Someone recently emailed me with some good questions about my youth group’s vision to go Deep and Wide. Thought I’d share them with you here, along with my responses.

1. What difference has the deep and wide program made to your youth ministry on the ground compared to any program you used before?

Going “deep and wide” is not a program. Taking kids “deep and wide” is our mission statement, purpose statement, core values, strategy, and our philosophy all in one simple vision for teenagers. It directs and determines our programs, the content we teach, the relationships
we build, and every other aspect of our ministry, but it is not a program.

2. What are the positive (and negative) you could share with me about it?

There’s really nothing negative about it. It follows Jesus’ commission to “go into all the world” (go wide) and “teach them to obey everything I have commanded” (grow deep). It’s also the great commandment to “love the Lord your God” (grow deep) and “love your neighbor as yourself” (go wide). Everything is wrapped up in those two inseparable aspects of Christianity: worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism, missions, everything.

If you want to read more about it, Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share Ministries) wrote a thesis on it that goes into more detail.

3. One concern I have about the material is [your] use of the word “push” which could potentially have negative connotations in terms of “pushing” young people to make a commitment. Maybe this is a difference in our theologies but there have been several ministries…over the years (of which I was involved in one as a young person) that have “pushed” young people and for many this has had long term negative fallout. I agree that we ought to be hastily encouraging young people to have relationship with Jesus and to share it, but I am keen for that relationship to be long term. Do you have any thoughts?

I understand your hesitation with the word “push” and I agree with what you’re saying. Too many churches are very passive when it comes to encouraging teens in their faith. We think that if we talk with them once a week at church for an hour about it, then that’s sufficient to help them grow. But in comparison to everything else in their life — academics, athletics, band, family, relationships, whatever — they are definitely pushed. There are expectations and boundaries for each of those things that are much more rigorous than what we expect of teens spiritually. Mormons, for example, expect their kids to go to seminary for classes every day early in the morning before school and the Mormon drop-out rate is almost 0! We barely expect that they show up at youth group.

So, when I use the word “push” I mean we need to raise the standards and expectations of spiritual growth in kids lives. According to my theology, we are all naturally sinful and rebel against the things of God. Pursuing Him does not come natural for any of us. That’s why it requires some gentle, sometimes forceful, pushing. In my experience, never has a kid rebelled against that. In fact, they always rise to the challenge and start seeing Christianity as something more than just a wussy thing on Sunday mornings.

The kids who are spiritually apathetic need to be challenged the most. Jesus said, “teaching them to OBEY everything I have commanded.” Sometimes we have to challenge kids to just try what Jesus commands in an area of their life, and as they see that it really works, that this
is real and not just old Bible stuff, they start to become more interested. As they continue to obey and follow the Lord and see Him at work in their lives, then they move to becoming more excited about their faith and then passionate. That doesn’t mean teens (and even myself) don’t fluctuate spiritually, just that we are striving to obey the Lord in every area of our life.

Ultimately, you’ll have to be sensitive to how much you “push” a kid. It’s different for every teenager. Some need a lot of accountability, challenges, and follow-up. Some only need to be “pushed” once.

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I don’t do alter calls or invitations to come forward or anything, but I do make sure that I point every youth group lesson back to the gospel for several reasons.

1. It’s the foundation of everything else in scripture. In fact, we wouldn’t even have scripture in the first place if it wasn’t for the gospel. It’s the core, the hub, the center of everything we teach. Everything is dependent on the gospel. No matter what subject, issue, or passage you’re teaching, it all ties back to the gospel message. Don’t believe me? Watch Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv do it with almost every message he preaches.

2. I’m not naive enough to think that all my youth group kids have made a decision to trust Christ. Actually, often the very opposite is often true. The church kids are the ones who are the most immune to the gospel. They mentally check out thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve heard this part before.” That’s why it’s important to always tie every lesson back to the gospel! I’ve found that some teens listen to my lesson just to try to figure out how I’m going to make the connection at the end. When I get there I explain the gospel in a way that’s relevant to the lesson we just discussed. In this way it doesn’t become redundant for them, but instead they get the gospel from a new angle every week.

3. The more my kids hear the Gospel, the more clear it is for them, the easier it is for them to share it with someone else, and the more confident they feel when doing so. When I do one-on-one discipleship with teen guys, one of the questions I always ask is, “If you had 30 seconds to share the gospel with someone right before they died, what would you say?” It’s surprising to me how many good, solid church kids have a perspective of soteriology that is totally confused. They often miss key elements such as sin, or the fact that Jesus was God. They know all the elements in their head, but they’ve never been asked to put all the pieces together. That’s why it’s so helpful for them to hear the gospel every week from me because it makes it more clear each time they hear it. Coincidentally, that helps them share it more clearly with others, which in turn boosts their confidence. Of course, that means I must first have a firm grasp on the gospel myself. Do you? Can you clearly answer my question?

