All About the Heart and Soul of YouthWorkers (and we're obviously doing some redesign)
As Youthworkers, have we really thought about the implications of Conversion? Have we considered Conversion God’s work? Have we tried to take God’s place to manipulate young people? Do we even have a plan for what comes next the day after Conversion? “To have a conversion experience is nothing much. The real thing is to…
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“You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.” Psalm 91:1-2 Once upon a time the church’s responsibility was to raise moral beacons in communities throughout the world. In…
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I’m having a hellish month of scheduling, which means I’m not able to process life events in real time. For example, last Monday I got to spend breakfast explaining to my 4 & 6 year old boys how mommy was going to go to the doctor because some stuff was broken inside. They needed to…
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What does “Spiritual Generativity” mean? In the simplest terms, it’s the passing on of our faith tradition from one generation to the next. If youth are always separated from the rest of the life of the church – how will they learn what it means to be the church as adults? How do we in…
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Sociologist of Youth Ministry – Melinda Denton Last month I asked one of the lead researchers from the National Study on Youth and Religion if theology mattered when it came to differentiating between ‘highly-religious’ teens and ‘not-as-religious’ teens. Melinda Lundquist Denton’s response was: “Theological particularity is somewhat lost at least on this generation (we don’t have data…
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Thank you to our special guest contributors, Jake and Melissa Kircher from We Love Our Youth Worker for this article. People who work in youth ministry often struggle with the concept of rest. There’s always kids to Facebook or text, phones buzzing, paperwork to do, trips to plan, parents to calm, meetings to attend, and…
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In African cultures a common greeting between people from a tribe not their own would be “How are the children?” The idea behind that gesture is that if the children are doing well then the village/tribe is reflective of that wellness. We do similar as you meet an old friend or extended family member they,…
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This article was originally published November 15, 2011. It goes without saying that youth ministry is always changing. (Oops. Well, it would have.) I grew up in the land of the forgotten nightmares of Unsafe Sanctuaries. “Chubby Bunny” was the least of our worries. Our adults were encouraged to take kids off alone; we’d go…
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We spend an awful amount of time focusing on how to avoid conflict and job-related stress and in doing so we’re ignoring a percentage of our audience that clearly wants to get fired. If you’re floundering around getting close to termination but not quite pulling it off, this one is for you. Don’t be too…
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Gracing the cover of this month’s National Geographic magazine is “The New Science of the Teenage Brain,” a headline the result of years of research on teenage brain development. It attempts to answer the age-old question about teenage risky behavior, “What on Earth was he doing?” As a person who works with and loves teenagers, what…
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On average, youthworkers can probably be most easily summed up as “the person that drove the van to Six Flags.” It’s an average; there’s a lot of good, smart work being done on one side of that median description and a lot of inept efforts that lost the church credit card and forgot to buy…
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Last night our youth did another night of 3 Questions, a conversational family program I started this year. (If you’re unfamiliar with the format for 3 Questions, you can read about it [HERE].) One of the questions asked by the dads in the room was, “What about life is too hard for teens and what…
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I Blew It. (sky-punch.) Owning your mistakes is a hard, hard business. Depending upon your ministry context, your large and small failures probably have a variation of immediate impact, eventual consequences, or, most mysteriously, the occasional ability to dissolve and vanish completely. “We never did find that 9th grader at Six Flags, but oddly enough…
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ARTICULATING FAITH: Thoughts on “What do you believe? American Teenagers, Spirituality, and Freedom of Religion,” a video by Sarah Feinbloom Written by Amy Valdez Barker “A compelling educational peacemaking film without being didactic, sectarian, or doctrinaire. Every public school, congregation and youth program in the country should have a copy of it.” Rev.…
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Having done a dumb thing or three in Youth Ministry over the years has led me to consider 3 Simple Ways NOT to start Youth Group in the fall. Maybe you’ve been there, maybe you just did this, or maybe you are about to do this and I can save you a future confessional moment.…
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This article was originally published October 4, 2011. One of my … [Read More...]
The Life of a Disciple in the World 7 Deadly Sins Session 7: Lust- … [Read More...]
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