Missing Link” webinar on Tuesday, August 7. The first session is around lunch time at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific. The second is at 8:30pm Eastern/5:30pm Pacific.

Find out more about the webinar and register at the link below. Fill in that missing link in discipling the teens in your youth group!

Visit the “Missing Link” webinar from Dare 2 Share

This is on the front page of Amazon.com right now. Does anyone else feel this way about youth ministry?

I feel like I’ve been wrestling with “figuring out a better way” for a few years now. As much life-change and transformation we see taking place as a result of youth ministries around the country, is this really as good as it gets? Is it possible to serve the Lord, His bride, teenagers, and families in a way that might yield even more fruit? Or even if it’s not about the quantity of fruit, could “a better way” yield higher quality fruit?

We hear stats all the time about teenagers leaving the church after high school, giving up on their faith, and living totally different lives at youth group than they do at school. No matter how much we teach about pre-marital sex, alcohol, and integrity, how much of that really seems to take root on a level deeper than behavior modification?

Or, on a more selfish level for youth workers, not a week goes by where I don’t hear from a youth worker who’s struggling with church politics, difficult parents, or a senior pastor. Many of these youth workers are on the brink of either being fired or quitting. But they don’t quit because quitting feels so wrong, like leaving vocational ministry is akin to disowning our mother. So we stay and accept the financial, emotional, and sometimes spiritual drain as part of the job. To compound the guilty feeling for stepping down, we go to youth ministry conferences where we are encouraged from every angle, “Don’t throw in the towel! It’s worth it!” Is it? Could it be that the structure in which we serve is fundamentally flawed? Or what if we could step “down” to a volunteer role and instantly be ten times more effective in ministry to teens and their families? (Would you do it? Personally, I’m finding that’s there’s plenty of student ministry to be done everywhere. You don’t have to be employed by a church to be in youth ministry.)

To me, the solutions I see being proposed to all these issues and more usually feel like band-aid fixes. Sure, getting parents involved in the youth ministry is a good thing, and having more regular communication with your senior pastor is always beneficial, but are those solutions to the bigger issues? Are they addressing a root problem or the symptoms of something else?

Hear my heart in this: I’m very passionate for serving the Lord, His bride, teenagers, and their families. Just like you, I want to see a transformation take place in youth ministry that allows us all to honor the Lord more faithfully and introduce families to Christ in a way that’s conducive for faith to revolutionize hearts and communities long-term.

I don’t think I have all the answers, but after a few years of thinking, praying, and ongoing conversations with youth workers and other leaders, I feel like there are definitely answers out there for the root problems. As I learn to articulate it more clearly, hopefully we can work through this together and, like Amazon, pioneer youth ministry in a way that reaches beyond “normal” to “figure out a better way.”

The collaboration video is an effort to promote Rainn Wilson’s new YouTube channel and website, Soul Pancake, that launches on August 23, 2012. He says the site will be devoted to “exploring what it means to be human.” He says they’ll be discussing philosophy, art, science, culture, and spirituality, including issues like the meaning of life, our origin, and more.

It always interests me whenever celebrities like this start talking directly about spirituality. And due to his popularity among teenagers and young adults, dropping in from time to time on what he’s teaching might be a good idea.

In this video he answers a question about why a 13-to-25-year-old’s feelings and emotions are often over-exaggerated from the reality of their situation. Why do young people freak out over things that are seemingly not that big of a deal? What causes them to make a situation that normally would be something an adult was just pass over to something that becomes filled with drama?

While Rainn’s personality comes out in the video, they actually discuss this issue on an intelligent level. Here are some of the resources they refer to in the description text of the video:

• Teenage Brains [National Geographic]
• The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet [NPR]
• Brilliant, Brazen, Teenage Brains [Psychology Today]
• The Teenage Brain [Boston Children’s Hospital]

Watch the video below or here on YouTube, “Teen Brain.”

A month or two ago my father-in-law connected me with a guy named David Dorn, a guy who is funded by a denomination to produce Bible studies for teenagers on YouTube. It’s a relatively new YouTube channel called, “Preposterous,” and is based on the idea that “what Jesus calls us to do is preposterous, but it’s in the preposterous where we find life.”

I met David at a YouTube conference a few weeks ago and talked with him about his YouTube Bible study project for teenagers. Watch our quick discussion below and a preview of what the Bible study is like.

You can find each of the video episodes posted on the Preposterous website along with small group discussion questions for each video as he walks through the book of Matthew.

David is in the beginning stages of this project, so if you have any feedback as you watch the videos, use the discussion questions, and check out the series overall, please let him know. He welcomes as much feedback as you can give him. Connect with him on Facebook or Twitter.

