My favorite podcast is LifeChurch.tv’s video message series. Craig Groeschel’s teaching always challenges me spiritually and his insights into scripture align with real-life application in convicting ways. Now that I have my iPod Touch (that I got for FREE!) I watch the podcast almost every week.

A couple weeks ago I was catching up on some past messages and started watching his 4-part series called, Goin’ All The Way, that covers almost everything about love and relationships, from dating to sex to marriage. As I watched the first message titled, How to Find the One, I soon stopped what I was doing and devoted all my attention to his sermon. But then I couldn’t stop right there — I had to watch the rest of the series, which I did. Since then I’ve probably watched all four messages about five times.

I recommended the series to all of our high school small group leaders and a couple of them took me up on the suggestion. Each week they watch one of the messages on DVD then discuss it afterwards. Everyone loved it! The reports I heard about the discussions that took place were phenomenal! I highly recommend you check this series out for your youth group, for yourself, for married couples, or all of the above.

Download the series for DVD here (free site registration required)

View the series online here

Craig also has a book that goes by the same title: Going All the Way: Preparing for a Marriage That Goes the Distance. I haven’t read it myself, but I’m assuming the video series is based on his book.

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.

Comedian Thor Ramsey is doing a story on youth ministry and contacted me asking for my most humorous and/or most touching moments in youth ministry.

I have a couple great stories, but the one that stands out in my mind happened last year in the airport on our way home from a missions trip. I had the game Catch Phrase with me to help us pass the time on our flight. While standing at the luggage claim, it started beeping in my backpack. Of course, as Catch Phrase does, the beeping got faster and faster. All the strangers standing around immediately gave me nervous looks and quickly backed away! I franticly tried to dig the game out my bag and as I did so, the beeping also got louder and louder. Finally I reached it and took the batteries out so it wouldn’t beep again, but whew, I fully expected the bomb squad to tackle me at any moment! The expressions on the faces of other travelers was priceless! lol

Thor would love to hear your most humorous, dramatic and touching moments in youth ministry, too. Post ‘em in the comments below.

By guest blogger, Brandon Riley

Sell the Vision…
You can have the coolest website or forum that promotes online community, but if you fail to sell the vision to your community, it may be used only by the few that are fairly web-savvy. Helping your ministry see that these online tools are more than just ways of communicating, but are part of the culture and can be used as tools in the ministry will help them to understand the reason behind this new technology.

…To volunteers
When we first started building an online community for our students in August of 2007 I spoke with our volunteer leaders about the importance of being in the student’s world on the Internet. One thing I stressed was using their online profile information as a way into starting a conversation with them. We can in a sense be a student of students by knowing them better through the information they provide on these online profiles. Many students will (sometimes unfortunately) disclose more personal information on the Internet than they will in person.

…To students
In August of 2007 we started using a new online community platform that would allow us to also handle sign ups for our small groups, events, etc. It was a lot of work at first because we were changing the entire culture of doing things. We pushed it pretty hard in the beginning. We made a promotional video, sent home flyers, posted info on our website and had laptops in the back of our facility for students to sign up. We cast the vision as a way to stay connected with our ministry and a way to reach out to new people. One thing we did, which I think was the success to our strategy was that we forced our students to use it. We took one thing (small group sign-ups) and said, “If you want to be in a small group you need to be apart of our online community.” This worked for about 90% of our students over the course of 3-4 weeks.

Conclusion
I have found that people are sometimes skeptical when it comes to new technology or new ways of doing things. Giving them a clear understanding as to why you are using this or doing things a different way will help get them excited about these new opportunities. Don’t be afraid to stop using paper by going completely online. Yes there may be some road bumps, but in the end it will be revolutionary.

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Brandon Riley is the Technical Director of Student Ministries at Denton Bible Church in Texas and is also the Director of User Experience for Tuggle, a social network with built-in management tools for youth ministries.

By guest blogger, Brandon Riley

Just like any Christian community there has to be distinctives that make it “Christian.” Perhaps the same should be true with online “Christian” community. Is it enough to have Christians online in a Facebook group and therefore call it “community?”

As you think about building an online community for your youth group, perhaps you should be asking what makes it distinctively “Christian.” Sure the mere fact of encouraging people and asking how they are doing is good morale, but perhaps you will find this same type of morale among non-Christians as well.

As teenagers spend more and more time on the internet, how are we as youth workers going to reach them in this realm of life for them? There are four areas of focus that perhaps may be of great use in the online community as we strive to enhance “Christian” community that is already taking place in our churches.