4. Scripture expects that both me and my youth group kids share the gospel with others regularly. There are some things scripture expects from us whether we’re gifted in that area or not. For example, some people have the gift of serving, but every believer is still expected to serve others. Some people have the gift of giving, but every believer is expected to tithe. Some people have the gift of evangelism, but every believer is expected to share Christ with the lost people around them in one capacity or another. When we keep the gospel in front of our teens at youth group, it moves it to the forefront of their theological grid, and thus they are more apt to follow the Lord’s command in obedience to share Him with others.

Ultimately, it helps both the youth group teens and myself go deep and wide at the same time.

What kind of role does the gospel play in your youth ministry?

Yesterday in our LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation Jason Lamb of Dare 2 Share Ministries lead us in a discussion about the Deep and Wide Ministry model. We ran through a quick overview of what it is and what it isn’t, and then talked about ways to implement it in our ministries. Toward the end we also discussed some of the common objections and problems people have with the Deep and Wide Ministry model.

If you’re not familiar with Deep and Wide, I recommend that you first download and read the thesis from Dare 2 Share’s website. If you have questions that were not discussed in the recording below, Jason Lamb is happy to make himself available to you. Check out his blog at deepnwide.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter. Or, contact him directly via email: jasonlamb@dare2share.org.

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

January 30rd: Next week’s topic and guest are still TBD. Keep an eye on this page during the week.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

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Some of the feedback I’ve heard about what you’d like to see added to Life In Student Ministry are reviews of different curriculum so you know what’s worth your money and what isn’t. Personally, I don’t purchase much curriculum because I like to write my own for our ministry — I feel it allows me to be much more precise in addressing the issues that are important to us while targeting it exactly at my kids, something no publishing house can do. However, I have used a couple different curriculum packages before in other settings and currently use YouthBytes to aid discussions with jr. highers. Here’s a bit about my experience with various curriculums.

Note: Since I only write reviews on products I’ve actually used, each of these product reviews comes from my personal and practical experience from actually using them in ministry with teenagers, not just by looking at a box or flipping through some pages of material.

Disclaimer: Every ministry has different values and works with kids who are coming from different backgrounds in different contexts at different levels of spiritual maturity. The following reviews are only based on my own values and experiences. Your experience(s) may be very different from mine.

The Gospel Journey

Published by Dare 2 Share Ministries. Website. Price: $149 for 7 lessons.

To this day, The Gospel Journey has sparked the most spiritually significant discussions I have ever had with a group of high school teeangers. In fact, it was even an influential piece in shifting my own approach to youth ministry.

Set in mountains of Colorado, Greg Stier of Dare 2 Share Ministries takes a group of teens and young adults of various backgrounds (wiccan, atheist, agnostic, and others) on a journey through the Gospel. It attempts to be a reality show, but even Greg admits it’s not really a reality show as we typically think of. Rather, it is a show about reality.

The DVD sessions mostly consist of Greg teaching through the Gospel Journey acronym followed by very significant objections and questions by youth of other religions. Watch the trailer on YouTube to get an idea of what it’s like.

The included leader’s booklet includes two different guides: one for using with your churched kids and one for using with unchurched, unsaved kids. I personally started by using the guide for churched kids, but quickly had to supplement it with some of my theology books from seminary because the high school kids took the discussions very deep. In fact, there were some weeks we went almost 30 minutes over our meeting time and no one wanted to leave.

Check out my earlier post about The Gospel Journey for a more detailed review. Also see Dare 2 Share’s new Gospel Journey: Maui.

SUMMARY: The Gospel Journey definitely gets 5 stars for it’s depth in content, creativity, and unique approach to helping teens think through very critical theological issues. Best geared for high school students.

Goin’ All the Way

Published by LifeChurch.tv. Website. Price: FREE!

LifeChurch.tv has an amazing amount of resources available for free, but probably my favorite for use in youth group is Craig Groeschel’s 4-part sermon series called, Goin’ All the Way. (Watch it online here.) I downloaded the DVDs of his messages, showed them in their entirety to the small group, and then led a discussion afterwards. You may think that sitting kids in front of a TV to watch someone preach is kinda lame, but it’s definitely not when it comes to this series. I’ve used this series a couple times and every group has been completely glued to Pastor Craig Groeschel, listening intently, and even answering his rhetorical questions out loud to the TV!