Visit PreposterousProject.com for youth group video curriculum

Four of those free downloads go to the people below for submitting a picture and brief description of their youth group’s favorite game on the LISM Facebook Page.

I still have 1 more free download code to give away! Sometime this week I will give it away via the LISM Facebook Page!

Here are your top four favorite youth group games! Has your group played any of these? What games does your youth group enjoy playing the most? Comment below and let us all know!

1. Cell phone pic scategory!

Submitted by Julio Nieves – Leaders pose and create pics, display them on a slide show, and groups have to replicate it. Extra points for creativity. Text photos in to leader so you can create a sideshow of what they sent in. Show after lesson for laughs!

2. Q-Tip wars

Submitted by Nancy Hill Glodich – Each side has straws and Q-Tip and they try to get all the Q-Tips to one side. After a certain amount of time, one side wins! (So far, no one has shot an eye out!)

3. Fat Santa

Submitted by Jimmy Hudson – Divide into teams and pass out balloons. Buy the largest sweat suits you can find at WalMart and some small sized balloons. Set an amount of time and the teens blow up the balloons and stuff the santa. Best looking Santa at the end wins.

4. Shuffle Your Buns

Submitted by Steve Cullum – Everyone has a chair facing inside, forming a circle. To start, one student stands in the middle and tries to sit down in an open seat while the group “shuffles” to their left. If the person in the middle sits down, the person to their right is now in the middle. If a larger group, you can add multiple students in the middle for more chaos.

One of the things I love about doing these weekly Youth Questions videos on YouTube is that I hear some of the “behind the scenes” things that are going in youth groups from teenagers. The question we answered last week is one such question.

“I stopped going to youth group because I don’t feel like the other kids there accept me. Is that okay?”

Several youth workers and former youth group members answered this question for the teen in the video above. If you have any advice for this teen and other teens who watch the video in the future and are in the same situation, go to the video on YouTube and comment on it there. Leave your advice for these teens as a youth worker.

Here’s another question from a teenager that we’ll answer in an upcoming Youth Questions video:

We had a nice youth group around 15 people. Now 7 people have graduated and our group doesn’t have the same energy and excitement that it once had. What can our group do to make youth group exciting again?

If you’d like to be a part of that video, record your answer to a video and send it to me here sometime this week or next week. And thanks so much for helping us impact teenagers around the world through YouTube!

Several years ago I was in the middle of vision casting for our youth group because, honestly, it didn’t really have one. We were pretty much just doing youth-groupy-type stuff with no real intentional direction.

When I was getting ready to kick off the whole vision casting discussions with the youth group, I opened up the evening with the lesson that’s available for download below. I guess it’s not really a lesson per se. It’s more of a discussion starter to get kids thinking and interacting with the idea of a vision for the church and, more specifically, their youth group.

If you use this, I’d really love to hear in the comments how it works with your group!

And, in case you’re interested in taking this vision casting thing a step further with your group, my ebook, “Focused Youth Ministry,” outlines a 30-step process to go through with your leadership teams and teenagers. It will not only take you through a process that will help you discover what God’s vision is for your ministry, but also help you form a plan to implement it and make it sustainable long-term. It’s available for only $1.99.

Download, “I dream of a church…”

A youth leader from Sydney, Australia, recently developed an iPhone App called, “Group Games.” It is a database of over 100 youth group games that can be easily searched on an iPhone through various categories or by simply selecting a few options about how many kids you have, how long you want the game to take, how much prep it needs, and more.

I got a copy to check out and, while many of the games are not new to me, it is very handy app to have readily available for those moments when you’re killing time in the parking lot with kids or you need a game idea quick because the game you originally planned just flopped flat on it’s face.

The screenshots of the app below give you a feel for how it works and what it’s like, or see them in high res on the “Group Games” iTunes page.

The app is only $0.99, but if you want it free, I actually have 5 copies to give away! Here’s how to enter to win one of them:

1. Upload a picture to the Life In Student Ministry Facebook Page of your youth group playing one of your favorite games.
2. Explain how to play the game in the description text of the photo.
3. Check out some of the other people’s photos and games and “like” the ones you think are best.

Next Friday, July 13, 2012, I’ll pick my favorite 5 youth group games (based on originality, creativity, and your votes with “likes”) and highlight them in a future post here on Life In Student Ministry. Those 5 people will also get a code for a free download of Group Games. Just make sure you can accept Facebook messages from me!

Check out, “Group Games,” on iTunes

Three youth workers collaborated together to create this 4-week youth group lesson series for jr. high students titled, “Once Upon A Time.” It’s a teaching series based 4 key passages in Genesis: Creation, The Fall, The Flood, and The Call of Abraham.