1. Testimonies: Stories of life change and stories of being changed by God’s grace are some of the best un-tapped areas that online communities need to embrace. Often online profiles include favorite books and music but no place to include a story of life change. And granted if someone has not experienced life change and has no real testimony at this point in life, perhaps they will look at other profiles to see what this testimony thing is all about and perhaps they might even start to question where they stand with the almighty Creator.

2. Ongoing Dialog: While discussion happens at church and in small groups, the idea of discussing theology or prayer requests or culture ought to be something that Christians are in constant dialog over. As we seek to be a body of believers who not only come together once or twice a week, but are speaking and dialogging together perhaps even at midnight on the Internet about the theology behind the movie I Am Legend.

3. Involvement: Is your online group just an online group? Being on several social networks myself, I have been able to add myself to 15+ groups most of which I never look at or interact with. I simply exist within the group. Is your online community encouraging your students to sign up for things in your ministry such as small groups, praise band or the tech team? Is your online community a place for students to volunteer to go play Wii at a nursery home with the elderly?

4. New People: Does your online community welcome new people and make them feel like they are apart of something unique? Making your online community a place where members can feel welcomed and loved will be a distinctive they may not find in many online groups. Are you welcoming people as they join? Are the members starting dialog with them they
day they sign up? Perhaps students may connect online with others before even connecting in person due the walls that often come down in this relaxed environment.

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Brandon Riley is the Technical Director of Student Ministries at Denton Bible Church in Texas and is also the Director of User Experience for Tuggle, a social network with built-in management tools for youth ministries.

Time Out (by Jerry Schmoyer)

How do you react when someone refers to the youth group you lead as “your” youth group. “We’re going to Tim’s youth group tonight.” “Tim’s youth group is going on a trip…” What runs through your mind when you hear it referred to in that way? It’s OK to feel good since this is what God called you to do. You trained for it and throw your whole life into it. Yet down inside something should feel a little wrong about hearing it called “your” group or even when you call it “my youth group.” Sure, we know well enough what people mean by that term, and its OK for others to use it. The problem comes in if we start believing that, if we think of it as “my” group. We can sometimes loose perspective of whose group it really is.

Jesus says “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). We can use whatever terms we want as long as we keep foremost in our minds whose group it really is. It isn’t mine, it’s the Lord’s group. I can’t build it, only He can. We are growing the youth for Him, He is growing them through us. He is the chief shepherd, we are just the under shepherds, the ones with the awesome privilege of having a front row seat to watch Him work. Thank Him for that privilege. Enjoy your ministry. Pour yourself into it. Just always remember it is His group, His work, His church.

Scripture
Matthew 16:18, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

Ephesians 2:19-22, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

Reflect

• Do you sometimes take credit for what God is doing? Don’t steal His glory in any way!
• Do you put pressure on yourself to “do great things for God?” Try relaxing and letting God do great things through you.
• Do you ask Him to help you with your plans and program or do you report for duty and listen sensitively for His plans and leading?

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Jerry Schmoyer has been a minister in Pennsylvania for over 25 years and has worked with teenagers for 14 years, ever since I became one myself. He authors the weekly Time Out series here at Life in Student Ministry in hopes to spiritually refresh your soul as you continually pour so much of yourself into students. God bless!

Back in Bible college, everyone in one of my youth ministry classes contributed ideas to make a collection of resources for youth ministry. I honestly forgot about it until I was digging through some old folders on my computer trying to find something to give away this week. Good thing I tend not to delete stuff! What we have here are almost 300 pages of games, crafts, object lessons, illustrations, dramas, and video resources for youth ministry. Three hundred pages! And it’s all here for free. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Crafts
Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Drama
Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Games
Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Object Lessons
Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Illustrations
Youth Ministry Ideas Library: Videos

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.

Earlier this week I was interviewed by a student who is working on a Boy Scout project. His questions were about how I ended up in ministry. Later I realized I had never shared that here with you guys, so it’s story time!

In 1980 I was born to a newlywed couple living in Pennsylvania. My Dad graduated from seminary a few years before and in 1981 accepted a pastorate position at a church in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the church he still pastors to this very day. I grew up in that church and watched my Dad in ministry every day. Even at a young age, one thing became clear: I did NOT want to be a pastor. I saw a lot behind the scenes of leading a church and I had absolutely no desire to want to deal with those things myself one day. Regardless, my parents made me and my siblings help lead a lot of ministry-related aspects of the church, such as leading music, sharing testimonies, and teaching Bible studies to adults and peers. They raised us to see the church not as a place that we merely attend, but rather a place where we participate and lead others. It was a place where we had a responsibility to serve.

