Squad Goals
One of the best parts of ministry is working with a team of people we love and care for as part of our family. There is nothing I would not do for those who serve with me and there is no way we can reach a great number of students unless we have a great team.
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Planning to Partner with Parents
We all have moments where we wish we could just work with students. We have this ideal of these little lives that we can help mold and steer towards a life lived within the body of Christ. Often, we may find ourselves forgetting that parents are a huge part of that body of Christ too.
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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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Find the Right Volunteers
It’s now two months into the ministry year, and I have a good problem. I need more leaders. Students are coming and bringing friends, which is good. The problem is we currently don’t have enough leaders to meaningfully engage with all of them. And, I don’t think I’m the only youth worker with this problem.
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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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The LGBTQI Conversation
At a recent UK gathering of Christian Youth Workers the most requested area of advice and training was surrounding the LGBTQI conversation. Yep, I said it friends, conversation. The use of the word ‘issue’ or ‘situation’ in this context, I find, is at best unhelpful and at worst, spiritual abuse.
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