The series covers a lot of great applications points for jr. high students, but overall it asks how the story of our lives integrates with the story God’s telling through these four major stories.

The series kit is 36 pages long and includes:

• Suggested teaching manuscripts
• Small Group Questions
• Drama Scripts

Thanks to the creators of this youth group lesson series for contributing it to Freebie Friday to bless you and your ministry!

• Joshua Johnson
• Jon Annin
• Tom DeGroot

If you have a downloadable youth ministry resource you’ve created, consider blessing a few thousand other youth workers and youth groups by sending it to me for a future Freebie Friday! Thanks!

Download the, “Once Upon A Time,” series

Dana and I are super excited to share with you that, Lord willing, our third child will be joining us this February!

If you follow me on Facebook or YouTube, you may have seen that we had a miscarriage a few months ago, so we were a little hesitant to quickly get our hopes up and start sharing the news of this baby with everyone, but an ultrasound revealed that everything is looking great, the baby seems fine, and that this will progress to a full pregnancy! Woo hoo!

Still, we would appreciate your prayers through Dana’s pregnancy. Once you have a miscarriage, there’s always that fear that something will go wrong and that you’ll lose the child. It’s certainly happened for friends of ours is pretty tragic ways. If you don’t mind keeping Dana and this new baby in you prayers, we’d definitely appreciate it. We truly believe in the power of prayer and that God will honor the request of a multitude of people for our little baby. Thank you!

Of course, as we vlog through our normal life on YouTube, we had to record the moments of when we first told our other kids about the new baby, as well as the ultrasound, family reactions to the news, and more. It’s fun! Check it out below.

And, if you’re curious about what we’re doing on YouTube as a family, two weeks ago we crossed our 500th video! Here’s that 500th video of highlights from our past six years of sharing life on YouTube, as well as a short, one minute animated video I made on why we share life on YouTube in the first place. Sometime soon I’ll have to update you guys on how YouTube has really become an incredible ministry platform for us, especially to teenagers!

Of course, we thank each of you for being a part of our lives since LISM started seven years ago! While I haven’t been incredibly active lately in posting what I’ve been thinking about youth ministry, there’s certainly a lot running through my mind about it. I’m looking forward to sharing it all with you sometime soon! Thanks for being a part of this journey with us!

It would be awesome if every church in the world was a completely healthy and thriving faith community, wouldn’t it? While many churches definitely appear to be in that category, unfortunately not every church is. Regardless of how you define a “healthy church,” most of us can probably name at least one church we know of that’s pretty unhealthy.

But what if the church you serve is an unhealthy place? What if you look around and you’re a part of a mess that you wish you could help clean up?

A few months ago at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference I had lunch with a Mark Eades and a few youth leaders from his team. Mark is a youth pastor in Iowa and together, he and his leaders told stories about their church that are often uncommon of most stories I hear from youth workers about their church. Obviously no place is perfect, but Mark and New Covenant Bible Church are intentionally heading toward health instead of dysfunction.

Over lunch I asked Mark to help those of us who may be in an unhealthy church environment know how we can best contribute to moving our churches back to a healthy place. So he went home and shot this video with another local youth pastor they answered these questions.

• What is a healthy church ministry?
• What contributes to your church’s healthy environment?
• What role do you play in contributing to it?
• How can other youth workers help their churches move toward being a healthy place?

Above is a video of their responses. I trust it helps enable you to be a blessing to your church community by playing an active role in contributing to your church’s overall health.

QUESTION: If you’re in a healthy church, share your responses to these four questions in the comments below. Let’s help other youth workers who may be struggling in an unhealthy ministry context.

Have you ever known someone for a long time, but one day were blown away when you learned something new and unexpected about them? This can happen in good friendships, and I’ve found that it happens in marriage. We can become so familiar with a friend or a spouse that we think we know just about everything about him or her, and so we are surprised when we learn something new about that person. We may not even believe what we’ve heard, because it doesn’t match what we thought we knew.

This is what happened to Jesus when he returned to his hometown, to the place where people saw him grow up–and began to teach:

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. Mark 6:1-6

There is a danger in this passage for those of us who serve in any kind of ministry position that is easy to miss. For those who were in Jesus’ hometown, Jesus was… familiar. As we read accounts of Jesus’ life and witness people entirely miss the big picture of Jesus’ identity, we can make the mistake of assuming we wouldn’t commit the same error. Surely, were we in the same position as Jesus’ childhood friends and neighbors, we would not write him off as a small-town carpenter who had tasted a modicum of success as a rag-tag rabbi and had gotten too big for his britches. We would never have gotten so familiar with Jesus and what we thought we knew about him that we refused to see him for who he really was.

