Our friends at Cadre Ministries are giving away 3 resources to help you prepare for your short term missions trip this summer, and also to help you while you’re there.

1. Ten Short Mission Trip Land Mines Your Team Must Avoid. This one includes a FREE 13-page training session for your team for you to use before you leave.

2. Service Projects That Make Middle Schoolers Shine. Mission trips don’t have to be far away and they also don’t have to be only for older kids. Here’s why you should do service projects with jr. highers and how to make the experience leave a lasting impression.

3. Making The Most Of Mission Trips. Six things your groups needs to start doing now before you leave. Share it with your team as soon as possible.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. There’s no featured guest, set topic or agenda except to have an open discussion. Ask questions, seek advice, share prayer concerns, vent, whatever you want. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Perhaps one of the most significant parts of my youth group’s missions trip to Belize last summer was the hour we all spent alone with God each morning. At the beginning of the trip some of the kids weren’t too sure about reading their Bibles and praying for an hour every day, but after 10 days of it, some kids said it was the highlight of the trip.

If you’re considering a missions trip this summer, be sure to make personal time in the Word and in prayer a central part of the trip. In our case, we didn’t give the kids a devotional book or anything — just God’s Word and some private quiet time. But if you would rather give your kids something to use, HCBJ Global has a FREE 30-day devotional ebook on missions called, Be the Voice and Hands of Jesus. It’s very well-done, professionally designed, and follows the traditional format of a verse or two with an explanation, story and application. Here’s a list of the devo titles:

• Day 1 – Jesus Reached Out to the Unexpected
• Day 2 – Jesus Mobilized Others to Reach Out
• Day 3 – Jesus Acknowledged Faith
• Day 4 – Jesus Prayed Before Choosing Partners
• Day 5 – Jesus Touched People with Power
• Day 6 – Jesus Welcomed Interruptions
• Day 7 – Jesus Recognized an Open Heart
• Day 8 – Jesus Didn’t Follow the World’s Priorities
• Day 9 – Jesus Felt Great Compassion
• Day 10 – Jesus’ Hands Looked for the Lost
• Day 11 – Jesus Allowed Affirmation of His Ministry
• Day 12 – Jesus’ Voice Spoke the Truth
• Day 13 – Jesus Accepted Persecution
• Day 14 – Jesus Loved Difficult People
• Day 15 – Jesus Was Confident in His Treasure
• Day 16 – Jesus Counted the Cost
• Day 17 – Jesus Prayed for Unity
• Day 18 – Jesus Demonstrated Authenticity
• Day 19 – Jesus Made Priorities
• Day 20 – Jesus Honored Sacrifice
• Day 21 – Jesus Asked People To Trust Him
• Day 22 – Jesus Engaged the Whole Person
• Day 23 – Jesus Encouraged Commitment
• Day 24 – Jesus Championed the Poor
• Day 25 – Jesus Is the Bread of Life
• Day 26 – Jesus Transformed People
• Day 27 – Jesus Saw Potential
• Day 28 – Jesus Asked for Courage
• Day 29 – Jesus Promised His Presence
• Day 30 – Jesus Did the Impossible

You’ll have to part with some personal information in order to download the ebook, but it’s worth it. You’ll also get:

• 30 Day Household Prayer Guide
• Worship Music (MP3, Sheet Music and Powerpoint Slides)
• A downloadable sheet that helps you to plan your next outreach project
• Voice and Hands Video: A downloadable video that shares about what it means to be the Voice and Hands of Jesus

Get “Voice and Hands of Jesus” devo book and more!

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk. Our featured guest is Mike Kupferer and he’ll lead us in a discussion about finding the right youth ministry position. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat.

Yesterday I wrote about why I’m abandoning outreach events and gave several reasons why “outreach campaigns” may be a more effective solution.

For several months now I’ve been planning an outreach campaign for my own youth group and am excited to have other youth groups join us! The best part is that it’s completely FREE! We’ll be going all over the world, sharing the gospel with friends both in our local neighborhoods and friends far away. It’s an online missions trip, a “missions trip to Facebook,” if you will.

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online about things that don’t really matter in light of eternity, let’s train them to share their faith and push them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January whatever-31, 2009

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

February 1-14, 2009

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 15-whenever, 2009

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, a Facebook app you can use, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, join the OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Group and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you in February.

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Thanks to YouthBytes, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and Xtreme Youth Alliance for their support, promotion, and free resources for the Online Missions Trip! Thank you Brian Ford and Michael Rothermel for all your help in creating content and tools for this missions trip that will bring teenagers to Christ! And thanks Janelle Painter for designing the Online Mission Trip logo!

For many churches and youth groups, the typical approach to evangelism is to host a big event that will be attractive to unbelievers who are invited by their Christian friends. A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post about my problem with outreach events like this. Back then I didn’t really have any answers for my frustrations, but now I do. I’ve officially decided to ditch outreach events altogether for a couple of reasons.

1. They end up being “Christian entertainment.”

Regardless of how much I push an outreach lock-in, publicize it, and encourage kids to bring their unsaved friends, it’s rare that students actually do so. Out of 20 kids, maybe 1 or 2 of them are unchurched. The rest are all youth group kids or Christian kids from other youth groups.

2. Low conversion rate.

If there actually are any pre-saved teens there, the percentage of those who give their lives to Christ seems to be pretty low. Maybe because it feels intimidating, maybe because there’s no interaction or avenue for asking questions, or maybe because they have no relationship with the person who is presenting the gospel.

