Tag: youth group

  • The Youth Pastors House

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    Yesterday, I was riding my bike to the trolley when I spotted this beauty. While the saran wrapping of the cars is very well done, the TP job leaves a lot to be desired.

    My first thought? Hey, I wonder what church this person works at?

    Of all the church staff, the one thing that youth workers get right more often than anyone else… good  ministry happens in the home. I’d take that a step further to say, the best ministry happens in the home. It doesn’t have to be your house. But the best stuff typically happens in a house.

  • How do we get to Youth Ministry 3.0?

    t_9780310668664I’ve been wrestling with the concepts of Marko’s book, Youth Ministry 3.0 for a long time. Actually, before I worked a YS I had been going through a prolonged set of discussions at Romeo saying in a thousand different ways… What I’m doing isn’t working anymore.

    The problem was simple. I was trained and experienced at how to do youth ministry a certain way. The entire ministry was built around a youth group night of games, worship, small groups, and a talk. I had seen it work and do incredible things! Even in Romeo we had seen this ministry model draw 40+ students to a church of 120. Lives were changed, kids were discipled, volunteers loved it, on and on. We ran that thing and worked that model like a well-oiled machine. I was well-versed in all the terminology of all the other well-oiled youth ministry systems and had written tons comparing and contrasting the strength of one model over the other. But in the last few years the model tanked. Kids stopped coming. The whole thing became kind of toxic. Instead of re-arranging their schedule to make in on Wednesday night all of a sudden kids were trying to find things to do on  Wednesday night so they could politely bow out. Frustration mounted and I kept saying, “What I’m doing isn’t working anymore.”

    The crazy thing was my reaction to a YM 2.0 model. My response was always, even to the last day, “I know this works, something is just missing, that’s all.” I would tweak things here, re-emphasize this or that. It was never that the concept was broken. The problem was always either the kids not getting the vision of the model or my model not having the funding/support it needed to succeed. It never really dawned on me that my solution to fixing things was to kill the model and search for a better way to minister to students. My reaction was always to just work harder and to keep trying.

    Pray more, blame the parents. Pray more, blame the money. Pray more, blame myself. Pray more, blame the kids busyness. In the end I was royally frustrated and a little angry at God that He had me in a place where I couldn’t fix things.

    But as Marko’s book shows, there is a massive shift from what he calls “Youth Ministry 2.0” built around programs and models, towards “Youth Ministry 3.0” where the programmatic approach is, probably though not necessarily, foregone for a draw towards ministries built around affinity. (A super over-simplified analysis, right there!)

    My wrestling point right now is pretty simple… how do I help ministries kill what has worked for a generation and open their eyes to a way to reach this generation. My experience in YM 2.0 environments is that they’d be happy running an un-attended YM 2.0 model if that means they don’t have to change things. Youth workers may not like the sacred cows of big church but they have certainly built some sacred cows themselves. (Remember the fury over my articles, “I Kissed Retreats Goodbye?“)

    From a national perspective I’m seeing one trend that is scaring me and I don’t want it to be the solution: Killing youth ministry budgets, staffs, and programs. Please tell me that we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bath water? Simply because a model isn’t working doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t minister to adolescents!

    What is a more productive outcome than that?

  • Don’t play horse with this kid

    This brings back some memories. When we took students to Chicago for a mission trip with ICI, we had endless gym time to practice all sorts of trick shots. Something tells me this guy was unstoppable at horse.

    Now I just need a video with extreme carpetball shots and we’d be all set.


    Since we’re talking high school and we’re talking basketball.     Check out these variations on basketball. I grew up playing most of these “in the slums of Granger, Indiana.” OK, it was the rich suburbs… but hyperbole is just too much fun.

    Twenty-one: all vs all, first to 21 wins. (I could write a book on local variations of 21. The game is different all over the country!)
    Make-it-take-it: team game, score a basket and your team keeps the rock.
    King of the court: multi-team game, your team wins a game to 10 and you keep playing.
    Knockout: all-vs.all, start at the free throw line and try to knock out the person in front of you.

  • Lies of Youth Ministry, Part One

    Boys and girls in youth ministry we’ve got some problems. We in youth ministry, as a tribe, believe some lies about who we are, what we’re about, and how we should be reaching students. Let’s address these and move forward to fix them, OK?

