Here’s what we did so that I can share the idea with you:

• We estimated the size of the group that was showing up and picked a small room to squeeze everyone in close together.
• We had candles for the students to hold and a sheet of paper with songs on it for them to follow.
• We opened in prayer, watched a voice of the martyrs film about Christians being hurt for their faith and how they have to have secret meetings in order to worship Jesus.
• Music was led with an acoustic guitar (unplugged).

Things to work on:

• Schedule out every minute – make sure that you have an order that you are following and think through the transitions that you want to take place for example: from praying to singing, to watching a video clip, testimony or whatever you line up.
• Have the music sheets ready and printed up for students to follow along. I thought it was much more effective not using a projector for the words of the songs for this particular event.
• Run through the activity before hand with the person leading the worship and all those involved in the leadership to see if everything is transitioning smoothly.
• Pray that God would work on hearts. Pray that the Lord would use the event to spur students to a deeper commitment to Him, getting involved in missions, or simply praying more for the Christians that don’t have the freedom that we do in the united states.

Go here for a sample of a concert of prayer outline.

Has anyone done something like this? How has it worked for your youth ministry? What are some other variations?

What Youth Ministry Toolbox provides is PowerPoint lessons and PowerPoint games for youth ministry for a $40 a year subscription which after checking out the lessons and games inside – I think they would be a good buy for your youth ministry.

Here is a few examples of the PowerPoint games on the inside:

• YouTube – How Well Do We Really Know It?
• Terminator Salvation
• Twilight Trivia
• My WiKi Can Beat Up Your WiKi

There are over a year of games and lesson plans inside and they add new games and lessons too to keep things fresh.

So if you are looking for some PowerPoint games and even PowerPoint lessons to use for your youth ministry then I would check them out to see if they are right for you and your youth ministry.

What do you think about Youth Ministry Toolbox?

Leave your comments and reviews about them.

And why do some parents put so much pressure on youth pastors to disciple their students, while taking little responsibility for their own kids’ spiritual lives?

These questions will probably continue to haunt us for a while, but it’s interesting to see study after study demonstrate just how influential parents can be (like this one and this one).

Here’s the kicker. In spite of the incredible influence parents have on teens, they don’t use it. Parents are spending less and less time with their kids. Some say they spend an average of 10 minutes in meaningful conversation with their teens every week.

Youth pastors are not and cannot be replacement parents. In fact, instead of traditional “youth ministry stuff,” we might find that some of our time is best spent helping parents be better spiritual leaders in their own homes.

That’s quite the challenge, especially for youth pastors that have never been parents themselves. But our experience with students gives us a lot of valuable insights that most parents of teens, who are scrambling to understand these strange creatures now living in their house, would appreciate.

Here are some tips for working with parents from some of my blog’s readers:

• Don’t be a know-it-all, because you don’t, and parents won’t listen to you if you sound like you have all the answers.
• Affirm that the family has much more impact on a young person’s development than the church and youth group, because it does. Emphasize your desire to partner with parents so you don’t sound like you’re trying to replace them (some parents may feel that way about you already, and resent you for it).
• Demonstrate your credibility and talk about what you do know, like trends in youth culture and issues teens deal with. If you don’t know an answer to a question, then say so, and offer to find an answer together.
• Always by sincere in your concern for parents and their struggles. Listen before you talk.

Nathaniel Dame is a youth ministry coach and youth culture expert. His passion is to equip youth pastors to be the leaders that God has called them to be and to have a deep, lasting impact on their students. He is the founder of Called to Youth Ministry and blogs regularly at Effective Youth Ministry.

simple student minisry

About a year ago Jeff Borton contacted me to let me know that there was a book that was on its way called Simple Student Ministry. He asked that I would let others know about it on my blog to gather some input from other youth workers across the country.

Earlier in May I received a copy of Simple Student Ministry to read and review for you.

Simple Student Ministry is a book that was created after the book Simple Church was written by Eric Geiger. I believe both Geiger and Borton wanted to write a student version so that both the church and the student ministry could be on the same page as to creating a simple process for ministry.

I want to say right away that Simple does not mean Easy. It actually can be harder to be simple. What simple does however is create a more focused ministry helping you to accomplish your main goal or mission.

The chapters are:

1) Student Ministry Breakfast Sandwiches

2) Simple Student Ministry?

3) Clarity

4) Movement

5) Alignment

6) Focus

7) Large and Megachurch Case Studies

Parachurch Case Studies

9) Small and Midsize Church Case Studies

10) The Transition to Simple

I want to make it clear that Simple Student ministry is not another “model” but rather helping you to have a “process” for ministry that is clear and direct and less complicated.

Simple Student Ministry emphasizes the discipleship process as the driving factor behind programming in your youth ministry.

I was not surprised at all that Simple Student Ministry sounded the same as Simple Church. This is actually a good thing because they are not going in different directions. Obviously the main difference is that the book is directed towards those in student ministry.

If you haven’t seen or read Simple Church here are the main components and these components are also the same in the Simple Student Ministry:

Clarity – Movement – Alignment – Focus

Pick up the book for you student ministry team today on Amazon:

Is anyone doing this? If so I’d like to hear about it.

Some may ask why? Listen to this: you can set twitter up so that your updates will automatically text the phones of those that follow you. Yeah – so what a great way to communicate to your students.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to twitter and sign up your youth ministry. I suggest that you pick something close to your youth ministry’s name for the ID for example my twitter page is: http://twitter.com/stevemblanchard and so you will want to pick the ending to be as closely related to your youth ministry – hopefully you can still grab something that works. When it asks for the name of the person setting up the account I encourage you to put, “Youth Leader” so that way if you get fired (hopefully not) or leave to another ministry, the next youth leader could take it over and utilize it.
2. Get Your Students to Sign up with Twitter and follow the youth ministry account. This is by far the most administrative and toughest step to accomplish but if you can get it done – how fun!
3. Next make sure that they can receive texts to their phone and get that part set up properly. The idea here is that when you send out a new twitter message – they will get that message as a text on their phone automatically! Now you can see how cool this can be. Setting up their phones so that they receive your twitter updates will probably be the hardest part of this.
4. Make sure that you teach them how to use Twitter from their phone. There is a wealth of information about twitter and how to use it. Here is their phone FAQ this link will also educate you how to twitter from your phone.

I hope now you see the power of twitter and what it can do for your youth ministry. Once things get set up properly you can send out updates and all of your youth ministry kids will get it on their phones! Oh yeah, twitter is still completely FREE so that is a huge bonus for youth ministry people.

Our youth ministry is testing this new communication method out this summer and I can’t wait to share with you how it goes.

Here are some other things to think about:

• Not everyone has phones. Yeah believe it or not you still need to be aware of who is left out of the loop.
• This may need to be communicated with the parents and I would highly encourage you to try and get the parents to follow as well so they receive the same updates as their teenagers.
• Be aware that some aren’t set up on unlimited texting so the more you update the more cost it could be to a families phone bill.
• Might need to have a training session where everyone gets educated on how to do this and get set up correctly
• Even though some may not have phones – they can still get a twitter account from the web and still see and receive updates

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