Actually, it’s both. I’ve been doing Freebie Fridays here for a while now, but Adam Mclane also gives away free youth ministry stuff every Monday through his site, YMexchange.com. This week he’s giving away a 6-part teaching series on prayer:

This 6-Part Teaching Series is based on the Lord’s Prayer and includes a discussion starter activity and series of questions. We suggest using this as the launching pad! Take these notes, add to them, and customize them for your group!

Download the 6-part teaching series on prayer

Also be sure to check out all the other free stuff while you’re there. You’ll probably wanna subscribe to their RSS feed, too, so you can feast on their latest materials every Monday.

Thanks for sharing, Adam!

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! ]

Last week Ypulse posted an article about AT&T censoring a webcast with the band Pearl Jam due to some of their political statements. I guess it makes sense if you don’t want people to possibly associate your company with the political content you’d be distributing, but it doesn’t sound like young people are taking the censorship too lightly. In the article, Anastasia says this:

What pisses off young people? Feeling like someone in authority is making decisions for them about what they can or can’t do or what they can or can’t hear, especially when it’s a corporate entity.

So what happens when a guy visits youth group using language that would make Jerry Springer blush? Or a girl wearing a see-through shirt? It seems to me that there’s a difference between enforcing rules and censorship at youth group.

RULES: There have to be some basic standards in order just to function properly. Rules are a part of life no matter where you are and enforcing them is important to maintain stability. But neither do I expect unbelievers to act like manicured little church people. The balance for me is holding believers to a standard of accountability for appropriate Christian living, a standard that obviously does not apply to unbelievers. Unbelievers are free and encouraged to be themselves unless, as an ongoing pattern, it distracts or hinders ministry that would otherwise take place to everyone else. I will not continually sacrifice ministry to a group of students for the sake of one. So, asking a guy to stop using excessive foul language or asking a girl to wear another shirt at youth group is appropriate and necessary.

CENSORSHIP: A girl in your small group starts sharing about her parents’ recent divorce. As she shares, emotions are heightened and before long she’s crying and pouring her guts out about how intensely she hates her father. Or a high school guy tells people that he doesn’t like what you’re doing with the youth group. In either case, suppressing students’ opinions and feelings or even ignoring them altogether will have a very negative affect. At my youth group, I hope kids feel that there is nothing we can’t talk about. Nothing is off-limits. Every subject matter is fair game.

It’s OK to enforce rules, it’s not OK to censor kids.

1. Attention Youth Ministers - Don’t get up on the Deep End (Some great encouragement for youth pastors)

2. Tips for starting a worship band (Good stuff for not only starting a praise band, but to ensure that it continues successfully.)

3. The failure of youth ministry (By Mike Yaconelli. Current youth ministry models should probably be scrapped and approached differently from the ground up. Found via polemos blog)

4. What Harry has to say about youth ministry (An object lesson about youth ministry taken from the Harry Potter series.)

I think I missed the memo that during the past two weeks youth ministry bloggers were supposed to write about teenagers leaving the church, especially as related to Lifeway’s recent study. There’s a lot of coverage out there!

5. LifeWay Research Uncovers Reasons 18 to 22 Year Olds Drop Out of Church (From Lifeway)

6. Why Young Adults Drop Out of Church and What We Can Do to Stem the Tide (From Lifeway)

7. Parents, Churches Can Help Teens Stay in Church (From Lifeway)

8. Preventing young adult, church, drop out (Ron Klabunde’s summary of the Lifeway research. If you skip Lifeway’s articles, check this out.)

9. Study eyes why youths quit church (Looks like relationships and frequent contact are the keys to reversing the statistics.)

5. Thou shalt invest into students lives on an individual basis. Don’t assume someone else is doing it or that the student doesn’t really want it. Even in larger youth groups, pick a couple kids and pour your life into them. If critics arise who accuse you of playing favorites, remember it’s better to give a few students individual godly attention than no one at all. Don’t let the fear of critics paralyze your ministry. And if, in a worst case scenario, there are kids who are jealous and demand for your time, that’s great! Bring ‘em on! Ensure that volunteers are doing the same with everyone else. Whatever you do, don’t get so wrapped up in administrative crud that there’s no time for personal time with kids. They don’t care what you do in the office all day or if your Sunday school lesson isn’t too deep this week. If your actions don’t prove that you have a personal interest in them, they won’t be listening anyway.

