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April 23, 2010 Great news! My sister had her scan yesterday and the tests came back saying that she is free of cancer! They might even take the chemo port out. They had planned to leave it in for 6 months just in case the cancer made a comeback. Thanks everybody for your prayers! Dennis [...]

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While I don’t wish bad on anybody, I’m happy the volcano eruption in Iceland has kept my youth ministry friend, Soeren, here from Germany for a few more days. He served as an intern for our High School Ministry at Saddleback Church several years ago. Since then, he returns twice a year for a few [...]

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One of my pastor’s mantras is, “God never wastes a hurt.” This morning I witnessed this first hand hearing my mom talk to her cousin. If you’re a regular reader of VolunteerYouthMinistry.com, you’re aware that my sister is on the mend from Lymphoma. My mom has a cousin who was diagnosed yesterday with the same [...]

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I’m on my way back from a week-long mission trip in New Mexico with our high school students at Saddleback Church. I’m anxious to unpack the experiences, observations and what I learned this week. There will be lots of blog posts coming. A couple of them will include videos of games we played. You might [...]

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One of the many great benefits of living in Southern California is all of the TV shows we can visit for free. Today, youth worker friends Jonathan and Jennifer Telles took me and a friend (Soeren Koch – youth worker from Germany) to the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal. We had a great [...]

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My brother Chris passed away Easter Sunday, March 30, 1997 While the grieving ended several years ago, I wanted to honor him today in a way that would keep his memory alive a little bit longer. Chris was the daredevil of the family. This picture was taken just a couple of months before he passed [...]

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Today I scheduled my first event to meet with volunteer youth workers. I’m looking forward to meeting with youth ministry leaders in Riverside, California later this month. It’s amazingly fun to talk about youth ministry with fellow youth workers. I can’t get enough of exchanging ideas and bits of wisdom we’ve learned along the way. [...]

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- Helping a student work through his doubts and issues toward spiritual health – The phone call from a student who trusts me enough to ask for help – Getting an invitation to a student’s event when the paid youth staff don’t – When a student who blew off my advice comes back in frustration [...]

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Thanks to the growing readership of this blog, I’m starting to get requests to train volunteer youth workers. While it’s an enormous honor to be asked, it also means I need to write some training sessions. I’ve got 16 year’s worth of youth ministry experience and conferences up in my head, and tons of material [...]

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