Tag: youth ministry

  • I like Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream

    Currently, Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is top 10 on iTunes. It’s huge. And I am not ashamed to admit that when it pops up on my iTunes I listen to it 3-4 times in a row.

    While I’m sure most youth workers groan when they hear this song… I take a totally different perspective.

    I want this to be my students dream, too.

    Well, not exactly— since the video leaves a lot to the imagination. Here’s what I mean by “I want this to be my students dream, too.”

    • I want my students to have a fun, audacious, spontaneous, and exciting sex life. (Until they get married- “Pre-sex lives.”)
    • I want them to fall in love and be happy with that person for a long time. I want their love life to be fun, like a teenage dream.
    • I want them to fall in love early in life. I want them to grow up (meaning, take full responsibility for themselves) and get married ASAP. I believe we’re creating a self-fulfilling prophesy that they aren’t ready when they are.

    Perhaps the reason this song speaks to so many people is because we tell people to wait too long for this type of relationship? Perhaps there was no room in our lives at 18 or 19 years old for a no-regrets love affair? Perhaps our parents scared us out of teenage dreams with statistics about divorce and telling us we needed to go to college first?

    But this dream, I believe, is quite similar to God’s desire for us. The Bible is clear about sex before marriage. But it is equally clear about early marriage.

    I just know when I watch this video I think about my relationship with Kristen. We were almost 19 when we met. We took lots of walks on the beach. (aka- free dates) Outside of the motel line– that video was us! Our parents both told us we were too young and we ignored them. (Just like they ignored their parents warnings!)

    When we got married at 21 we fulfilled the dreams of this video and it was great. (Though, Kristen grew up baptist so skin tight jeans were out of the question.)

    My prayer for youth ministry is that we are crazy enough to tell our students and their helicopter parents that they need to have teenage dreams for themselves. I pray that we become culture creators and truth tellers in such a way that gives our society a wake-up call. Teenage Dreams isn’t shameful. We would not exist as a people if it weren’t for generations of teenage dreamers. We don’t need to shame teenagers from their sexuality, we need to teach them appropriate ways to embrace it.

  • 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.

  • You are Youth Ministry

    I really like this promotion for the Dallas diocese. It’s well done and draws me in.

    Not sure where this will be shown, but I really dig it.

    ht to D. Scott Miller

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 4 Types of Youth Ministry Teachers

    Teaching is a core competency for youth ministry. If you’re going to make it… you had better be an above average communicator of God’s Word. Titus 1:9 gives a simple description of a ministry overseer that is tough to escape:

    “He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.”

    As I chat with professional, full-time youth workers around the country I think I can categorize most of them into basic 4 categories. Forgive the generalizations. It’s not clean and I think people hop in and out of different categories at different parts of the school year and their life cycle in ministry. I think I’ve been all of these at various times in my life.

    4 Types of Youth Ministry Teachers

    1. The artist: These people consider their teaching a craft. In their eyes, their lessons are as much art as a photographer, an architect, or a ballet dancer. They spend countless hours lost in crafting their teaching series, messages, etc. These folks look down on those who buy resources. Though, they may buy stuff occasionally for inspiration.
    2. The time manager: These people understand and were maybe once “the artist.” But they don’t have time for that anymore. They look at their role as a teacher a task and they want to prepare quickly. They are always on the look-out for a quick idea. They love ministry resources, video curriculum, and have a mantra that if they spend a little money on a resource that they’ll spend more time with students and less time preparing lessons.
    3. Copycats: These folks are always looking for someone else’s idea. It’s all equal in the Jesus economy, right? They listen in 6-8 sermons a week to glean ideas… not be taught, they love free downloads and hunt them, and they are always trying to take something someone else did and tweak it for their own use. They may not have many of their own ideas in play, but they’ll also be the first people to label their ministry as “very creative.“
    4. Processors: These youth workers believe that their teaching will be better when they work through the content as a team. So they draft concepts and have a team of friends/volunteers look at it. By the time a lesson is taught, it has gone through 4-5 levels of revision. These people love their process.

    Here’s the kicker. I don’t think any of them are necessarily better or worse than the others. I think they all have a place. And I think each category can lead you to be a better-than-average communicator of biblical truth to adolescents.

    Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that much which process you use. It matters far more that the message/teaching/lesson is delivered in a way it is absorbed than it is how the message/teaching/lesson was produced.

  • Go and Do Discipleship Model


    [video link]

    My view of discipleship has radically changed in the last two years. I’m increasingly convinced that my role as a shepherd to high schoolers is about putting them in moments of spiritual crisis so that they recognize that they need to learn more from God’s Word.