Craig also has a book by the same title, Going All the Way: Preparing for a Marriage That Goes the Distance, which addresses this issue in more detail. Could be used as a good accompaniment to the video series.

SUMMARY: Goin’ All the Way is an excellent sermon DVD series that talks about dating, relationships, sex, how to find “the one,” and how to make marriages go the distance. I highly recommend it. Geared best for high school students.

YouthBtytes

Published by YouthBytes. Website. Price: $300 for 40 lessons (individual pricing available).

YouthBytes is a video-based curriculum with content that is very solid. It focuses on only a single point, and has a very fast-pasted, professional, MTV-style production. The format of the videos is to set the youth leader up to have a meaningful discussion with kids about the topic at hand. To help leaders do that best, each DVD includes of a version of the video in different lengths: a 1-minute, 3-minute, 7 to 12 minute, and even a 30-minute version. Of course, each video includes a lesson guide that includes key scripture verses, illustrations, ice-breakers, stories, and discussion questions.

Although the videos are excellent, the lesson guides are a bit lacking. Any lesson you buy from any vendor must be tweaked and tailored to the individual needs of your specific students, but these guides leave you tweaking a bit more than you might expect. For example, the ice-breakers are typically stories that introduce the topic in some way. However, I think experiential learning is always much more effective, so I like to engage the students in an activity of some sort to introduce the subject matter, which means I have to come up with more creative introductions for each lesson. The discussion questions also do not probe as deep as I like to go with my students, so I always re-write those, too.

Check out my earlier post about YouthBytes for a more detailed review.

SUMMARY: The videos are 5-star quality, but the lesson guides do not yet have quite the same value. However, in the near future YouthBytes will be updating their lessons to include many of my ideas, activities, and discussion questions. At that time, the whole package will definitely be 5 stars. *wink* Best geared for jr. high students.

Go Wide Kit

Published by Dare 2 Share Ministries. Website. Price: $74 for 3 training sessions.

If you’re looking for a tool to help train your kids in normal, every day, social evangelism, Dare 2 Share’s Go Wide Kit is definitely the way to go. The kit includes several things, but the core of it is a DVD containing three sessions where Greg Stier both trains and motivates teens to share their faith with their unsaved friends. He teaches them to first Pray for them, Pursue a relationship, and gently Persuade them into a relationship with Christ by taking opportunities to steer conversations toward spiritual matters.

The reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because in a separate section of the DVD, Greg talks about his idea for starting an e-team (evangelism team) in your youth group. I resist the idea that sharing Christ should be expected primarily of whoever joins an e-team, and fortunately, from my own conversations with Greg, he agrees with me. If he had the choice, he’d remove references to an e-team idea, but what’s published is published.

Check out my earlier post about the Go Wide Kit for a more detailed review.

SUMMARY: The Go Wide Kit is an excellent tool for training teenagers to share their faith. It gives them confidence to “bring God up” in normal conversations with their unsaved friends. Just ignore that e-team parts. Best geared for jr. high and high school students.

The Journey

Published by the Evangelical Covenant. Website. Price: $12.95/student journal; $39.95/leaders guide

The word “confirmation” carries a lot of different meetings for different people in different denominations, but if you’re willing to strip away all that baggage, my denomination’s discipleship (confirmation) material really is quite excellent. It’s a small group discipleship experience for 7th and 8th graders that takes them through the entire Bible in 2 years — Old Testament one year, New Testament the next. Students are expected to complete journal work each day during the week where they interact with scripture and answer questions about how it connects with their daily life. In their weekly small groups, the jr. highers discuss their journal work and learn more about the next major event or theological issue in the Bible.

I am honestly quite impressed with how thorough the material is, how practical it is for a jr. higher’s every day life, and how well the leader’s guides are put together. The best part is that by the time every jr. higher moves into high school, they have a solid grasp on the message of the entire Bible as a whole. What a great foundation for high school!

My personal ties to any one denomination are very weak, but I’d still recommend this material for any church’s jr. high ministry.

SUMMARY: An excellent overview of the entire Bible in 2 years that encourages jr. highers to reflect on it’s practical implications in their personal life on a daily basis while having accountability and relationships in a small group. Geared best for jr. high students.

Girls and Guys Curriculum Pack

Published by Youth Specialties. Guys Website. Price: $11.24 | Girls website. Price: $10.94

This curriculum pack is actually two books for small groups that are gender specific.