Being a smaller church, we didn’t have a youth group until my teen years when some other parents in the church decided to pull us together once a week for a “youth group meeting.” Looking back, I can tell that their hearts were in the right place, but the meetings actually did more to push me away from youth group than anything else. I participated because I was a P.K. and it was expected that I show my support.

The first turning point came during high school when my Dad strongly encouraged me to attend a leadership breakfast hosted by Student Venture, the high school ministry of Campus Crusades for Christ. Despite knowing absolutely no one there, Dad dropped me off at the breakfast that cold rainy morning and arranged for some Student Venture leader named Bob Klein (pictured to the right) to drive me home afterwards. It turned out that Bob wanted to get together with me again after that drive home. I don’t remember agreeing to it, but the next thing I know I was attending the weekly Student Venture meetings and spending one-on-one time with Bob. Before long, he was frequently taking me out to lunch, teaching me how to share my faith using the Four Spiritual Laws and letting me tag along with him as he witnessed to complete strangers and hung out with kids after school.

The second turning point came while I was hanging out with Bob one afternoon, watching him share his faith with a group of random students at a pizza shop hang-out. I had seen him do this many times before, so I nonchalantly sipped on my lemonade while he did his thing. About the time he would usually introduce the Four Spiritual Laws, he instead handed me the booklet and said, “Tim is going to show you how you can have a relationship with God and enjoy heaven with Him one day.” I choked on my drink! I reluctantly took the booklet, though, and went through it with them the best I knew how. Afterwards Bob debriefed with me about the experience and shortly thereafter I was helping him plan Bible lessons, outreach events and follow-up discipleship with new believers from the high school. It was through my relationship with Bob that youth ministry became contagious, almost an attitude or a way of life. He pushed me out of my comfort zone many times, challenged my faith and capitalized on the strong ministry legacy my parents had left.

Youth ministry has been part of my blood ever since. After high school, I commuted to Philadelphia College of Bible (now Philadelphia Biblical University), worked with Student Venture my freshman year until Bob was transfered to Ohio. Shortly thereafter I became an intern at a fairly large local church and in October of my sophomore year (1999) I left my Dad’s church and started working there as a small group leader and teacher, later to become the High School Director in 2001.

As many church youth ministries do, the youth group at that church really cut back a lot during the summer, relieving me of most of my responsibilities. So, rather than sit around and work a normal job that would pay for college, I took the opportunity to go away somewhere and serve in youth ministry. In 1998 and 1999 I served as a counselor at a Christian camp I attended every year as a kid. In 2000, a church in Virginia Beach actually took me, a 19-year-old kid, to serve as their interim youth pastor! The final three weeks of that summer I spent in Amsterdam working with Billy Graham’s Amsterdam 2000 evangelism training conference. When summer of 2001 came around, I had made a connection with Bill Scott of ZJam Youth Ministries in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved there to work with the radio show, write daily Bible studies, direct TeenHopeLine.com and a lot more. That’s also the summer God provided just enough money so I could pay for college the next semester and still have $0.81 left over in my bank account after I purchased books! After graduating from college, I spent the summer of 2002 directing a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children before I drove to Texas to attend Dallas Theological Seminary.

While in seminary, I served as a youth pastor at two different churches, one being a church plant that closed a year after I joined (not because of me! lol) and the other at a church where the pastor later moved to Minnesota and connected me with the youth ministry position at his new church, the position I currently hold.

All this because my parents taught me from a young age that church is a place where you serve and because an adult built a relationship with me whose passion for sharing Christ with students became contagious. If you need proof that relationships are more important than programs, here I am!

The Schmoyer Family

I lost track of how many times I wanted to send you guys a quick little message or a time-sensitive resource link without having to make a whole new blog post about it. When I have a quick question and want feedback about something, it’s not practical to spam the Inbox of the several hundred email subscribers. It feels limiting that the only form of interaction we have is through email and the comments here on the site.

So, I created a Facebook page for Life in Student Ministry that will allow us all to interact with each other more efficiently. Become a fan by clicking this link to our page on Facebook. I’ll be keeping it updated with various youth ministry videos from around the web that I don’t usually post here, so if you’re looking for youth ministry related video clips, keep your eye on the Life in Student Ministry Facebook page.