Or would we?

That being familiar with Jesus would cause us not to recognize him is a puzzling paradox. After all, isn’t one of the goals of walking with Jesus to become more familiar with him? To know his words, to know his heart? Why would being familiar with him become a detriment to our faith in him?

The problem is, when we become familiar with Jesus, we stop trying to know him.

I’m not sure those of us who serve in ministry are that different from Jesus’ hometown “friends” in Mark 6. They knew enough about Jesus to not care to find out anything more about him. To ask him questions. To be proved wrong. They knew enough, and that was enough. They weren’t willing to go any deeper with Jesus.

Today, take a minute to examine yourself and whether you are too familiar with Jesus. Do you know enough to be a good enough leader, so you don’t spend much time trying to know Jesus on a deeper level? Are you so dead-set on your opinions of Jesus that you refuse to be amazed by him? When was the last time you read the Gospels and were blown away by something you had never seen before?

To be familiar with Jesus is to not really know him. If this is where you’re at today, close your laptop, put down your phone, and open up the Bible to read about Jesus. You might be amazed at what you find.

Prayer for Reflection
God, please forgive me for being too familiar with you, and too familiar with your Son, Jesus. Though I know little about you, I have determined that what I know is enough, and I have stopped searching. Help me to see Jesus in a new light, not for information or to prepare for a lesson, but to be transformed through his death and resurrection, and through the power of your Spirit. Father, please reveal your Son to me today. Amen.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Benjer McVeigh is a youth pastor in Ogden, UT, where he works with students in grades 9-12 and their families at Washington Heights Church. You can read more from Benjer at www.benjermcveigh.com or follow him on twitter.

If you’ve ever searched the web for youth ministry resources, you’ve undoubtedly come across my friend Ryan’s website, pastor2youth.com. It’s easily one of the top websites for youth ministry conversations and is loaded with a lot of helpful articles, an active forum, hundreds of games, and more.

But what you may not know is that the 3,000+ resources in the “Downloads” section are all contributed by other youth workers. It’s awesome to see a community surround youth ministry resources and exchange them with each other for free!

Of course, I’d love for you to send the youth ministry resources you develop to me so I can feature them here on Freebie Friday for several thousand youth workers, but you can always submit your resources to Ryan’s website, as well.

Or, if you don’t have anything to contribute right now, feel free to go download whatever you need. It’s just awesome to give back to the community that gives so much to you. So, whenever you can, do that both here for Freebie Friday and at pastor2youth.com. Thanks!

Download 3,000+ resources at Pastor2Youth.com’s YM Exchange

Have you ever really thought about the questions that we ask when something doesn’t quite go our way? They’re actually pretty telling.

My wife and I have been praying about some things in our lives lately – a little about direction, a little about why some things went the way they have, and a lot of thanks for the way some things have gone lately. Personally, I often find myself asking a lot of the “why” questions about some of the less than perfect things. Whenever I do that, I usually come back to the “you” questions. “God, why do you do things like ______?” or, “Why does ______ happen?” A lot of times, these wind up being the wrong questions. Recently in my personal devotions, I came across this:

Romans 12:18 “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”

At first it seems somewhat unrelated. When I thought about the verse further, it’s much more a “me” type of verse. It encourages us to do whatever is in our power to make things right. On that note, I’d encourage you to do whatever you can in your life to resolve conflict with others. If you know things aren’t right, and there’s something you can do to help make them right, do it. For me, this is looking a little different right now.

This verse is saying, “Don’t look at other people as the problem – look to yourself first.” When there is an issue, I need to look first to myself, then look around. Is there simply a decision that I need to make? Is there something I need to do that I haven’t yet? Is there a sin issue I need to deal with? Those are usually the questions I need to ask before I ask the questions that point at God or others.

Quite bluntly, it’s much easier for us to shift blame or focus somewhere else. Very often, we need to focus inwardly first. Often, I hear that as a criticism dealing with our generation, but it really goes back to something Paul had to write about, and all the way back to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. The problem is our hearts. We need to deal with that first.

Ask yourself, “What is in my heart right now that I’m trying to put on other people? What do I have to do to deal with this first?

LeaderTreks recently published a free youth group lesson that fits perfectly with the 4th of July coming up in a few short weeks.

The lesson talks about America’s celebration of freedom and how it influences our lives every day. It then makes a transition to talking about how we find true freedom in Christ and how that should influence our lives, as well.

