MAKING SENSE OF JUNIOR HIGH MINISTRY
Ministering to Parents Strategically
Serving in student ministry for 15 plus years has allowed for many different scenarios to play out in people’s lives. One of the keys to a fruitful student ministry is to partner with parents. Students have many different things tugging at them from school, sports, jobs, and extracurricular activities. When it comes to church, we must partner with the parents of our students, so we do not add more stress or tension to the busy schedules of our students.
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4 Ways to Get Parents Involved in Your Ministry
Parents can be our biggest ally and advocate, or they can be the catalyst for you moving to another ministry (that’s a nice way of saying, they’ll get you fired). It’s really all about how you approach developing healthy relationships with the parents of your students. Cultivating a partnership with them, as they try to encourage spiritual development in their student’s life, is key to a thriving ministry.
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Parent Partnership is Crucial in Junior High
Parents, especially the ones who have their first born in middle school, are freaking out. New rhythms, new ways of life they didn’t have to walk before, their kid turning into someone else before their eyes. Welcome to middle school. It’s a whole new world when you inherit a middle schooler—and everyone in your house knows it.
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8 Hacks to Make your Overnighter Great
I’ve never understood why youth workers hate overnighters, they are my absolute favorite thing! …Sparingly, admittedly. My first day at my current church, 5 years ago, was an overnighter. The relationships that I built that first day with students and leaders set me up for success. Now, each overnighter, I reflect on it as my “anniversary date,” and try to make each one better than the last.
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Attendance Isn’t Everything
Over the last 3 years, I’ve been working at a smaller church in Northeast Kentucky. When I accepted the position at my current congregation, I was 20 years old and a full-time student. I was young (I’m still young) and inherited a small youth ministry that consisted primarily of young middle school students hungry to learn. Over the next 2-3 years as the youth ministry matured, so did the original middle schoolers.
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Partnering with Parents is Good for Everyone
Hands up if you’ve ever found that working with parents in your youth ministry setting can be tedious? I’m with you. I’ve been in and around youth ministry for nearly a decade in different ways, but it’s only now that I have begun to feel like I’ve made some headway in my partnership with parents.
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A Day at the Beach
A day off of school for some of us who live in Florida, means a day at the beach. There are many beaches to choose from here in Florida, and even in November it was perfect beach weather. Over the years I have experienced many trips to the beach with my family and with youth groups and I have noticed that they usually fall into two categories. First, there is the ‘oh, look the beach, let’s stop’. This is the trip that is spontaneous and has people rolling up their pant legs to wade into the surf.
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Take Your Email Communication to a New Level
The worst thing you can hear from a parent is, “I didn’t know that was happening! When did you announce this?” Or, “I never know what’s going on in the ministry!”
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A Pilgrim’s Progress Through Partnership and How it Can Change Your Ministry to Parents
In September of 1620, around one hundred people set sail from Plymouth, England on a ship called the Mayflower. After a long and treacherous voyage fraught with unforeseen storms, the ship dropped anchor that December off the shores of present-day Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Over half of the Mayflower’s settlers died that first winter.
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3 Preaching Tips That Keep Junior High Students Engage
There is nothing more difficult than having to sit through a message that is not engaging. Recently, I was at an event where the speaker did not relate to me. As the speaker read their manuscript, they did not provide any connection to the audience.
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Professionalism
When you think of the average junior high student what comes to mind?
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Bringing it Back, Old School Style
Any of us who work with Jr. High students know that they are desperate to grow up. They want to be older, gain more independence, be given more responsibility, and basically be mini adults. We also know, they are nowhere close to being grown.
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Their Ministry Matters, Too!
Sometimes it is hard to look beyond ourselves. We see our ministry, and what we are trying to accomplish, and get caught up in the process. We see everything on our calendar and, many times, only view the church through that lens.
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Strategic Programming is Creative Programming
The universal word for junior high is: FUN. When junior high students have FUN they are more likely to feel like they’ve found a place to belong, no matter where they are at in their relationship with Jesus. So, we program our ministries with FUN events, services, camps and more!
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