Last week I directed a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children in New Jersey and took nine of my youth group students along to serve as counselors. Part of their responsibility was to teach these three Bible studies I wrote.
 

1. Who is God?
2. Bad news, good news
3. Knowing God personally

It’s geared toward children who have never heard about God before, but can just as easily be used with teenagers. The first lesson introduces the student to God and explains a little bit about what He’s like, the second covers the plan of salvation and the third shows them how they can develop a relationship with Him even after camp is over.

DOWNLOAD THIS BIBLE STUDY LESSON PACKET

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

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The longer I’m involved in vocational ministry, the more I’m convinced that ministry is should never be done from a Bible college or seminary education. This kind of ministry tends to focus on what you do, a task oriented to-do list of pulling off events, Bible studies and meetings. Instead, ministry should always be done out of a passion for God, a desire to know Him more intimately every day. Not just as desire to know more about God, but a deep craving to spend unrestricted time with Him. This kind of ministry focuses on who you are, a yearning for God that is extremely contagious and caught by those around you, not taught from a text book you read once.

I saw this over on PastorForums.com:

The traditional style of youth ministry is to have a youth pastor and a few sponsors run a youth group. They meet separately, they have their own activities.

There is another approach that is gaining popularity that plays down the group mentality, as it were, for a more parent-driven ministry. This system keeps the youth integrated with the rest of the body on the whole, and only gathers the teens together in a group once a month or so. These group meetings are very different from traditional meetings. The parents are strongly urged to attend, they play the games and hear the teaching.

The goal is to keep the parents as involved with raising/discipling their children as possible. As it is the duty of the parents to train up their children, the youth leaders strive to do nothing more than come alongside the parents and encourage them.

The problem with the traditional style is that parents are largely removed from the picture, too much so. The problem with the group-driven ministry is that not all of our kids have parents, at least not parents who attend church. How would they feel attending a youth group where everyone else’s parents participated except theirs? Maybe the same way I felt back in high school when my wrestling teammate’s parents attended all our matches, but my parents couldn’t because of Bible study conflicts. (Thankfully, that changed immediately when I confronted them about it my junior year.) I also wonder about the balance between parents being over-involved and teenagers needing gradual independence. And I’m not sure how parents are discipling their children if they’re just listening to the same lesson the kids are. And what about the kids who need a place away from home just to vent about family problems?

I’m not against the parent-driven model at all. I strongly support the whole Deuteronomy 6 approach — I’m just not sure how it should best play out practically. It seems that both approaches have downsides. There may not be an easy solution to the whole parent-participatory youth ministry. What do you guys think?

Some of you may remember back to my post that tried to help a friend of mine, Bill Scott, come up with a name for his new ministry. Well, he settled on Xtreme Youth Alliance and it launches tomorrow (Sunday) night on over 80 radio stations around the country. If it does not yet air on a station near you, you can always listen to it live at SpiritFM.com, 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM ET.

The show will be somewhat like his previous ministry’s radio show, ZJAM, featuring the latest in Christian music, interviews, teen discussions, prizes, and more. The online ministry will also be similar, providing live chat with prayer partners, daily Bible studies, forums, one-year mentorship program and podcasts. However, with the backing of the American Association of Christian Counselors, this is only the beginning of a totally unique ministry. With the AACC’s support, Xtreme Youth Alliance has the ability to grow bigger, become more effective, take more risks and reach more teenagers than ZJAM could ever have dreamed.

For now, my part in the ministry is organizing and sending out the daily Bible studies. I did this for ZJAM for three years, but I’m taking a different approach to it this time. Rather than writing all the Bible studies myself, I’ve recruited a team of teenagers from my past several youth groups who are mature believers and have a desire for God’s Word. Together, they’ll be writing the daily Bible studies for their peers, more like a Bible study by teenagers for teenagers. Any gaps that arise I’ll fill in with my own studies. So far these students have written excellent material. By the end of the show Sunday night, Bill expects to have several hundred students signed up for the Bible study and by the end of the year, I anticipate several thousand will be on the mailing list. I’m really excited to see the spiritual impact these teenagers are going to make on students around the world.

[tags]ZJAM, XTRLive, Bill Scott[/tags]

Today marks half a year of Freebie Friday, free youth ministry resources, ideas and materials offered from Life In Student Ministry every week. I still remember when the “Freebie Friday” idea came to me while I was walking home from my old church in Texas and thought, “I can provide some of my materials with no problem, but I don’t think I can keep it up over an extended period of time.” I almost let the idea drop, but I obviously decided to go through with it and now here we are at the six month mile marker and I still have resources queued up to go!