Use the link below to download it for free, although LeaderTreks will ask you to part with some personal information in exchange for the lesson. But don’t worry — the people at LeaderTreks are great friends. You probably should give them your info even for nothing in return!

Download “Real Freedom” from LeaderTreks

Our mission at Epipheo is to “reveal truth in a way that changes people’s lives.” If the truth that’s revealed in this video takes place, it could truly change the lives of at least 100,000 teenage girls in our own hometowns.

Consider sharing this video to help raise awareness for the Epik Project and the part that each of us play in standing against teen trafficking in the US.

“Will I have a better attendance if I have kids commit to an event months ahead of time or is it better to have them just show up the day of the event?”

Somehow I think the issue of getting kids to commit to youth events is the surface issue, a symptom of something else because most kids really don’t have a problem committing to something. You know exactly what those things are because often it’s what they’re doing instead of the youth group event.

Getting kids to commit to youth group events isn’t based on the timing of when you get them to commit, bribes, or price break incentives (although that may motivate the parents). It’s based on something else: what they believe about you and the ministry.

What you believe determines how you act. It is a basic principle of life that applies to every single one of us. For example:

• If you believe flying is unsafe, you will not fly.
• If you believe eating poop is bad for you, you will hopefully not eat poop!
• If you believe God’s command to Adam to “go forth an multiply” is for all mankind, you will try to have children.

As most of us know, a lot of people say they believe something, but often their actions indicate that they truly believe something else.

So when kids commit to their athletics, their music lessons, their friends, or their ideas, the question to ask is, “Why? What do they believe about those things that makes it easy for them to commit?”

The follow-up questions relating to their commitment to youth events are, “What do they believe about you?” and, “What do they believe about the youth ministry?”

The first question is important to because what they believe about the leader permeates everything else they believe about the ministry, including the ministry’s events. The second question is just as important because sometimes teens can believe one thing about the leader, but believe something else about the ministry due to influences the leader may not be able to fully control (i.e. a previous bad experience, misinformation from someone else, etc.).

But here’s some good news: on some level you get to choose what they believe about you and the ministry. It’s just that most of us have never really thought about what we’re unintentionally teaching them about those two things.

The main elements that influence what people believe about both you and the ministry are:

• A strong vision that has forward momentum
• The execution of that vision
• Their active involvement in that vision
• The life-change they witness taking place in themselves and/or others as a result

So instead of addressing whatever is competing for teenagers’ commitment, instead ask the question, “What is it that they believe about this competing thing in their life? And what is it they believe about me and this event?” Until you address those questions, you’ll be left addressing superficial issues that won’t be fully resolved with price breaks, bribes, and begging.

P.S. If you’d like to explore a 30-step process I wrote that helps you ask good questions that will enable you and your team to discover God’s vision for your ministry, Focused Youth Ministry is currently 80% off for only $1.99!

Nick Bremmer, the 5th and 6th Grade Youth Director at St. Mark’s UMC in Bethany, OK, recently did a fun event that any youth group would have a blast playing together. It’s called, “The Glow Games,” and involves hundreds of glow sticks, which you can get on Amazon for dirt cheap.

Nick created these games with Scott Godinez and both of them were generous enough to send me the Glow Games packet to share with you all. It explains all 15 games you can play in the dark with the glow sticks and includes a logo you can easily use as a PowerPoint slide or promotional item. The games are outlined in both a PDF and a Word Document so you can edit them to work best with your group.

After reading through these games, they look like a lot of fun! If your youth group plays the Glow Games, please comment below and let us know how it went. Thanks!

Download the Glow Games Youth Event Packet

A common question you’ve probably discussed in your small groups is, “How can I grow in my faith? I go to church, attend youth group, and do all these things, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any closer to God.”

A teenager asked us that question on YouTube and several youth workers, including myself, took a stab at offering some help and advice in this video called, “How can I grow in my faith?”

Feel free to use the video in your small groups, teaching, or just to post on your youth group’s Facebook page. Hope it can help encourage your kids!

Also, feel free to subscribe to our Youth Questions channel on YouTube and if you’d like to join us in answering questions for teenagers on YouTube, please message me on Facebook and I’ll get you added to our secret Facebook group where about 50 youth workers collaborate on these.

I know that we’ve done this before, but I think it’s good to have the reminder in front of your face every few months.

Right now, get up, and go to a quiet place. Leave your cell phone behind, and anything else. Don’t even take a Bible or paper. Find a place that’s quiet and where you won’t be disturbed. Just sit, reflect, and talk to God. That’s all.

