Tag: youth group

  • Beg, Borrow, and Steal our Retreat!

    That’s the goal of our high school ministries Winter retreat.

    I’m not talking about a cash neutral event to the youth budget. I’m talking about… we’ve got no money so we need to do this retreat for free. We don’t have budget money and our students literally have no cash to offset expenses.

    Here’s what we’re trying to do:

    Create a memorable, kinetic, outside-of-our-neighborhood, experience with our high school group. We need this retreat. It’ll be good for the students and it’ll be good for the group.

    Here’s how we’re going to do it

    Beg: I’m not too proud to beg. Especially when it comes to the faith development of the students in our ministry. Fortunately, when it came to location, I didn’t even have to beg. I just asked a Kingdom-minded friend if we could crash his youth building for 30 hours. When I visited Danny Long earlier this fall and saw his facilities (about 30 minutes from City Heights, but far enough into East County to feel completely separate from the urban environment.) I asked if it might be a possibility to use his building for a retreat. Without flinching he was happy to do it.

    Next up, Kathy (our youth pastor) asked her cousin to lead worship. Done. Teaching? I’m pretty sure we’ll split those duties. Now we’re out begging for folks to pick up the tab on our Costco run for food for the retreat.

    All that’s left is to beg off some programming elements. One of the tricks I learned from retreat-guru Lars Rood [author of an upcoming YS book on doing ministry for cost-neutral or free] was to not skimp on experience. So we are officially on the lookout to bring something to this retreat that our students from City Heights completely unexpected. (Horseback riding, sledding, paintball, or something along those lines.)

    Borrow: We’re going to borrow ideas. Darn near all of them. Why spend all the time thinking up stuff when we can take things people are already offering for free and tweak them to work in our ministry/ From activity ideas to theme to kitchen appliances.

    Steal: OK, we’re not going to steal anything. But we are stealing victory from the enemy by doing something we can’t afford for free. We might not be a resource rich ministry, but we are a resourceful group who aren’t ashamed to rely on the Kingdom.

    Have you ever done a ministry event like this? If so, leave a comment and share your idea. [So I can steal it.]

  • Open Letter to My Former Students

    Like all my friends in youth ministry, I have acquired a growing list of graduates that now scatter the globe. Some are freshmen in college this year, some are married and have cool jobs, and most are kind of in an in-between state. We bump into each other from time-to-time, we comment on one anothers life on Facebook, and I hope they pray for me as I have committed to praying for them. This post is for them.

    Dear former students-

    Dr. Seuss was right! Oh, the places you have gone and the things you have done. Some of you I’ve kept up with pretty closely while most I only get to see little snippets of when you come to town or with what you post on Facebook.

    I just wanted to say to you publicly some things that you need to hear. Life has a way of transforming your dreams into a lame reality and I thought it might be valuable to get a third-party perspective on things.

    Let’s take one more trip up the mountain and dream about what God wants for you.

    The world is yours for the taking

    Seriously, have you looked at your peer group? Life has dealt you a hand that you can easily take advantage of! It’s shocking to me that tomorrows influencers are impressed when snippets of their lives appear on the Fail Blog or Texts From Last Night.

    Never confuse failure for success, no matter how popular it may seem. God has so much more for you in mind.

    If you can rise above that stupidity and soak in as much education and experience as you can in the next 2-3 years you will be head and shoulders above the idiots who walked across the stage with you in high school.

    IQ & money & SAT & GPA mean jack squat right now. It’s all about hard work. Outwork your peer group and you will succeed.

    Tomorrows employers are watching what you are doing today. They want to know… were you one of those knuckleheads we laughed at on Fail Blog? When you explain to them that you were too busy taking care of your classes and holding down a job to pay for college… the doors of opportunity will swing open.

    Take every class seriously. You are paying for it (and will pay for it for the next 10 years) so force your professors to give you their very best. If they don’t perform at their best challenge them to step it up privately. Wrestle through the temptation to blow off classes. Sit in the front 2 rows. Don’t open up your laptop. Take notes the old fashioned way. Do your reading. Turn stuff in.

