Last night I met up with a youth ministry Twitter friend (Jonathan Telles – blog, Twitter) for dinner. We had never met in person, but we’ve been following each other on Twitter. We talked about a lot of stuff; vacation locations, ministry ideas, how-to’s for ministry, etc. It was 3 hours of getting filled up [...]

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The last church where I was a youth pastor did not support the youth program financially. One time they gave me a raise of $50/month and told me to spend it on the youth. I had to turn in receipts to show how I spent it. I have about 3 more sessions on that and [...]

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When I prepare to teach my small group, there are 4 tools I’m learning to use to help me customize the curriculum to be relevant to our ministry setting. 1. Relate my life to the material – Sometimes this requires me to dig deep, other times the connections are obvious. Either way, it’s important for [...]

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When I was a rookie in youth ministry, I felt like a failure if I couldn’t reach every student. It wasn’t as much about my ego as it was feeling a need to be everything to every student. Regardless of how much I tried, there were some students I just couldn’t make a deep connection [...]

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Many of us became youth ministry volunteers either because somebody helped us get through our teenage years or because we want to help others avoid the same mistakes we made during our adolescent years. However, many times leaders get overwhelmed by students once they start volunteering. Last year I spent a few days substitute teaching [...]

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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 [...]

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