I love it that a lot of the content generated here at Life in Student Ministry is based on my interaction with you guys (or “ya’ll,” depending on where you’re from!). If you have questions or ideas for me, please contact me at any time.

One question that’s popped up several times lately is what to do when parents use church as a form of punishment and ground their kids from youth group activities. GiGi Logan, the Children’s and Youth Ministry Director at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in North Carolina, writes in an email, “…parents don’t realize that they’re teaching their kids that church is like a cell phone, TV, etc. and that’s SO NOT COOL!”

Honestly, I don’t really have a lot of advice on this subject, so I’m hoping many of you will pool your wisdom in the comments below. I’ll just make a couple observations:

1. While I’m excited that a teenager enjoys youth group enough for the parents to see it as a significant loss for their child, it’s still exactly that — a significant loss. Kids are not usually grounded from going to school because it’s both a privilege and a responsibility. Church is no different. In fact, maybe if a parent is having trouble with their kid at home they should send him or her to more church, not less. (As long as that’s not perceived as cruel punishment to the opposite extreme! lol!)

2. I’m against using church as punishment not because I’m the youth pastor and youth group happens to be “my baby.” I’m against it because the church is instituted by God and every student here is part of the body.

3. My dad is a pastor and despite my parents’ stance on enforcing church attendance over anything else, there was a time during my early teen years when they grounded me to my room for an entire month, including no church. In that case, it communicated that my punishment was a HUGE deal.

What do YOU do when a youth group student is grounded from church? Your advice on the matter is greatly appreciated.

I got this email a couple weeks ago and was encouraged by the recipient to share my response publicly. Feel free to chime in your two cents, as well. Here ya go!

We moved to a very small town in KY this summer and are attending the church my parents go to because of the people there. The problem is our daughter (6th grade) is the only youth in the church…. We tried going to a church a town over that had a youth group, but the people were not very friendly. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle the single youth church? I end up teaching her Sunday school class, like your article said about teaching the ones who are there, but it is hard to find someone willing to give up going to Sunday School to teach just one child. Do you suggest to keep trying other churches? We have suggested they hire a part time youth director (the church is inheriting a sizable sum) to find other kids in the community. Any other ideas to get other adults involved or to make sure our daughter gets the knowledge she needs? We do a devotion each night at home, but I think having other adults help with her Christian education is a good idea.

I totally understand your situation because I grew up in a church with a story similar to yours. The only difference was that I wasn’t the only teenager because I had a couple of my brothers with me.

While it’s honorable that you see the value in youth ministry and are striving to start one in your church, I must say that there’s nothing wrong with not having your daughter in a youth group. Many parents have raised their teenagers quite well without the influence of a church youth ministry. If your main reason for wanting to have a youth group is just so your daughter had some cool activities to do with some Christian friends, I’d tell you not to start it because it will probably cause you more headaches than anything else with that kind of purpose in mind (even if that purpose isn’t the one that’s explicitly stated). However, it seems that your reason for wanting a youth group is because you know that other adults can leave a big spiritual impact on your daughter’s life. That I agree with 100% because that’s how I got kick started in youth ministry in the first place. A adult from a local high school campus ministry started meeting with me for lunch, picking me up to tag along as he did normal errands and meetings, and eventually his passion for students became contagious. It’s because of that relationship that I’m in youth ministry today, not because I grew up in some dynamic youth group.

For you guys, I would recommend not pushing the youth group thing if that’s not a huge need of your church. Instead, I would push the adult relationships. If your daughter has one or two adult women she seems to enjoy and respect at church, ask those ladies if they’d be interested in spending time with your daughter outside of church. If your daughter doesn’t seem to naturally connect with any adults there, pick a couple Godly ladies yourself and talk with them about investing into your daughter. Maybe start by having a “girls night out” where you and those ladies just go do something fun together. Invite your daughter along as if she’s one of the “big girls.” As she starts to feel comfortable with them, start to back out a little and let your daughter go alone with them. Also, if you’re involved in a women’s bible study, take your daughter to that. Furthermore, find unique ways she can serve the body as the only teenager in the church in order to teach her that youth ministry isn’t just what the church does for her, but youth ministry is youth doing ministry.

Essentially, forget the youth ministry thing and pull her up to the adult ministry stuff where that eventually becomes the “youth ministry” to her. Hope that helps a little. God bless you guys!