    Outwork everyone.

    Take every job opportunity seriously. I don’t care if you are making sandwiches at Subway or whipping snot from a kids nose at daycare. Do it for the glory of God. This isn’t a great job market but that doesn’t mean you can’t do great at your job. Remember, he who is faithful with the small things…

    Outwork everyone.

    This stage of life isn’t about friends. It might feel like it should be, but that’s not true. People going places aren’t worried about such things. Look around at your classes today. Your job is to figure out how to rise above all of the people in that room. You don’t have to be smarter than them or get better grades than them… you just have to out position them.

    No one expects anything from your generation. Rise above that and the world is yours.

    Hard work, hard work, hard work. This is the path to success.

    No one is going to hook you up so hook yourself up.

    Grunt out this 5-6 years of your life, act like an adult as soon as possible, and you will reap the rewards for decades to come.

    The church desperately needs you

    I did my best to teach the Word of God to you plainly. Some of you absorbed it and took it seriously, some did not. That’s OK as you picked up more than you think you did.

    Find a local church, get involved, and help them reach their community. It can be the church you grew up attending. It can be a new church. Really, just go to church.

    Trust your instincts on what a healthy church is. It will feel right. It doesn’t have to be big or flashy. It doesn’t have to have a killer program you love or a hot musician. You don’t have to feel comfortable with everything they do and you don’t have to think it’s perfect. My experience is that I feel most negative about a church when I just go and am not involved or giving money. I guarantee you that if you become part of a churches ministries and give what you can, you will feel like you fit in.

    Your church just has to love Jesus, love God’s Word, and have a stupid belief that the Gospel can change lives.

    At the same time, I taught you to think critically about the world around you. This is the most valuable skill needed in the church today. There are enough Christians who are satisfied with reaching a small percentage of the community. Lead bravely wherever you get involved. Remind those at church what the Bible actually says. Hold them to it. The Book of Acts is possible today!

    I pray that you keep believing that every person in your area needs to know Jesus and not to accept 10% as the best you can do. I hope you see things that need to be fixed in this world and step into the responsibility to right wrongs.

    Don’t just be consumers of the Word of God. Be doers.

    Move out as soon as possible

    There is something about your parents generation that wants to hold onto you and baby you as long as possible. Resist that temptation.

    I know it’s nice to have someone take care of you. And I know that its nice to have someone do your laundry.

    Get out. It’s not helping.

    The fastest way to grow up is to leave the nest. I’m not saying you need to hate your parents or that you aren’t supposed to ever see them again. But I am saying that if you are over 18 the best biggest step you can make to being accepted as a “real adult” is to get out.

    The fastest way for you to get dependent is to stop taking their money. Find some people and share an apartment. Pay your own bills. Eat your own Ramen if you have to. You aren’t going to starve… you’re going to get hungry to grow up!

    I’m still here for you

    If you need someone to talk to, I am now and hope to always be here to listen and offer advice. At the very least, know that I continue to pray for you.

    I expect great things from you. As I said when you were in middle and high school– I have a fundamental belief in your generation.

    Be better than my generation. Now. Now. Now.

    — adam

  • Youth Workers: Don’t Punk Out

    Youth Workers: Don’t Punk Out

    Youth ministry seems to be facing asymmetrical challenges right now.

    Two of them on the forefront of my mind are longevity and transference of wisdom.

    With a tough job market and a climate of deconstruction/re-thinking/shifting in the profession… it really pains me to see a lot of very gifted youth workers move on.

    Some of them are my friends. And I put on a happy face to try to be happy for you when you send me an email telling me of your bright new idea. But I’m really sad when I see our dreams for one another give way to something else. For a myriad of reasons our sophmoric desire to be in youth ministry for a lifetime has given way to leaving ministry altogether or becoming a church planter or taking a “higher” staff position at a church as executive/lead/teaching pastor.

    If I read those reasons right, most of them seem to imply– more stable, more money, more powerful positions.