Distractions are all over the place. Even good things, even Godly things, can wind up distracting us. Sometimes that’s because we get into a routine, and sometimes that’s because we find an uncomfortable silence that we need to distract ourselves from. Silence is good, and we need time to think, process, and communicate with God. Unfortunately, we don’t get silence often, and don’t allow ourselves the blessing. It’s too important not to do. So, go do it now.

You may not be in a position where you can do it right now, (at work, etc.). In that case, when you get a break, get home, whatever, go and take a solid 10 minutes of silence. If you’re able, take 30 minutes. Take a time of silence, with no distractions, and just allow it to be you and God. Often, that’s much better than simply reading a devotional, and what we really need.

The Youth Questions channel on YouTube turned 1 year old last March and so far the effort to point teens to godly, solid advice has been amazing! Almost 50 other youth workers partner with me every week to make these videos a reality.

One of the most common questions teens submit to me through YouTube is how to deal with bullying. Surprisingly, they’re not just talking about bullying from the mean kid two grades above them, but they’re asking how to deal with bullying from their parents, teachers, and siblings, too.

So when I saw this free youth group lesson series on bullying, I had to share it with you. You can download it for free from the link below.

You could also use two of the Youth Questions videos on bullying to kick off a discussion with your group each week you discuss this. Or, you could use the lesson series as-is and maybe post these videos to your youth group during the week for further discussion.

Here are the two videos on YouTube:

• Rich kids bully me. I want to run away!
• What to do when you’re bullied

And by the way, if you’d like to join me and about 50 other youth leaders, teenagers, and parents in answering these questions from teenagers each week, message me on Facebook and I’ll add you to our secret Facebook group. The more caring adults and teenagers we have answering all these questions on video for teenagers, the better!

Get “STAND UP!” mini-series on justice and bullying from YouthMinistry.com

Ah yes, the awesomeness of summer student ministry brings with it many life-changing decisions, mind blowing events, summer camp memories, and of course the unfortunate reality of immodesty! Here are a few thoughts that have helped me in the area of implementing dress standards for summer youth ministry.

1. Start by “informing” your core students. (Those who are spiritually mature.)
Surely you have times when you are training your young people in the area of Biblical principles to live by, right? If you are not, then start! Inform them, and by all means don’t be afraid of standards! Our young people will be surrounded by standards for the rest of their lives. They will have standards in the work place, marriage, and life in general. Don’t short-change your students. In fact, show them that the Bible is our ultimate standard for life!

I think the fear a lot of student ministers have is the fear of losing their students. Pastor Paul Chappell said this in regard to young people, “…when we fear the risk of losing them, we condemn them to spiritual infancy.” I am not going to be the one to hinder my students, so I inform them a lot, even on hot topics like modesty. I started with those who are already practicing modesty and trained them to approach the matter with grace.

By the way, it is truly a heart issue, but how are young people going to get their heart right if we don’t inform them in the first place? Set your students up for success by informing your core! (Hebrews 10:24, 2 Peter 1:3)

2. Teach your core students to be pro-active when promoting your events.
In other words, let them be the informers to those whom they are inviting way ahead of time. Think about it for a minute: when a student invites a friend to a wedding, is it not natural for one to ask, “What am I going to wear?” How about when a student invites a friend to a youth group ski trip?

Consider this: we are in Memphis, Tennessee, and the majority of our public school students are already used to abiding by dress codes anyway. They know what “dress code” means.

What ever happened to giving people the heads up? Perhaps we should stop tiptoeing around certain issues and just man-up and inform people. Now I realize that there will be those casual individuals who show up without notice, but here is my thought on that: wouldn’t it be easier to address a few (if needed) than your whole un-informed student group?

Again, I teach my students to address any issue in life with grace, but by all means I teach them to pro-active about it way ahead of time. (John 1:14)

3. Avoid events that make provision for the flesh in the first place!
The truth is that our students enjoy tons of opportunities to kick back, have fun, party, go crazy, and “drive their youth leaders nuts” throughout the whole year. Why go to the beach, pool party, or waterpark when the “message” presented (immodesty, sensuality, lust, etc.) at those locations contradicts your overall message of true godliness, holiness, righteousness, and worldly separation? Perhaps we are guilty of a double standard at times, or even worse making provision for our own flesh?

Some say, “Well they are eventually going to grow up and have to learn to reach their culture anyway and so why not teach them how to deal with it in a Christian context?” My 5 year old son has never smoked a cigarette, taken a drink of beer, looked at pornography, had sex, nor played Russian roulette. Do you think I should let him to do all these things in a “Christian context” in order for him to know how to deal with and reach his culture for Christ? (Romans 13:14)

Inform your core students, teach them to be pro-active when promoting, and by all means avoid making provision for your students flesh!