• Guys: 10 Fearless Faith-Focused Sessions on Issues That Matter to Guys
• Girls: 10 Gutsy, God-Centered Sessions on Issues that Matter to Girls

My wife and I have found them to be well balanced in addressing critical issues of manhood and womanhood. Each of the 10 lessons includes several different options so you can tailor the lesson according to your needs and time restraints. The activities are fun, break the ice, and illustrate the issues very well. Interactive handouts are included to ensure that the teens are tracking with you through the whole lesson. Unfortunately, it also serves up too much text to just read to the kids, so you’ll need to feel comfortable enough with the content so you can share it in your own words.

SUMMARY: Great books for addressing gender specific issues with teenagers. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I’d like to see them probe a bit deeper, but if you have comfortable relationships already built with the kids, I’m sure you may end up asking those hard questions anyway. Geared best for jr. high and high school students.

Design for Discipleship

Published by The Navigators. Website. Price: $6.99 each

Design for Discipleship is the series I use for one-on-one discipleship with new believers. It consists of a 6 workbooks that walk a new believer through the core foundations of Christianity. Although a leaders guide is available, I don’t use it. I just complete the workbook assignments on the same schedule as the guy I’m discipling and meet with him once a week to discuss our answers together. It lends itself well to very meaningful discussions and questions.

The workbooks include passages to read, a bit of explanation, and many questions to answer about the scripture text that was read. What I like best is that the questions are not asking you to list the obvious — they require some engagement with the passage, thinking, and processing through observation, it’s meaning (interpretation), and application, which is great because that leads to self-discovery, the most significant way to learn and take ownership of something.

SUMMARY: I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I would prefer that there was a bit more teaching in the workbooks to balance all of the questions. Otherwise, it’s great for one-on-one discipleship. Geared best for jr. high and high school students.

TeenLifeMinistries.com

Published online at TeenLifeMinistries.com. Price: $9.95/month for unlimited access.

TeenLifeMinistries.com isn’t a curriculum as much as it is a youth ministry resource site that includes almost 15 years worth of Bible lessons (with accompanying PowerPoint presentations) for youth groups. If there’s a topic or passage you want to talk about, I can almost guarantee that TeenLifeMinistries.com has something for you. The lessons are easy to use, simple to modify, and include all the handouts you could ever want. If you want to use the lesson as a small group discussion, there’s a sheet for that. Or, if you’re an up-front-and-preach kinda person, there’s an outline version for “preaching,” too. Of course, you could easily combine the two options together in a sort of “I preach, then we discuss” fashion, too.

The weakness of TeenLifeMinistries is that the lessons all start to feel a bit similar pretty quickly. After a couple months of the outlines, format, and questions, my teens were saying, “I can tell exactly where this is heading” and would somewhat check out mentally due to the repetitious nature of the structure. Fortunately, it’s a subscription-based site so you can cancel whenever you want.

SUMMARY: TeenLifeMinistry.com’s real value is in having a goldmine of very flexible resources and ideas to kick-start your own lesson planning. As stated earlier, you should never use anyone’s lesson “as is,” but be especially intentional about not doing that here.

You’re Next

Published by Dare 2 Share Ministries. Website. Price: $29 for leader’s guide

This is Dare 2 Share’s response for the “go deep” part of their Deep & Wide ministry strategy. Greg Stier goes through the 30 Core Truths (found in the Deep & Wide thesis downloadable from here) and shares youth group lessons that are intended to take kids deep into God’s Word in a systematic approach to theology. While the concept is great, especially because the lessons are highly practical and heavy on application to real life, it really doesn’t go as deep as I think it has the potential to go. I found myself using it for ideas on how to introduce one of the 30 Core Truths, but took most of my “depth” from one of my systematic theology books and integrated that into my lessons instead.

I gave it 3 stars because, even though much of the content is based on stories from Greg’s life, if you substitute his stories with ones from your own life and mix in some deeper theology from another source, it has the potential to be pretty powerful. I know that sounds like I’m saying you basically need to re-write Greg’s lessons, but it’s not quite like that. He lays a solid framework for which to work when taking kids deep into God’s Word.

SUMMARY: This “go deep” tool doesn’t go as deep as the Go Wide Kit goes wide, but it still provides a decent framework for addressing the 30 Core Truths with the youth group. Geared best for high school students.

Soul Fuel

Published by Dare 2 Share Ministries. Website. Price: FREE!

You sure can’t beat the price of this weekly curriculum from Dare 2 Share Ministries — FREE! Every week it shows up in your email Inbox and includes a devotional sheet for teens, a youth group lesson plan, and a parent sheet. They each loosely address one of the 30 Core Truths in some way.

