Lesson Helpers: iPhone & iTouch Youth Workers Need This Free Application

Search in Applications for YouVersion. You can download the free Bible. It’s incredibly useful. You can search by verse or keyword. You can even bookmark your verses for the night and click on each verse as you need it. You can even teach your small group students to use it. God’s Word will be more [...]

The Power of a Good Word

A friend of mine operates a pretty well-known youth ministry blog (MoreThanDodgeball.com). A few days ago he liked one of my blog posts and put a link from his blog to mine. See the affect it had on my webstats in the graphic below. It’s not difficult to guess which day he posted the link. [...]

Ministry Lessons: Don't Let 'Em Off The Hook

One of my students sent a note to me today saying that he couldn’t make it to small group tonight. He was pretty vague in his explanation, but it had something to do with showing his parents his grades. He said his grades were fine, but there was some issue. My note back to him [...]

Great Note From A Former Student

I love getting notes from students about what they’re doing in ministry, about how I’ve impacted them or about the good ole days. By sharing these on my blog, I hope these “trophies” can be an inspiration to a youth worker who is new, discouraged in ministry, or doesn’t feel “qualified”. I had a pretty [...]

Facebook Ministry

In the past few weeks I’ve become a Facebook user. It’s been great because I’ve reconnected with long-lost friends and friended many current friends and students. As great as that is, it’s pretty typical for what I would expect to happen. However, what I didn’t expect is the ministry angle of Facebook. Last night I [...]

A Little About You

I’d love to know a little about you and how this blog may be useful to you. Can you please take 5 seconds to answer these poll questions? View Poll If you would like to contribute to this blog or give suggestions, please e-mail me at dennisbeckner@gmail.com or comment on this post.

Calling All Volunteer Youth Workers

Hey fellow youth workers, My passion in youth ministry is to not only be a great volunteer to my students, but to also help create community among volunteers so we can learn from each other, encourage one another and challenge each other. I would love to hear from you through either comments on my posts [...]

Lesson Helpers: Cutting Up My Lesson Plan

I am very aware of the need for students to share in small group. I try my best to get them to talk more than I do. I have so many stories and pieces of helpful advice for almost anything my students can say. It’s a fight to keep myself from dominating the small group [...]

Lesson Helpers: Using My Graduates

The point of this blog entry is to point out that even though students have graduated from your ministry and may be hundreds of miles away, they can be very important to your ministry. How Graduates Can Help (even from afar) College students can reinforce your message in a way you are trying to communicate [...]

Traditions

Traditions are an important part of my ministry to students. They create anticipation for my boys as they look forward to an event, build community, and help increase the value of my ministry in the life of the student, that student’s family and to the ministry I serve. When they look back on their high [...]