    Let our 20-year old self talk to our 34-year old self for a second… “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!??!!”

    Those are all things we swore we wouldn’t give our dreams to. But, if I can use passive/politically correct language for a minute, life seems to be forcing some of us to sell out.

    I just want to toss this out there. Maybe there are others who are sitting on the fence and looking at greener pastures.

    • Don’t punk out.
    • Working with teenagers is as important now as ever.
    • Fight the temptation to take an easier way out of your problems.
    • You’ve always said youth ministry wasn’t a stepping stone.
    • The grass won’t be greener as a church planter or a lead pastor, you know it and I know it.

    We know this to be true: As cultural spins faster and faster the brightest minds and the greatest innovations are now will continue to flow from youth workers just trying to figure out how to best minister to kids in their neighborhoods. The best ministry innovations are not now nor have ever flowed from the top down. It’s always the other way around. The best innovators typically don’t have the biggest platforms nor do they typically have agents.

    Why?

    Intrinsic hunger forces innovation. The best ideas come when you have no other choice but to innovate.

    Sure– I know someone is going to light me up for saying it. After all, who am I to question decisions that aren’t mine? And all the other voices in my friends heads telling them they need to go plant a church, be a teaching pastor, or chase another vocation must be right and I must be wrong.

    But I’m allowing myself to be sad. And I’m allowing myself to put it in writing that you don’t have to punk out. Adversity, frustration, questioning, tension, getting fired, having to adapt, making less money, and being discouraged aren’t now and never have been “God closing doors.”

    Sometimes those things are merely a testing of calling and God rewards you for passing the test.

    Sure, the world needs more senior pastors. Sure the world needs more church planters. Sure the world needs more whatever-it-is-that-is-taking-you-from-youth-ministry.

    But those kids. (The kid that was you. That kid was me.) That kid will always need a youth worker there at just the right moment to say just the right thing.

  • Properly Loading Volunteer Staff

    Your role as a ministry manager isn’t just to plan programs and teach students. Successful ministry largely lies in your ability to properly manage a group of volunteers.

    Take five minutes and identify which category each of your volunteers is happiest in:

    • Low capacity
    • High capacity
    • Super capacity

    What are some ways you can vary what each volunteer contributes to reflect how God has gifted them?

  • Front-loading ministry in the discipleship process

    A couple weeks ago I shared a post about discipleship that raised some questions about how we do things in our student ministry. Most of the comments were affirmative. Some of the more critical questions which arose required some follow-up.

    With that in mind, I grabbed a few moments with Chris and Kathy, our staff members who run the New Heights Project to drill down into some of the questions that came up.

    • What is the New Heights Project internship all about?
    • Who we are and who we partner with?
    • Why intentionally hire non-Christian students to do children’s ministry?
    • What has been the effect of this method in students lives?

    One additional thought. The thing that freaked most people out was the concept of intentionally hiring a mix of Christian and non-Christian students as interns. Every church I’ve ever done ministry with had students help in ministry areas who weren’t Christians. Any ministry leader is fully aware of that same fact. The only thing that is different here is that we’ve made it part of our strategy. Typically, ministry leaders know it but don’t acknowledge it because we’re talking about children of church members.

  • New Heights Project highlight video

    A few weeks ago I mentioned something our youth ministry does over the summer. We hire a group of high school students to run our children’s ministry outreach program. Here’s a highlight video they showed in church at the end of their experience.

    I’m so thankful for the impact these students had on our community! Of course, they didn’t do it alone. The whole staff of Harbor was fully engaged as well as a big crew of adults from the church as well as some other missionaries from InterVarsity’s urban project.

  • Is this a safe place?

    Photo by ekai via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    About 10 months ago a group of people sat on Chris’ back porch talking about starting a youth ministry for our church, Harbor Mid-City. As we chatted, dreamt, and prayed about this ministry one of the things that came out was… “We want it to be a safe place for students to explore a relationship with Jesus.”

    That phrase stuck. It actually became a part of our ministry description which we recite during every meeting. “IOB is a safe place for students to explore a relationship with Jesus.”