Although each lesson follows an outline, most of the content is written as a transcript. I know some people prefer reading something word for word, but it doesn’t seem to work too well in this context because the lessons are intended primarily for small groups, not preaching from a pulpit. It just doesn’t feel right to discuss some questions as a group and then make students sit and listen to you read the next paragraph to them, ya know? If you can memorize it, that’s great, but I mostly just shared it in normal conversational English using my own words to keep the dialog going.

The length of the material is also fairly short — probably enough for a 15-20 minute discussion. Most of my teaching in my youth group goes for 30-60 minutes, so this is a bit short for us.

SUMMARY: Soul Fuel gets 3 stars mostly because it’s free and consistent every week. It’s probably better suited for quick devotionals with kids than it is for youth group meetings.

Talking the Walk: 31 sessions for new small groups

Published by Youth Specialties. Website. Price: $13.59

This book is probably one of the best books I’ve seen for solidifying a new small group of teenagers together. It’s cram-packed with ideas and activities that will grow new friendships, build trust, and create an environment that feels safe for everyone. If you have a new group of teens in a small group who don’t know each other very well, this book is perfect for you.

However, I find it odd that it seriously lacks a spiritual influence. There are scripture passages in each lesson, but both myself and my leaders had difficulty figuring out how it connected with the rest of the lesson, as weak as the lessons already were. The focus of this book is definitely on building community in your new small group, not really on Bible study.

SUMMARY: If this book had stronger Biblical content, it would be an excellent resource for new small groups of teens who don’t know each other very well, but without it, the group-building games and activities need to be combined with an actual Bible study from elsewhere.

Jr. High Grapple

Published by Group Publishing. Website. Price: $89.99 for 16 lessons.

Grapple is one of the few curriculums I’ve ditched mid-way through. In fact, I only used it for about 4 weeks before I stopped wasting my jr. higher’s time with it. The format is to introduce a topic to your teens, watch a short video that illustrates it, and then continue with the discussion. Sounds good in theory, but videos were very weak in both content and production value. For example, the video that introduces the topic of salvation was based on a visit to a pet shelter where animals were asked if all dogs go to heaven, and it looks like it was produced in iMovie.

Furthermore, my adult leaders found the discussion sheets to be very difficult to understand and follow, partly because the sheets tried to communicate too many points in one lesson or that the points didn’t seem to connect very well with the main idea of the lesson. Anyone who works with jr. high knows that they need only one solid point driven home in a variety of ways, not multiple points that are weakly connected to the main idea.

However, the one thing that Grapple offers that I absolutely love are the parent sheets included with each lesson. These sheets are designed to send home with parents after the jr. high meeting to inform them on what was discussed. The parent sheets include a couple discussion starters for parents to use with their kids and take the topic deeper at home, which is a great way to help families have spiritual conversations at home.

The other thing I really appreciated about Grapple was that all of their lessons, parent sheets, videos, and discussion sheets were available for download from their site, which meant that I could easily embed the video illustrations in PowerPoint presentations, email discussion sheets to adult leaders in advance, and make parent sheets available for download on our website.

SUMMARY: I would’ve given it 0 stars, but it’s availability in digital format and parent sheets are definitely worth at least 1 star. Best geared for jr. high students.

Add your own review

If you’ve used a curriculum you’d like to recommend or would like to warn people to way away from, please write about it in the comments below. I just ask that you only review it if you’ve actually tried using it in a youth ministry context.

Thanks for helping youth workers around the world make an informed decision about the material they use at youth group!

NOTE: Reviews and links from publishers and advertisers will be deleted.

Every year each ministry in our church writes an overview of the past year. A couple of us (including myself) also give an oral report at our annual meeting. Here’s a brief (believe it or not) excerpt from my written annual report about where the youth ministry has come this past year.

A Focused Vision

This year our philosophy of ministry was greatly simplified. No more mission statement, purpose statement, vision statements, core values, strategies, etc. It was confusing for most people and very difficult to communicate. It left the vision for the ministry’s forward spiritual movement very fuzzy and unfocused for students, adult leaders and even me!

Now all those statements are boiled down together. The purpose is the mission, which is also the vision, which is also our core values and strategy all wrapped up into one, easy-to-remember vision: “Deep and Wide Youth Ministry.” We want to take teenagers deep into the Word so they become spiritually passionate believers who take the gospel wide to the lost people around them.

Beginning to Implement the Vision

The implementation of Deep & Wide is starting to work itself out in a variety of ways.

