The Problem: Each week at our program, The Landing, we have a few students who stay outside during large group time, then go to small group. No amount of encouragement has brought them consistently inside. The Solution: We haven’t fully figured out a solution, yet, but I think we took a big step closer last [...]

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At The Landing, I’m hearing some rumbling among some of the leaders of a specific gender to remain unnamed that their groups are struggling with crosstalk and not having enough time for each student to share. Being a guy, that means I’m a problem solver – a fixer if you will. I bought these timers [...]

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I LOVE traditions, rights of passage, etc. I believe it’s a great way to build anticipation for students from one year to the next. When I saw this post over at GenToGenYM.com, I had to share it. Good job Steven! This might be my new first night of small group tradition in future years. Every [...]

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I got this text from a student this morning. It’s one of those “pass the torch”, feel-good moments in youth ministry. When he was in my small group, we’d open the group by having each person sharing a chem (good thing from their week) and phlegm (something they wish had gone differently). This idea actually [...]

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Here’s a text message I sent to a student today to let him know I’m thinking about him. It’s kind of goofy, but it speaks love into his life. I’ll never use this with any other student because it would shave off the impact with Kyle. I will, however think of goofy things to text [...]

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Back to school time is a great and natural time for those of us running ministries to attract students to check us out. Since I run The Landing at Saddleback Church, this has been on my mind a lot lately. Here’s what we’re up to: Our Junior High Ministry (Wildside) is going to do a [...]

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I had this idea to take s’mores to the next level by using Pop tarts instead of graham crackers. It was so good that I had to share the idea here. Go and do likewise! PS: Thanks for reading VolunteerYouthMinistry.com!

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I used this a couple of times last week at high school summer camp. “You’re not in trouble, but…” is the perfect medium I’ve found between the lands of Knuckleheadville and You’reawesomeistan. When student isn’t really being “bad”, you just need him to take a break from driving everybody crazy, we too often resort to [...]

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When one of my boys gets his license, they pick me up for lunch & I buy. Today is Sean’s turn! Woo!

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Steven turns 18 on Friday. However, he’s sick so he couldn’t come to small group this week. We weren’t going to let that get in the way of celebrating his birthday. Since we didn’t have WiFi, we used a free application called Tango to video chat with him and give him a little birthday love. [...]

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