We all have students who are down in the dumps about their lives from time to time. Since the beginning of summer I’ve been reaching out to a Freshman student in our ministry. He’s a great guy, but feels his life is pretty tough. Over the past few weeks he’s been opening up to me [...]

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While reading through my curriculum the other day I decided to take only the scripture and read through it with my students without the curriculum questions. We’d read a section and discuss it until they didn’t have anything else to say and then move on to the next section. They ate it up. We were [...]

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Ever been on a webpage and seen something blog-worthy? Now there’s a button you can add to your browser to add videos, text or images from that page directly to your WordPress blog. Worpress bloggers should check this out. It’s awesome. When logged into WordPress, click the Tools menu on the lower left side of [...]

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I love taking a week off work to help with trips with my youth ministry. In a week with students, I can do more youth ministry time-wise than I can by leading small groups all year long. It’s so great to lead students especially through spiritual breakthroughs that typically happen on events like this. However, [...]

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I LOVE blog statistics. It shows me what people are interested in reading. I don’t know that it affects my writing topics so much because I write what’s on my mind that I think will be useful to others. It is, however, fun to see what pique’s people’s interest. Here’s what they look like today: [...]

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I’ve stepped up my challenge to my guys spiritual growth lately. I’m pushing them to think about their faith and what impact it’s having in and through their lives. By challenging them I’ve also been challenged. I can’t expect them to take me seriously if I’m not doing the things I’m pushing them to do. [...]

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This week in small group I challenged my students to evaluate their spiritual lives for homework. I’ve started giving them tasks to do on their own. I want them to learn to grow spiritually on their own before they leave my small group. I finally decided that I need to give them something to help [...]

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The other night we had hot chocolate and cookies at the beginning of our small group. It was funny because the water was amazingly hot. We couldn’t drink the hot chocolate for a while and we all ended up with scalded tongues. I told them that when they woke up the next morning with a [...]

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I read a book last summer by Andy Stanley entitled Communicating For A Change. I highly recommend it. The main point of the book is that your message only needs one memorable life-changing point to be effective. It’s genius. Tonight that principle came into play as I taught small group. I only made it about [...]

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