• Sr. High C3 renamed to Impact: “We come to be spiritually impacted so we can go out there and make a spiritual impact.”
• At Impact, we’re going through 30 core questions of Christianity, essentially summarizing 30 key areas of systematic theology.
• C-Groups continued to be a place where high school students can build relationships with other believers in a small group setting and be challenged to go deep in the Word.
• All teenagers were trained to share their faith using Pray, Pursue, Persuade: pray for 5 unsaved friends, pursue a relationship with them where you bring God up in conversation, and lovingly persuade them into a relationship with Christ.
• All teenagers also were taken through the G.O.S.P.E.L. Journey, where we traced the Lord’s plan of salvation through the entire Bible.
• Jr. High went through an in-depth study of the entire New Testament in The Journey small groups. This year they will go through the entire Old Testament.
• The Belize missions trip was geared to take kids deep into the Word by spending an hour alone in the Lord every morning, teaching times, and through debriefing/reflection together on what God was doing through us. They were also challenged to go wide with the gospel as we shared our faith with adults, children and teenagers alike. Many came to faith in Christ as a result!
• M.U.U.U.C.E. served as a good kick-start for getting into the Word this school year and introducing new 7th graders to each other as they got ready to go through the New Testament together in The Journey.
• Wake ‘n Ski did not meet its “go wide” focus. It is being evaluated for next year.
• 30 Hour Famine was organized and let by high school student, Sara Wadi. She did an outstanding job of coordinating the event to raise funds for providing food, education, clothing, medical attention, and the gospel message to starving children in other countries. The money we raised literally “went wide.”
• Since our vision for Deep & Wide Youth Ministry was still taking shape, our winter ski trip to Big Sky in Montana did not really fall into it any specific way. That will obviously have to be evaluated if we do the ski trip again.
• M.O.V.E. 2008 was a great opportunity to serve the community of Minneapolis by cleaning a facility that provides furniture to individuals and families entering society (immigrants, ex-convicts, etc.). We also assembled a lot of donated furniture for them, as the hands and feet of Jesus.

As we launch into the upcoming year, we intend to make Deep & Wide much more pointed and integrated. The transition began last year and it will continue throughout next year, too, as we evaluate everything and seek the Lord’s direction for our ministry. Hopefully by 2010 Deep & Wide will be be the driving force behind everything that happens in the youth ministry. The life-change and growth we’ve experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg of how God wants to bless His work here.

Where the Vision is Going

Our goal is to become more Christlike, as scripture commands (Rom. 8:29; 12:2; etc.). This does not mean that we only strive to become more perfect with less sin, as many Christians think. It actually means that our heart for lost people must continually grow because, ultimately, that’s the very reason why Christ came to earth in the first place – out of a love and burden for lost people. To become more like Christ means that our hearts share His desire to see sinners come to faith in Him. This evangelism aspect of discipleship should be a part of the spiritual journey every believer takes. We want to see teenagers become more Christlike, in both spiritual maturity (Luke 2:52) and in a heart for lost people (Matthew 28:18).

We believe that evangelism and discipleship are not intended to be separate. Traditionally, small groups and Bible studies are seen as discipleship opportunities and evangelism is usually reduced to a special event or a project where students outsource the gospel message to someone on a stage. Matthew 28 says to “Go and make disciples.” Evangelism is a vital part of discipleship and personal spiritual growth.

• This next year I will intentionally to share the gospel clearly at every youth meeting so our kids hear it, know it and share it. And also for any unbelievers who might be present because nothing else we talk about in youth group means a thing if someone present doesn’t know Christ.
• This next year I will take teenagers deep into the Word by teaching theology and pushing them to be obedient to the application of the Word to their lives as they go wide with the gospel message. That means internalizing these principles myself first and modeling it for them.

Last month the youth worker network in my community hosted a training conference for all of our adult youth leaders and anyone else in our surrounding community that wanted to attend. We had a blast and learned a lot. We’ll be doing it again next year.

The featured speaker was Jeremy Hughey, the Deep & Wide Coach at Dare 2 Share Ministries. He spoke for two sessions to teach us what Deep & Wide ministry strategy is and ideas for what that should look like in our youth groups.

Since the other guys our youth worker network share the same heart I do to train leaders, we video recorded most of the seminars, including Jeremy’s, so we can make the training freely available to other youth workers around the world who might not otherwise have the money or resources to travel someplace to get it.

These are the seminars available:

• Deep & Wide: Session 1
• Deep & Wide: Session 2
• How to lead a small group
• Answering the tough questions
• Using music in youth ministry
• Panel discussion on teen issues

You can find detailed descriptions of each seminar here.

All the youth ministry training videos are available to view and download on our Allies website. I pray they encourage and bless your ministry.