    That phrase got tested a bit last night.

    Stephen, our teaching/senior pastor, came to youth group last night to teach on and invite students to participate in baptism. His teaching was pretty simple… this is what baptism is, this is what it symbolizes, this is who should get baptized, this is how our church does it, we’d love it if you would consider getting baptized. He did a great job.

    I could tell during his teaching time that some students were uneasy about this whole thing. They didn’t feel safe. It wasn’t that Stephen was teaching anything bad or that they were intimidated in any way or even that he was manipulating them to make a decision they didn’t want to make– there was just something about the truths of Scripture that Stephen was saying that gave the room a funny, rare vibe.

    You could see it in their posture. You could see it in the way they looked at him. You could see it in the way they listened to his talk.

    To follow-up, we broke up into small groups and the leaders were asked to dig a little deeper with the students and ask if any of them would like to be baptized.

    Three responses from my circle that tested me in my response.

    • Is there any way I can get unbaptized? My parents baptized me as a baby and I don’t want to follow God.
    • I’m not ready to get baptized. I understand the Gospel and I get what Stephen was talking about, but I’m just not ready to put my faith in Jesus yet.
    • Why did my parents baptize me? If they made a covenant to God than they didn’t live up to it at all.

    Mince no words. These were questions that pushed me back to that discussion 10 months before. Was IOB really a safe place to explore Jesus? If so, how I responded either validated that statement or invalidated it.

    Open questions for readers:

    What would be answers to these responses which would communicate that IOB isn’t a safe place?

    What would be some “this is a safe place” answers to these questions?

  • The plot and sub-plot of every youth group meeting

    Youth group meets every Wednesday evening at 7:00 PM. And every Wednesday night at 7:00 PM a cast of characters arrives on scene. Each character is three-dimensional. And each character is coming to youth group for their own reasons.

    Every Wednesday there is a plot and a series of sub-plots. And it looks something like this.

    Style: Drama

    The plot: Youth group has an agenda. The youth leader picks a topic for the night and has themed everything around it. In tonight’s play, we’re talking about worship. Everything that we’ll do is targeted at the agenda. What is worship? How can I worship? Why should I worship? Let’s worship together. Worship-themed games. And a wall where we’ll write our own definition of worship.

    This is the plot the youth worker, Adam, needs for the night to feel like a success. This agenda must win over everything. Why? The youth worker is in charge, duh.

    The main characters: Here’s a list of fictional characters for youth group, along with what their plot is on Wednesday.

    Ted: Ted was in the parking lot when the youth leader arrived. He’s thrilled it’s Wednesday night because the last thing he wants to do is be home. Ted’s sister is two years older and teases him constantly. That may not be a big deal, but Ted is sick of being teased. He comes to youth group because its a safe place for him to hang out. He’s got a couple of friends who come, too.

    Ted’s sub-plot for Wednesday night is that he needs to feel loved somewhere. He doesn’t get that at home. And he’s not sure if the church can make him feel loved… but his new girlfriend sure is making him feel loved. So if he’s not feeling it this Wednesday, he probably won’t come next week.

    Linda: She just wants to make it in the room. She’s been crying off and on all day. Not like in a dramatic way… but in a “I need to go to the bathroom” kind of way. Linda doesn’t know what to do because she is about 5 days late and might be pregnant. She doesn’t want to tell Mario because she knows he’ll freak. Her eyes are sore from crying and she’s completely on edge. She told Jill, Mary, and Christy what was up because they go to youth group with her and love her.

    Linda’s sub-plot is she’s freaked out because she isn’t sure if she’s pregnant or not. And she doesn’t even want to think about what would happen if she really is. That’d cause drama in every corner of her life. Youth group, school, and especially home. Yikes, her mom doesn’t even know she’s having sex. And the youth leader, Adam, that dude doesn’t have a clue. And she might just slap Margaret. That kid is so happy and she had the nerve to ask her on Facebook why she’s been a bitch all day. That kid doesn’t have a clue.