    #1 Your ministry is “successful” if you have 10% of Sunday morning attendance. My entire youth ministry career has been wrapped up in the local church so I can state this from experience. But let’s bear in mind historical perspective to understand this lie before we can look at a solution. The current version of Youth Ministry is really a reaction to the success of early parachurch ministries. Back in the late 1940s modern youth ministry was born when Youth for Christ hired Billy Graham to lead crusades to reach teenagers… and boy did that work! YFC’s crusades scratched a cultural itch since teens had been left out of the local church with the emergence of adolescence. (Adolescence is only about 120 years old!) As a strong middle class was born out of post-WWII days adolescent teen culture blossomed and the church was seen as irrelevant to teens. Gradually, in the early 1960s the American church responded in a big way to numerical victories of parachurch ministries. Churches were tired of seeing all of the students go to YoungLife and Youth for Christ… so they started hiring those organization’s staff to run programs in local churches.

    It was a great concept, but from the very beginning youth ministry was seen by church leadership as a way to hold onto church kids and maybe, just maybe, reach new families. This fixed a problem parachurches had without truly addressing the church issue that created the parachurch need in the first place… no place for non-believers to be ministered to.

    The truth is that local churches royally ruined what the parachurches were doing. To even call what most churches do “youth ministry” is demeaning to its evangelistic heritage. Instead of youth pastors being hired to reach a high school they were hired to grow/maintain a local church. (In fact, I’ve talked to countless youth pastors who were fired for trying to reach lost students!) The lie is that a good youth ministry is about growing a church. In most cases, a youth pastor’s job is so limited and focused on the church that it’s really not about reaching lost kids at all. (Appropriate lip service is always about evangelism!) I’ve actually sat in youth ministry networks and listened to youth pastors sound satisfied that they are reaching 50-60 students with their ministry. The target isn’t a percentage of butts in seats on Sunday morning! Reaching 50 students while 1950 have never heard the gospel is a gross failure.

    True success comes when you reach and disciple brand new people for Jesus Christ! The first lie points to the fact that church-based youth ministry largely lies to itself and calls itself a success when it reaches less than 1% of students in a community. Is it the individual youth pastor’s fault? Absolutely not. It’s a design flaw worth addressing. The truly successful youth ministries in this country focus on the lost in their schools and could care less what percentage of saved church kids come to their programs.

    Questions for youth workers: Do you agree with my use of the term “lie?” If so, what are some ideas for fixing this in your context? If you don’t agree, I still love you. But I’d like to hear your push back.

    Lie #2 It’s about discipleship

    Lie #3 You have to have a youth pastor

  • Youth Ministry & Risk

    I’ve been thinking about successful youth groups vs. unsuccessful youth groups. And truth be told the exact same thought holds true for churches.

    • Successful youth groups takes measured, bold risks.
    • Unsuccessful youth groups take few risks.
    • Successful youth groups generate excitement both internally and externally.
    • Unsuccessful youth groups are boring.
    • Successful youth groups have a two-fold reaching/teaching mode.
    • Unsuccessful youth groups have a one-fold teaching model.
    • Successful youth groups have the support of the church leadership.
    • Unsuccessful youth groups aren’t sure they have the support of church leadership.
    • Successful youth groups have intentional event planning.
    • Unsuccessful youth groups have events that are based on what kids want.

    Of course, all of this comes down to “How do you measure success in youth ministry?” How do you answer that question?

  • 10 Things I Did While My Friends Were in Florida

    I mentioned this project earlier today, here is the video. I think it turned out pretty funny. What do you think?

  • Off to Shoot a Movie

    Today I’m hanging out with my favorite peeps, the cast and crew from Light Force. We’re going to conceptualize, shoot, edit, and release a movie today.

    It’s called “10 Things I Did While My Friends Were in Florida.” We’ll be driving all over the Metro area shooting all sorts of weird things. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

  • Mercy: Some practical theology here

    Last night at Light Force small groups we talked about the difference between mercy and grace.

    Grace = Getting something you don’t deserve.

    Mercy = Not getting something you deserve.

    I could see the students wrestling with this. Here are students completely covered in both. They have parents who bathe them in both on a daily basis. Yet they don’t see it. I think it goes back, for them, to a fundamental misunderstanding of what “deserve” means. They think that they deserve mercy and grace.

    I left thinking that most of the students expect to deserve grace and mercy. (By their birth they feel they have merited favor with others and even God) And I wondered how I could communicate that they don’t deserve to deserve grace and mercy better?

    What are some practical areas of grace and mercy the students in your life experience but fail to acknowledge?