3. Teens’ evangelism becomes dependent on an adult leader.

Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing a disservice to my teens by unintentionally teaching them to outsource their evangelism efforts to someone on a stage. What happens when they grow into adults and still feel that evangelism is the church’s job?

A better approach

Instead, I’m forming what I call “outreach campaigns.” An outreach campaign is when teens are trained and held accountable to share their faith with their friends on an on-going basis. If teens start doing this at a young age, they’ll have the confidence to continue it for the rest of their lives. Otherwise, they might always rely on the church to get their unbelieving friends onto Christian turff where someone else will talk to them about Christ instead.

If teens develop the confidence and experience of sharing Christ with their friends outside the church, the conversion rate will be much higher than events. For the unbeliever, the feeling of being outnumbered and intimidated by a Christian group disappears, ongoing interaction and questions is natural, and a relationship with the trusted friend is obviously already established.

For several months now I’ve been working hard to put together such an outreach campaign, not only for my own group, but for anyone else who wants to participate in it with us. Stay tuned tomorrow for how you can join my youth group on a FREE missions trip!

(A couple weeks ago in our LIVE YM Talk we discussed the question, “Are youth events still working?” Some of what I mentioned here I talked about in more depth during that conversation. Listen to it here.)

Maybe it’s heresy for a youth worker to say this, but I’ve actually never been on a missions trip with a missions organization, like Group Workcamps, Global Expeditions, or Youth Works. It’s not that I’m opposed to them — it’s just that the Lord has always provided other personal connections to serve, both in the US and overseas.

Based on my experience, there’s several benefits to organizing your own missions trip.

1. Total flexibility. You’re in charge of the dates, where you go and what you do there, how long you stay, and everything else you can think of.

2. It’s cheaper. Since we’re not paying to support a missions organization, the cost of the trip is whatever we need it to be to cover expenses and not a penny more.

3. Serve according to your gifts. You can tailor the trip to the specific gifts and talents of your teenagers. Got lots of singers and kids who love to share Christ with strangers? Or do none of them sing and talking to strangers is like a Fear Factor mission?

4. Push the teens without breaking them. You can create a missions experience that will challenge them, but not push them over the edge. Since that breaking point is different for every group, so a one-size-fits-all trip may be too much for one group, but not stretching enough for another. Only you, their youth leader, know where that point is.

Again, there’s there’s nothing wrong with using an organization to plan and coordinate your missions trip. But if you’re considering a trip on your own next summer, these might be some reasons to give it a try.

Last week (June 18-30, 2008) was our youth group missions trip to Belize and man, it was an amazing time! Many more people will one day worship with us at the throne in heaven as a result of the Lord’s work through us there.

I updated our youth group website as regularly as possible with updates and pictures for parents back home. If you’re interested, you can see them at AlexandriaYouth.com.

The trip was a HUGE growing and learning experience for me. Not only in the year-long preparations leading up to the trip, but on the field, as well. Here are some of the biggies that I should have done differently.

My Mistakes

1. I failed to meet daily with the adult leaders. Now that I think back on it, I feel like slapping my forehead and saying, “No duh!” I do this on every other trip, why not this one? Somehow it slipped my mind. The result was a disunified team of adult leaders (6 of us total) that led to a lot of frustration and communication issues.

2. I failed to listen to the advice of someone older and wiser. Ouch. Yeah, I did, and found out later that the adult was absolutely correct. The consequences meant that two girls got sick the next evening and had to miss out on ministry opportunities. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I learned the lesson even though I originally felt 100% confident that my decision.

3. I failed to keep careful track of finances. I tracked them, but not nearly as closely as I should have. It got confusing because I had to use a lot of cash, villages don’t usually give receipts, factoring the exchange rate, a couple big Visa expenses and the fact that the cash was spread out among several adult leaders. Fortunately God made sure there was enough money for everything, including an unexpected fee to exit Belize, but it still added a level of unnecessary stress to the trip.

4. I went to bed too early. The last couple nights on the trip most of the teenagers stayed up late talking and hanging out with each other, which was fine. However, I was physically and emotionally drained and just wanted to go to sleep, so I did. Looking back on it, though, those were probably the most opportune times to really connect with the teens on a personal level. Sacrificing an hour or two of sleep those final nights to stay up with them would’ve been worth it.

My “Corrects”

Although I made some mistakes and would change some things if I could go back and do it again, I didn’t do everything wrong. Some things I actually did really well.

1. I was able to stretch kids out of their comfort zone without making them snap. That’s a hard balance to achieve sometimes — knowing when to push them and how far without pushing them over the edge. I feel that the adult leaders and myself found that balance and did a good job of pushing when appropriate and easing up when it was too much.

2. I spent an hour in quiet time with the Lord every day. So did our teenagers, not just me, and man, it makes all the difference in the world.

3. I utilized the gifts and talents of each teenager. It’s temping to try to fit teenagers into our agenda because it makes the agenda so much easier to lead and to follow, but instead we determined the strength of most of the teenagers and made assignments based on that. The result was that each student excelled personally and thus the team worked together like oiled gears in a clock.

4. I remained calm and steady despite emotional stress. Most people don’t realize the emotional toll a trip like this can have on the leader until they’ve actually been in that position themselves. It can be pretty intense at times, but throughout it all the Lord enabled me to remain calm and level-headed. One teenager noticed and even commented on it in front of the group.

Pics and Vids

• Pictures from our trip here.
• Here’s the highlight videos I made of the trip.