Ever distribute promotional materials only to realize too late that you forgot to include a vital piece of information? Here’s a checklist that will hopefully help you avoid that.
 
 

Free event flyer checklist
 
 

(ht to Josh)

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! ]

…is that they’re rarely an outreach. I plan something fun, exciting, promote it as an evangelistic event and encourage students to bring their pre-Christian and non-churched friends for an opportunity to get to know us and hear the gospel, but when the event actually takes place, how many non-youth group kids are actually present? Zero or one. Yeah ok, some may argue that “even if only one soul is won for Christ, then it’s worth it” and I don’t disagree with that, but the point is, out of 100-some students who attend, why don’t we see at least 50 pre-saved and non-churched kids being invited? When an outreach event idea is proposed, I often ask the students, “Is this something you’d feel comfortable inviting your pre-saved friends to?” Even when I get a resounding “YES!” the actual results seem to indicate otherwise.

Why don’t our church kids invite their pre-Christian friends to come to these events? Is it a communication problem? Is it a vision issue? Is it a heart issue? Is it a value system? Or is it completely the wrong approach to evangelism? Maybe I’m making it too easy for them?

Somehow my approach to evangelism in our ministry needs to change. My natural inclination is to bypass my church kids altogether and just go straight to where the pre-saved kids are, but neither do I want to dismiss my church kids from the process of evangelism. My role is not to do it for them, but somehow to teach them and do it with them.

I know my ministry is not the only one that struggles with this. What insights can you all provide? How has evangelism been effective for your groups? What can you all recommend for me and others in my situation?

4. Thou shalt get to know parents. The more respect and trust the parents have for you, the more you’ll be able to do (and get away with!) in ministry. You’ll also create many opportunities for parents to share struggles and insights about their teenagers that will greatly benefit your ministry to those individuals. Prove yourself to be someone who cares about the family as a whole, not just the kids. Start conversations when parents drop off their kids or when they pick them up, even if you have to run out to the car to do so. Then, when a difficult time hits that family, they’ll know who they come to and trust. Likewise, when a difficult time hits your ministry, they’ll know your heart and you’ll have their support.

I’M THE 9TH MOST POPULAR TIM ON GOOGLE
My blog stats are so funny sometimes. People find me through all sorts of random search queries ranging from “teen girl pics” to “why my parents grounded me from world of warcraft” (no joke!). The other day I noticed someone found me by searching Google for “tim.” Turns out I’m at the bottom of the first page, ranked as the #9 Tim on Google, right below Tim McGraw. Now that’s status.

…in case anyone cared to know.

And while I’m posting random stuff, check out these videos:

WHY EXERCISE IS BAD FOR YOU

TIC & MARKO’S LESS THAN SUCCESSFUL RESPONSES

(from the YS CORE ‘07 training notes)

My youth group has been a subscriber of Interlinc for several years now, so they’ve accumulated quite a large Christian music library. It used to be made available for students to borrow CDs, but apparently several problems arose: 1) CDs were lost, broken, scratched or not returned; 2) Kids just ripped them to their iPods and returned the CD. Granted, I’ve only been at this church for about 6 months now, so I’m not too familiar with the old system that was in place, but nonetheless it ceased to exist by the time I arrived. Rather than letting hundreds of CDs go to waste, I devised my own plan.

Inspired by all the positive response to my post on Simplify Media, I found Jinzora, a free open-source web-based music jukebox. In my true geek-like fashion, I set it up on my church’s server and integrated it into my youth group’s website where the students can now stream their favorite Christian music 24/7. No more checking out CDs, losing them under the bed or copying them several times over.

Click the screen shot below for a clearer picture of what it looks like. Nice, eh?

(Sorry, the library is available only to manually approved members of my church’s youth group.)

10 ways to entertain young children for $1 or less without the TV (Funny, all of them will entertain me for hours, too!)

Things to look for in youth ministry volunteers (Ken forgot to mention that they have to be young and cool… oh wait, no they don’t.)

5 things youth ministers don’t want you to know (My own addition: I secretly laugh on the inside when your middle school kid publicly, but innocently, says something embarrassing about you and your family.)

Overwork and Youth Ministry (Not just another “burnout” post, this one talks about overworking volunteers and rethinking our approach youth group activities.)