    Margaret: She’s everybody’s best friend. At least she thinks she is. She calls everyone each Wednesday after school to make sure they come to youth group. She helps lead worship, she helps Adam plan youth group activities, and when she isn’t getting straight As at school she is doing pretty good on the soccer team. Her home life is meh, but it doesn’t seem to faze her. Sure, her parents are getting a divorce, but God is in control, right? Plus, Adam and the other youth group leaders come to her soccer games– they are the only family she needs.

    Margaret’s sub-plot is tat she wants the night to be awesome. Youth group has made a big difference in her life, she knows she is loved and safe, and she feels like if people will just give it their all, they will all love Wednesday nights and the youth group will really start to grow.

    Mario: Mario loves coming to youth group. It’s silly, it’s fun, he learns a lot. He likes learning about God. For the first time in his life he feels like the stuff about God is making sense. He hasn’t told Adam yet, but at the retreat he prayed the prayer and has been reading his Bible every day. Speaking of the retreat, for the last 2-3 months since the retreat… he’s been giving Linda a ride home from church. It’s kind of funny because everybody knows they are going out but no one really suspects anything.

    Mario’s sub-plot is that he looks forward to youth group on Wednesday night so he can see his friends, learn about Jesus, and give Linda a ride home. He knows it’s crazy… but they’ve had sex on the way home every Wednesday for like 9 weeks. There’s no way he’d miss a Wednesday night. No not ever.

    Carrie: Carrie is really quiet on Wednesday nights. She comes a few minutes late, brings her Bible, and just kind of goes through the motions. She comes to everything, loves Adam’s teaching, and just likes youth group because its a distraction from her home life.

    Carrie’s sub-plot is that she comes on Wednesday night to get away from a verbally abusive home. Nothing she does is good enough for her parents. She feels unloved and youth group is the only place she feels safe. But no one at youth group would know that because she’s terrified to tell the truth about her dad, the pastor.

    Jill, Mary, and Christy: They’ve spent the whole day praying Linda isn’t pregnant. Well, they were praying when they weren’t asking their friends if they should tell a teacher or Adam. So now they feel a little guilty that about 200 people at school know Linda might be pregnant but that doesn’t really matter because if she is… everyone needs to know anyway, right? And if she isn’t pregnant than those 200 people will know that prayer works.

    Their agenda is that all they can think about is their friend Linda and her uterus. They are just going to play along tonight and not say anything. And then they are going to go home and Facebook chat about it some more.

    Adam: Adam just wants Wednesday night to be over with. He’s super tired and had a bad day. Staff meeting went way late. He couldn’t find the ingredients for the game he wants to play. And he’s annoyed that the elders are thinking about cutting his budget to go to NYWC this Fall. Adam got rushed through preparation because he was dealing with a problem between a parent and a former student who is now in college… like all day Tuesday. Adam thinks his lesson plan is solid and that this is what God wants him to teach. But he’s really frustrated that the students just don’t seem as into it since the retreat.

    Adam’s agenda is to be faithful to the plan. His gut is telling him there’s a lot going on with his students but the truth is, there’s a lot going on in his life, too. So Adam just wants tonight to be over with so he can go home and watch some TV he’s DVRed and see his kids before they go to sleep. He’s really frustrated, too. Since the retreat there’s been a lot of apathy among the students. Which is weird, it seemed like everything at the retreat went so well?

    What’s the point of the story: A lot of time in youth ministry we think that the plot of our lesson plan is the real story of our ministry. We go home feeling great if the lesson went well and kids seemed engaged in the plot. But when you look at all the sub-plots coming on Wednesday night– you see God is waiting for someone to intervene– and we go home frustrated because our gut tells us it could have gone better and we just don’t have a clue why. Sadly, we allow the plot to override what our students desperately need.

    Students are bringing the mess of their lives to the church and asking, “Can God help me with ____?“ And we’re answering that question by distracting them with games, music, and a lesson that isn’t answering their biggest question.