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Join our LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation today at 2:00 PM EST! The topic is, “Working with students who suffer from depression and eating disorders.” Dave Huizing, a Christian counselor from Word of Life in New York, has a lot of experience in this area and will be joining the conversation to train us on this topic. Join us using either your telephone or your computer microphone.

You know the books you’d like to read one day, but they always seem to be low enough on the reading priority list that you never really get around to reading them? “Ministry Mutiny: A Youth Leader Fable,” by Greg Stier was on that stack for me for about two years. But as I become more and more passionate about Deep & Wide and how that works in my youth ministry, I pulled it out and, Wow! Why did I wait so long to read this?! I picked up 10 copies of it and had all my adult youth workers pass the copies around to each other throughout the summer until almost everyone read it. Now I’m blogging about this book because you need to read it, too. In fact, every youth worker needs to read this book.

From a narrative perspective, the story line isn’t the most gripping one you’ll ever read. I can easily identify with the young youth leader who’s frustrated with youth ministry and is about to resign, but the veteran youth worker who comes to the rescue and mentors the young man for a week seems a bit too perfect to be believable. Nonetheless, it’s not the narrative that’s intended to keep you moving through the chapters as much as it is the advice, wisdom, and practical ideas that flow from the mentor in the story.

Through the mentor, Greg challenges the typical paradigm of youth ministry on all levels. Everything from curriculum, how we teach, youth events, outreach, spiritual growth, relevance, teen drop-out from church, the role of parents, and everything in between. He explains everything you always felt was somehow not quite right, but weren’t quite sure why.

But he doesn’t just point out the ineffectiveness and dangers of a typical approach to youth ministry — he builds a picture straight from the pages of scripture of what youth ministry should look like, what we all deep down inside really want it to be in the first place, but never articulated as clearly as Greg does.

There’s two things I especially love about the “mutiny from typical ministry” in this book. First, Greg focuses on exactly what I’ve always held to be true: Who we are in ministry should always determine what we do in ministry, never vice versa. As Ephesians so clearly states, identity “in Christ” comes first, function flows from that. And second, he doesn’t break down the youth ministry system without giving practical, down-to-earth ideas for how to implement the proposed ideas and changes in our youth groups. It’s as much a book of ideas as it is anything else.

At only 158 pages long, it’s a quick read, but, like I did, you’ll still find yourself highlighting and underlining many pages as you evaluate your own ministry in light of the wisdom Greg imparts from scripture. Read this book, even if you have to raid the vending machine at church to scrape together the $10 for it.

[ On Amazon: Ministry Mutiny: A Youth Leader Fable, by Greg Stier. ]

Eric Groezinger writes with the following question:

I’ve been challenged and motivated to consider [implementing the Deep & Wide ministry strategy]. My challenge is discovering how to implement this in practical, weekly meeting formats. I’ve watched how you’ve modified your weekly meetings to be more intensive with study and discussion – did you just jump in and do this, how did you share this burden/passion with your volunteers, adjust their thinking, student thinking, etc.

The short version is that my high school youth group had already started drifting in this direction before I even intentionally did anything with Dare 2 Share and Deep & Wide. The shift from “games and fun with Bible study thrown in” to extended periods of in-depth Bible study took place naturally on its own. Significant theological discussions were going overtime every week, forcing me to shorten fun and games a bit more every week to make more time for study. Sometimes kids hung around afterwards for a half-hour longer just to continue their study together! The results of kids becoming more passionate about their walks with God and inviting friends to hear the Word was an unexpected result of that (embarrassingly so). It wasn’t until after this discovery that Greg Stier again encouraged me to check out Deep & Wide. Although Greg and I both agree that the thesis itself needs to be rewritten (the second revision should be released this fall), the main idea of Deep & Wide put words to what we were already experiencing. So, in other words, Deep & Wide fit what was already happening in our group — we did not change our group to fit Deep & Wide. Starting this fall, however, I will communicate Deep & Wide to the entire youth ministry as the intentional direction our ministry is taking. Right now the discussion is just between me and some of my adult youth workers, but that will change in August.

I realize most youth groups and churches may not “stumble” across this like we did and will instead have to make an effort to make the shift to a Deep & Wide approach to ministry. The danger is that youth leaders will see Deep & Wide as just another philosophy of ministry or an approach to try to coerce God into performing a certain way in your group. Nothing could be more detrimental to your view of ministry! Deep & Wide is partly a ministry strategy, but even moreso it’s a lifestyle. It’s not just something you DO, it’s something you strive to BECOME. That means it has to start with you, the youth leader. Unless you first dig deep into the Word on a personal level, become passionate about your walk with God and sharing it with others, any changes you make to the youth ministry to be “Deep & Wide” will be completely superficial. After your own spiritual appetite is fed with the Word and your personal evangelism is on fire for God, only then can the Deep & Wide passion become contagious to your students. Otherwise it becomes just another program instead of a lifestyle. So, if you’re looking for practical ways to implement Deep & Wide in your youth group, start with yourself. At that point, how to implement it in your ministry will be evident because it’s become an ingrained part of you. Nothing else will sit well with your conscious. That’s where I’m at now.