QUESTION: Do you hold dress standards for your teens during the summer? If so, what are they and how do you ensure that those boundaries are respected?

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Robert Martinez is the Pastor of Student Ministries at East Side Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. He is burdened for his current generation of young people and seeks to “change the statistics” among the ever growing number of young people leaving the faith. You can follow Robert on twitter.

Honestly, after talking with many churches, search committees, pastors, and mentors close to me, it felt like most churches were looking to hire an administrator more than a pastor. Most churches also seemed to be looking for someone to take the youth ministry off the hands of the church and run it for them instead of someone who would partner with them and parents. Of course, few churches actually said it that way, but ultimately that’s what it felt like it came down to for me, and I’m not on board with either approach.

Along with all this, I’ve been thinking, praying, and revisiting my ecclesiology again in light of these things, specifically in the context of youth ministry and how we can best partner with families. Our whole identity in ministry being wrapped up in the stage-of-life ministry strategy is something I think needs to be visited in a way that brings light to some of the assumptions we make, not in a critical way, but in a way that helps us serve the bride of Christ in the most God-honoring and effective way possible.

In the video below, I summarize some personal thoughts of where we’ve come from over the past couple years to bring us to where we are today in Cincinnati, Ohio, at Epipheo Studios. I also share a bit about where I think we’re going in the future. I feel like I’m risking some vulnerability in sharing some of this with you all since it has the potential to bring some criticism (as it already has), but I hope that your feedback will be helpful in shaping me. Thank you, everyone, for your investment into me through posts like this!

Every night before I put my kids to bed (6, 4 and 2 years old), we read from the Bible and pray together. Every now and then, they interrupt prayer with different things to pray for that come into their heads spontaneously. I think that’s great, and just stop and let them go for it. This week, my four year old decided that he had something to pray for (and being as he’s usually a little more timid in prayer, I thought this was great). He prayed:

“God, we pray for Stevie Wonder, that you would help his eyes and that he would be able to see again.”

Seriously.

I kind of laughed, thought it was sweet, and we continued. I thanked and encouraged him, especially his soft heart for others. Later though, I started thinking about it, beyond “that’s hilarious.” He was first of all, sincerely praying for someone else and showing compassion. That’s great! Beyond that, he seriously believed that God could do this. Seriously? There’s some things God’s just not going to do.

Matthew 17 shows Jesus talking about praying boldly. I don’t know what God is going to do about Stevie Wonder’s vision, but I do know that my son taught me something about prayer. My prayer is often inhibited by doubt. I don’t pray boldly because I “know God isn’t going to do that.” If I ever do get the words out, I don’t know if I’m really taking them that seriously.

Prayer is a tough thing to understand. I’m still trying to figure it out and be more faithful regarding it. I don’t know how much prayer changes God and how much it changes us. I struggle with the difference between strong faith and arrogant confidence. What I do know is that God calls us to pray, know that he listens to, loves, and cares for us, and that we need to boldly believe and trust. I’m now taking lessons from a four year old, and I think it’s helping to put me on the right track.

QUESTIONS:

• What’s on your prayer list right now?
• Are you praying for anything boldly? Anything that’s only explicable by God’s intervention?
• What do you know needs prayer, but your avoiding it because it’s too big? Take some time and pray for it.

I’ve always said how important it is for a youth ministry to know the vision God’s given them, to focus on it, and to regularly evaluate it. In fact, I even wrote an ebook about it titled, “Focused Youth Ministry,” to help youth ministries and churches do just that.

One great way to assess your youth ministry is to talk with graduating seniors before they take off for college. Ask them some good, hard questions about their experiences in the youth ministry, the church as a whole, and the influence they feel it may or may not have had on them. Usually they’ll give you very honest answers that can help you grow and improve the ministry. Think of it like an “exit interview” for your graduating seniors.

If you’d like a list of sample questions you could start with, YouthMinistry.com is offering a resource for free from Chuck Bomar titled, “10 Things to Ask Graduating Seniors.” You can download the document for free from the link below.

While this list certainly contains some great questions, what else would you ask that’s not a part of this list? I’d love to compile a great list from you guys for a future post, as well.

Get 10 Things to Ask Graduating Seniors from YouthMinistry.com

While working with junior high students, I have learned that many of them haven’t developed a “filter.” A filter is what makes you stop and think about the outcome before saying, writing or doing something.

Junior highers especially lack a filter when it comes to using social media. And to make matters worst, they underestimate how fast that information can spread. They’ll often post details of their physical relationships with the opposite sex, write something nasty about a teacher, put down a friend or even brag about breaking the law. They usually don’t realize until afterwards, that it wasn’t a good idea to post those things. Uh… busted!