    This is in stark contrast to my previous model. Before I spent way too much time preparing them to do ministry and giving them information that just didn’t seem relevant to their walk with Jesus yet. The more I turn that upside down, putting them in situations where they know they need to learn more, the faster they grow up. When you couple that with my desire to see students take greater responsibility for themselves earlier in life… you start to see a new view of what we used to call a “description of a discipled person.”

    As more time goes on I see my role in disciple-making less as a manager of a program and more as a curator of the spiritual life. (see Richard Dunn’s pacing concept in Shaping the Spiritual Life of Students for that concept.)

    Here are the three links mentioned in the video:

  • Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde
  • Teens 2.0 by Dr. Robert Epstein
  • Inward, Outward, and Beyond’s “New Heights Project“

    • I’d love your feedback and thoughts as I work this out in my life and ministry.

  • Jesus Calls the Ordinary to Do the Extraordinary

    Tonight I have the fun opportunity to talk to a group of interns from our churches New Heights Project.

    Basically, we hire high school students from our community to a month-long leadership development internship in which they go through a couple weeks of preparation and a couple weeks of doing children’s outreach. It’s a bit funky, which is what I like about it, but one aspect I love is that we don’t just hire students from our youth group. Ultimately, the group is made up of both Christian and non-Christian students alike who spend weeks learning and telling other kids about the Gospel. And in the process we hope that they have ample opportunity to explore a relationship with Jesus and perhaps trust Christ with their lives.

    Yes, we really do have students who don’t even profess Christ asking other people to profess Christ! Hey, if God can talk through a donkey… [See Hyde’s Dedication and Leadership for more on this principle.]

    At any rate, here’s the notes for my talk. Feel free to use this as a jumping off point on your own talk from Matthew 16. (Um, please let me know if you plan on publishing these somehow. Didn’t think I needed to say that… but then I find my words in weird places!)

    If you don’t know me in person, this is kind of a home base talk for me. It communicates a lot of my story and my vision for what God is calling each of us to do.

    Download File[download id=”7″]

  • What is NYWC all about?

    I have the coolest job in youth ministry. I get to do what I love, connecting with youth workers around the world and I get paid for it!

    At the core of it this video demonstrates the 2 things I love most about working at YS.

    1. Tic lays out the heart of why we do the National Youth Workers Convention. This is really the heart of YS. We do all of this to minister to youth workers… that’s why it is worth it to us.
    2. I get to work with amazing people. Setting aside the amazing people I get to connect with outside of YS as part of my job, I have gotten to work day-by-day with some amazing heroes of youth ministry. These folks continue to be a daily inspiration to me.

    When we were shooting this video (ht to Ian) I just kept thinking about those two things.

    Dang, I am fortunate.

    And dang, I want to be a part of carrying on this legacy.

  • Good News for High School Students

    I’m always at odds with this reality:

    If Jesus offers good news, what is it about how we do youth ministry that is only attractive to 1% – 2% of the high school students on our campus?

    That always lead same  to a place where I say, “I don’t think we’re doing this right just yet.”

    • Good news spreads like wild fire.
    • Good news is unstoppable.
    • Good news releases energy.
    • Good news releases joy.
    • Good news is contagious.

    In 1994, as a high school senior our basketball won the Indiana state basketball championship. If you’ve seen the movie Hoosiers than you get a glimpse of how important this is to the state of Indiana. It’s a really big deal. Not only do the finals fill the RCA Dome, the same building which hosts the NCAA Final Four, it is a much bigger tournament as every high school in the state got a chance to enter the tournament. So as the final seconds ticked off the clock in overtime and our team was up 93-88… the student body of Clay High School collectively lost it. We poured onto the court. We screamed and danced. And then when we got kicked off of the court we ran around the inside of the stadium screaming, chanting, bouncing, skipping, and dancing! And then we got kicked out of the RCA Dome and we literally just ran through the streets of downtown Indianapolis screaming, chanting, bouncing, skipping, dancing, and stopping traffic to tell them, “We won!”

    That was good news worth celebrating. It unleashed unstoppable joy. It was universal on our campus. It was even universal in our city as everyone felt good about this good news!

    If youth ministry were good news to the high school students on our campus.. you’d see this same unstoppable release of joy. It’d be nearly universal. Even those who didn’t embrace it would be excited it. Good news is worth celebrating, dancing, and running through the streets for.

    I know it. You know it. 1% – 2% of people running through the halls… that’s just creepy!

    The only question is, are we will to think and dream of ways to be good news to our campus so they might desire to hear Good News?