In case you joined us midway through the series or missed something, here’s a roundup of every Freebie Friday so far:

1. Icebreaker Games
2. Four Spiritual Laws seminary training materials
3. Simply Youth Ministry materials
4. “Who Is God” Bible Study talk sheets
5. “Unquenchable” youth sermon series on worship
6. Ready-to-go Lock-in materials
7. Student leadership communication packet
8. Small group leadership training materials
9. Four Spiritual Laws evangelism training
10. Free youth ministry PowerPoint game
11. Free YouTube video converter
12. 8 day devotional ebook for teenagers
13. Free seminary courses on iTunes
14. Christianity 101 Bible Lesson with PowerPoint
15. “Deal or No Deal” youth group game
16. Visitor evaluation form
17. “First Four Lunch” idea
18. “Riding the Fence” talk outline
19. 130 Youth Ministry Tips and Ideas Ebook
20. Free chapter, “Grow, Minister and Lead”
21. Student Leadership Team info packet
22. Two lessons on, “Devoting yourself to God this summer”
23. Free youth group contact management tool
24. “Evangelism for my life” teaching series
25. Dare 2 Share freebies

I’m looking forward to another six months of doing my best to equip youth workers as others have so generously equipped me.

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

[ Sign-up for other freebies and content added to this site! ]

Woah, that came up fast! I just read my one year anniversary post and a lot has changed since then.

Last Year
This time last year I recorded 30,000 visitors for the entire year. Today’s stats show about 16,000 every month, even recently forcing me to upgrade this site to a virtual private server. I also started Freebie Friday this year, ran a huge series on Issues in Youth Ministry, released an ebook and even launched my first podcast, too!

Next Year
As for what the future holds in another year of blogging, I have no idea. I anticipate having a regular podcast that will hopefully become more defined. I’d like to be a catalyst for freely sharing youth ministry resources among youth workers. Maybe another ebook will pop up, too. Who knows.

The top 10 most significant blog entries to me of this year
June 26, 2006: Church worship and icons
July 14, 2006: Growing old with you, Dana
September 12, 2006: Knowing God: relationship, not ritual
September 18, 2006: Short rant on attitudes toward church worship
September 25, 2006: Youth group reflects its church
October 9, 2006: The need for solitude in worship
November 16, 2006: Issues in Youth Ministry: What needs to change?
January 8, 2007: Stepping down from my youth ministry position
March 1, 2007: Why volunteers should always go for free
March 15, 2007: Focus on the kids who ARE there
May 7, 2007: Keeping the vision in sight, literally

What We’re Doing
For several years now I’ve taken a week every summer to fly up to New Jersey and direct a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children. It’s always a stretching experience because most of the kids have discipline and authority issues, but it’s also very rewarding because many of them have never seen stars before or a horse in real life. Even more importantly, many of them have never heard of Christ or experienced any kind of appropriate love and attention. It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get these children off the streets and offer them a different perspective on life right before they make choices that lead to drugs, gangs and prostitution.

Who’s Going
Dana and I are taking nine students from my youth group to help serve as counselors for the week. They’ll be sharing their testimonies, teaching Bible studies, leading songs and games, performing skits and mostly loving on kids. Please pray for us this week and next as we exemplify Christ’s love and give these kids the time of their lives.

Trip Updates
I’ll be text messaging updates to the front page of my youth group’s website throughout each day, so if you want the play-by-play of what’s happening on the trip, just keep your eye on www.AlexandriaYouth.com or add me as a friend on Twitter. I’m also going to do my best to upload pictures to our online photo album every night.

Vacation
Immediately following camp, Dana and I are going back to Texas and Oklahoma for her family reunion and to take some vacation time visiting old friends. So, this blog may be quieter than usual for a couple weeks except for a couple posts I have queued up to go, but, Lord willing, I’ll be back. Pray for us!

Here’s the camp team from my church, minus one girl.

[tags]Angel Tree, camp, youth group[/tags]

Apple just sent me the approval email saying that my podcast has been reviewed and is now included in iTunes. If you have iTunes installed on your computer, you can use the following link to automatically open iTunes and display my podcast. Click the “Subscribe” button in iTunes for new episodes to be automatically downloaded and included in your music library for easy syncing to your mp3 player or playback on your computer.

Subscribe using iTunes.

If you do not yet have iTunes, you can downloaded it for free.

Nigel Coates, a youth worker in Great Britain, posted a great chart comparing leaders that develop followers and leaders that develop leaders. He says this:

Is it better to develop leaders or followers? In reality most of us try to develop… “followers”, which in the long run is less effective than developing leaders.

Check out the comparison chart he posted between developing leaders vs developing followers. I need to evaluate this for myself and I’m also going to use this with my student leadership team.

Long-time readers of my blog may remember back to August of last year when I first announced my upcoming podcast. Unfortunately, life quickly changed and forced the podcast to a backburner while I settled into married life, interviewed at churches and then moved to Minnesota. I had some extra time today, though, and cranked out my very first podcast.

The future of this podcast is likely to be very random. I have ideas for different interviews, Bible studies for youth workers, ministry ideas, mission experiences, and more. So stay tuned and it’ll be fun!

Summary of “Micah 2″ podcast
It’s hard to confront specific sins in students’ lives when you’re concerned about how it might affect your relationship with them. Micah addressed sin and has a good point about the outcome.

Subscribe using iTunes.

Use the controls below to download or listen to the podcast.

 

 Micah 2 [6:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download