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Have a youth ministry question you’d like me and other readers to answer? E-mail it to me! Please keep your question brief and to-the-point. Thanks!

A while ago Greg Stier told me to check out the Deep & Wide ministry strategy and asked me to share my thoughts with him. I honestly put it off for a while just because of time and priorities, but a couple weeks ago I read the 34-page thesis and was actually surprised how much it coincided with what’s already taking place in my youth group. We’ve been taking a natural shift in this direction already — Deep & Wide just put words to what we’re already experiencing.

Deep & Wide is not another ministry philosophy. It’s not intended to be a formula for youth groups. It’s not the newest, latest, wave of ministry hype. It is simply an approach to ministry that movies spiritually apathetic teens to spiritually passionate teens. And it truly is simple. Just as the book Simple Church advocates, our modern approach to ministry is very cumbersome: we have purpose statements, vision statements, mission statements, core values, target audiences, various strategies, blah, blah, blah. It’s all supposed to fit together somehow, but yet the average Joe in our church has no idea what any of it means, and often we don’t either. Deep & Wide is simple: the vision is the mission, is the purpose, is the values, is the strategy and everything else rolled into one cohesive approach.

But most importantly, it’s straight from the Word of God. As my own ministry has discovered, it’s funny how God works when we actually do what His Word tells us to do in ministry and stop focusing on all the other fabricated stuff we add to it.

Lest you think scripture isn’t foundation enough, Willow Creek and REVEAL are finding that the typical approach to church ministry is not moving people toward a closer relationship with Christ. All their research and statistical data backs up Deep & Wide exactly.

I’m not going to explain to you what Deep & Wide is since you can read it yourself. However, I do have some reactions to it that Greg and I have already discussed extensively. He agrees with my critique and plans to make these changes as they go through an evaluation process and release a revised copy later this summer.

1. The role of the Holy Spirit, although mentioned, seems largely removed from the process. It’s mentioned a couple times, but I think He deserves more credibility in the process than the thesis mentions. Absolutely none of the Deep & Wide stuff happens without Him. That’s actually a problem I have with most ministry philosophies out there — they come across as almost being a methodical approach to coercing the divine into doing something.

2. Although I think the 30 core truths are good, basing it on a survey from leaders in various denominations strikes me as being a bit too human-ordained. Where does the issue of spiritual identity come in (being made in His image in Genesis, being “in Christ” in Eph, etc.)? It seems like a lot of good topics to cover from a systematic theology approach, but a student could possibly go through every issue listed and never come out knowing what it means to be a responsible, growing and effective believer except to have a list of stuff they’re supposed to “do,” rather than knowing who they “are.” What we “do” should flow from who we are, not the other way around. Identity in Christ comes first.

3. Deep & Wide has a sense of methodicalness to it, almost as if it promises that if I do A, B, and C, that means X, Y, and Z will happen, but we all know that spirituality a lot messier than that. The graph of spiritual growth over time is never a straight upward climb. The thesis needs to reflect the bumps and setbacks that will take place in real life and not unintentionally create unrealistic expectations.

4. I’m a little more careful with the book of Acts than the Deep & Wide thesis is when making a defense for what the church should be like today. Acts was an abnormal time period for the church, a period of transition characterized by elements that aren’t and can’t be a part of us today. However, the point that God wants to bring thousands into a relationship with Him is well taken and understood.

5. Teenagers are looking for adult sponsors who can answer “yes” to FOUR questions — the three questions the thesis mentions, plus “Are you reflecting Christ more accurately every day?” I’ve had youth leaders who loved Jesus, loved kids and were real, and I’ve had to kick them out leadership for gross immaturity issues. Youth leaders must be growing in Christ if they’re going to be the spiritual role model that I (and the Lord) expect.

Of course, people usually only respond to points of disagreement, which is essentially what I’m doing here, but I wholeheartedly support and agree with the big picture of Deep & Wide. In fact, it’s the only required text to read and discuss in my youth ministry leadership mentorship program.

If you’ve read the Deep & Wide Ministry Thesis, Greg and I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, especially now as it goes through revisions.