I saw this blog post over on MoreThanDodgeball.com. I know many of us volunteers struggle with difficult students from time to time. Ideally as we get more seasoned, we get better at handling difficulties without removing students from our small groups. However, if it comes to that point, Josh has shared some great tips. Here’s [...]

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Today I walked into our high school ministry’s weekend service and saw the stage design. It was funny in an over-the-top kind of way. I can imagine a lot of youth workers getting fired for such a set. I love how Saddleback Church puts it out there.

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We’ve done a couple of series where each school will own a weekend. The students from an area school will plan and execute the entire weekend service. Each school tried to “out-do” the school that went before them. This is a pretty sweet video the students from Tesoro High School made for their weekend service. [...]

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Our high school ministry used this video as a countdown video before our weekend service this weekend. We’re in a two-week series on sex. The guy in the video is Chip, one of our high school volunteers. Pretty priceless!

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Tonight a high school ministry leader asked for some advice. Here’s the situation and my thoughts. I’d love to know what you think. Please post a comment if you have something to share. Basic details: – Female student stopped coming to small group – Won’t return phone calls – Weeks later when a leader has [...]

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Sarah and I have talked several times about her struggle to balance lesson time and prayer time in her small group. Her girls want to go deep into the lesson, but also love to talk about their prayer requests before they pray. It’s all good stuff, but there’s never enough time to do both as [...]

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We screened this movie at Saddleback Church. It’s got a little bit of bad language and the party scenes are a little uncomfortable in the church setting. However, the message of the movie is great. I recommend seeing it before taking your students just to make sure it isn’t too over the top for your [...]

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Sarah (one of our small group leaders) makes personal birthday cards for her girls. This week three of her girls had birthdays. Here are two of the cards she made. I love it. It’s super creative a great memory maker and shows her girls how much she cares by investing her time.

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This weekend and next Doug Fields is teaching a series on sex at our high school ministry. In preparation for that, I chose to lead a small group discussion on relationships this week in small group. To prepare for a great discussion, I developed an online poll using PollDaddy.com. This worked as a great discussion-starter [...]

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