Category: The Youth Cartel

  • Join us for Open Seattle

    I’m getting really pumped for Open Seattle next week. If you live in the Pacific Northwest we’d love to have you. Yesterday, we extended the regular registration deadline until next Monday– so you can still get in for $25! What’s Open Seattle? Open is an experiment. It’s asking the the youth ministry world the question……

  • Come Dream with Us in Atlanta

    The season of youth ministry, from 2007 – 2012, has been an extremely difficult time for those in vocational youth ministry. There have been a couple of major forces at play which have left our tribe discouraged, shell-shocked, and struggling to dream about what’s next for their ministry. Going into the recession there was a…

  • OpenYM.org – When my dream starts to become our dream

    It’s hard to put a finger on when Open started to become a dream. I can remember having conversations with Kristen in 2006 about the glass ceiling within the youth ministry world. The majority of the speaking/writing/training opportunities went to a relatively small group of people. Sadly, even though I’ve since joined the ranks as…

  • 10 Things I’m Excited About for The Summit

    The Summit: A chat with some of the presenters from The Youth Cartel on Vimeo. With just over 100 days until The Summit, I thought I’d share 10 things I’m excited about. The theme. After the insanity of the past 3-4 years, the idea of linking arms– taking a big, deep breath, and looking at…

  • Scenes from the Revolution

    I’m working on 3 hours of sleep. Again. No eloquence this morning, it’s all pain! This is what the front line of a revolution looks like. Tired, exhilarating, fast moving, and sometimes scary. Oh baby, here’s stuff that is happening right now. I’m pretty close to helping Parentzilla.com relaunch. Combined with Parentministry.net and another site…

  • Freebies for registering early – The Summit

    This week we opened registration for The Summit. This is our brand new, TED-like, national youth ministry event. [Here’s the announcement] And, as excited as I am about The Summit, this post isn’t really about the event itself so much as it’s about the type of ministry organization we want to be. Here is a…

  • Engaging with the Faith-Based Community

    Here’s the Keynote for my Boost Conference presentation later today. You can also download a PDF of this presentation & a PDF of all the raw data from my recent survey, Church Involvement in Public Schools, by clicking the link below. (free) [download id=”21″] Thanks to all who helped with the research portion of this…

  • The Open Manifesto

    There aren’t many places in the church where all ideas have the same opportunity to be presented. Everything is editorialized, shaped, and packaged. Every idea is filtered through a lens. We think something is wrong with that. Deep in our souls we know the solutions to the problems we face today are already out there,…

  • Good News in the Neighborhood curriculum now available!

    Early this morning I finished final edits and uploaded the final version of my latest project: Good News in the Neighborhood, a curriculum for groups. (Check out the trailer in the sidebar to the right) I’m very proud of how it turned out. As I think back to the original brainstorms and ideas for this…

  • 5 reasons I’m stoked about The Summit

    Later this morning we’re officially announcing a brand new youth ministry event called, The Summit. Obviously, it’s a pretty big deal for our little start-up. So I’m excited about it for all sorts of business-y reasons. But I’m stoked about The Summit for far more important reasons than business stuff. We need to dream again. We’re…