I make it a point to connect with students on Facebook and Twitter. Not in a creepy kind of way, but because that’s where they live. I often have to decide if and when to respond to certain things. Do I comment on a Facebook post? Do I respond to a tweet? Do I call the student to talk about it? Do I send a private message to them? Do I communicate with their parents about the issue? Do I do nothing at all?

These are good questions to ask yourself. The answers will be different for everyone, but the important thing is that you ask those questions. Engage when necessary and know when to step back and observe when needed.

You might be tempted to throw Bible verses at students or play the Pastor card when students post inappropriate things. It’s the easy thing to do. But in doing that, consider that you might push them away. In the past, I have sometimes done more harm than good taking this approach. Instead, approach with caution and approach in love.

Also, use social media as a window into the real lives of your students. Use it to discover the real issues they are facing, the sins that tempt them the most and as a glimpse into their relationship with Jesus.

Educate students on how to use social media in a healthy way. Help them to use a filter beforehand so they don’t have to experience the negative consequences afterwards. When they mess up, help them to get back up and learn from the experience.

Consider partnering with parents on the social media issue. Don’t assume they know everything about Facebook and Twitter. Look for ways to work together and help students use social media in a healthy way.

QUESTION: How and when do you decide to respond to a student’s inappropriate Facebook post?

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Terry Goodwin has worked in Junior High Ministry for 12 years. He is also the creator of juniorhighministry.org.

As we’ve been visiting a few churches around here, we’ve been seeing some things that look different from this side of the story than it did when I was in the church leadership role interacting with first-time visitors.

Last week we talked about the impact your church website has, how claiming to be a welcoming church can actually work against you, and how the stories you church tells can remind us that we’re not part of you.

A final thing we noticed that makes an impact on first-time visitors is asking the guest for their contact info. It’s not so much the request that’s an issue, it’s how it’s requested and, more importantly, why it’s requested that makes an impact.

Churches generally ask for contact info from visitors and give “compelling” reasons as to why they should part with such information. For example, “So we can have record of your attendance today,” or, “So we can send you more information about our church.”

But here’s the thing:

Most first-time visitors will make the decision of whether or not they’re coming back to your church within the first two minutes of walking in the door.

Although I’ve heard that plenty of times before, I didn’t realize how true that really is until the past several weeks. To be fair, for my wife and I it’s probably takes a bit closer to 5 minutes to make that decision, but the point is still the same: first-impressions are often a pretty accurate of the tone that’s reinforced throughout the rest of the experience.

So if you ask a visitor for their contact info within the first two minutes, that’s too presumptuous. But if you wait until after two minutes, they’ve already decided if they want you to have their contact info or if they want to know more about your church in the first place.

Try this instead: Don’t ask the guest for their contact info from the stage just so you can plug it into your database or something. Rather, talk with the visitor personally for a bit and if you feel the conversation is going well, then ask for their contact info so you personally can follow-up with them later, not just so you can hand off their visitor’s card to a church secretary who’s never seen them. That personal approach will probably work much better for us visitors, especially since we’ve probably already decided if we want to come back or not.

As a bonus, when you do follow-up with the visitor a few days later, don’t do it just to plug another church function. Show an interest in them as a person and ask to meet with them for coffee just to talk and hear their story.

Or, if you really want to make a huge positive impression on your guest, invite them and their family (if visiting) to go out for lunch after church. Just make sure you insist on paying for the family’s meal as to not unintentionally put any financial pressure on a family who might not be able to afford it but will never admit it. And also make it clear that you just want to spend some time with the family and get to know them, not to give them a pitch for your church or make them feel like they’re obligated to come back next week.

Bottom line: Show an interest in people more than in their contact info.

QUESTION: Does your church ask for visitor contact info? If so, how and why?

This summer several youth workers decided to bring their youth groups together to participate in a shared, common experience around the life and work of Jesus Christ. Unlike most collaborative youth group efforts, this one is digital in nature.

These youth workers shot some pretty high-quality teaching videos that each group watches and collaborates around. So far there are 79 churches in 17 different states with over 2,200 students registered to view the series together this summer.

In total, the experience will include 12 weeks of FREE online video messages focused on the gospel for young people. Each lesson comes with a discussion and activity guide, mp3, and other leader resources. Groups can register to view the videos (released one per week May-August 2012) and receive the resources.

To get your hands on these videos and resources, you’ll have to register a free account on their site, but you can check it out just by visiting their site at the link below and see what you think.

Visit the Hash Tag Youth Series