  • Longitudinal Youth Ministry

    Photo by Ben Lawson via Flickr (creative commons)
    Photo by Ben Lawson via Flickr (creative commons)

    There is something so cheap about a program that graduates students.

    Maybe it’s just that I don’t like to let go? Or maybe it’s just that I can’t reconcile the theological ramifications of shoving a copy of My Utmost for His Highest in a kids hands and saying, “Thanks for the memories. Have a nice life!”

    In reality, I’ve not let go of them. I just can’t. It wouldn’t seem right. And I am pretty sure they don’t want to either. Why else would I be maintaining these relationships with them into adulthood? Why are we still sharing life?

    The way my youth ministry career has gone, in many ways that relationship is just getting started when they walk across the stage to accept their high school diploma. It’s not over, we’re just changing gears!

    And yet, the programmatic approach to youth ministry depends on me pushing kids through the system. Freshmen take steps 1-2, sophomores steps 3-4, juniors do step 5, seniors do step 6. We’re always working kids through a system. We say we love them… but that’s a short-term love that lasts as long as they are in high school. Sayonara, sucker! I’ve got a whole slew of incoming freshmen to look after!

    The way I see it, that type of program is a cheap Wal*Mart edition of discipleship. Real discipleship is taxing. It’s tough. It’s costly. It’s complicated. It requires more commitment than getting assigned to 8 kids for a small group year or running a program at work.

    When I think of the way Jesus discipled I think of a process that was open-ended. They ground it out over time. It wasn’t a wheel or bases that he ran those young men through. It was life shared. Three steps forward, two steps back. But together they got there.

    From my own ministry experience, you just know when you have a few kids who get it and want to be discipled long-term. You don’t get assigned these kids. A pastor doesn’t have to bestow anything on you. It’s just natural, you pick it up, and you see where the relationship goes. You recognize it in them when they are 14 when they won’t leave your house because they just have to talk to you about something. You see it when they are 17 and they just drop by to watch a movie or something. You see it when they are 19 and they are just back for the weekend and want to grab a cup of coffee to catch up on life. You see it when they are 23 and you are chatting about life on Facebook.

    Maybe I’m just an abnomaly but my ministry to those kids continues long after I hand them a book and a graduation card. To do anything less would seem cheap. Like I didn’t even mean it.

    “Programs are short-term. Discipleship is long-term.”

    Maybe instead of trying to force discipleship into a 4 or 6 year box we need to re-shape youth ministry so that it starts with kids who want to be discipled and it ends… like at a later date when its over? Why are we trying to redefine discipleship instead of trying to redefine youth ministry?

    There’s always room for a couple newbies in my life. As we get rolling with this new youth ministry venture in San Diego I can see the cycle starting over again. I’m getting to know 14-15 year olds who are looking for someone to walk with for the long-haul. I’ve got room in my life because the reality is that the ones I’ve been mentoring/discipling for the last 5-6 years don’t need much attention. That’s exciting for me to see it starting all over again. I’m hard-wired for it. But that’s how you would hope the process works, right?

    Am I alone in this? Should we start looking at youth ministry as a long-term investment instead of a program?

  • My 3 Caddy Rules for Ministry

    caddy
    CC 2.0 jenni40947 via Flickr

    I’m a golfer. I’ve played the game off and on most of my life. More importantly, I love being around golfers.

    There is a joke among golfers that there are just three rules to a caddy’s job. “Just show up, keep up, and shut up.”

    That’s really how I feel about our burgeoning youth ministry. I’m just trying to show up, keep up, and shut up.

    Show up

    Let’s be real. As a volunteer that is 85%. I want to get there on time, be ready to join in whatever needs to be done, and be present emotionally.

    Keep up

    I’m learning. Tonight I came home feeling good because I felt like I learned a bunch of the kids names. I feel like I have a ton more to learn so that I feel like I’m actually contributing. I’ve got to keep up.

    Shut up

    The kids in our ministry could care less what I do for a living, how long I’ve been in ministry, or anything else. I just need to shut up and be there for them.