In a world overflowing with information, our attention spans are shrinking faster than ever. Our students are overwhelmed with emails, social media posts, texts and advertisements – all vying for a sliver of their precious time. This begs the question: how do we get students to notice our events and care about what we have…
Most youth ministries do not have the luxury of separating their middle and high school students, which is optimum, when it comes to Sunday school, small groups or even in your main meeting. This is mostly because of not enough volunteers or not enough volunteers who want to work with middle school. The challenges with…
If you, or your youth group, have a fever for March Madness, why not use it to fuel your youth group messages. Here are 10 message seeds for your final four messages. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6): Explore the symbolism of the four horsemen, discussing themes of judgment, conflict, and spiritual warfare.…
It is almost March and the madness of college basketball is soon to begin, are you ready? I want to help you leverage this month to help you grow your ministry. The center of march Madness are the bracket sheets. Offices, work place, churches, etc. print blank bracket sheets and choose the teams they think…
Plans fix problems is a simple maximum, coined by Brianna Wiest, but worthy of a discussion because many of you reading this are filled with anxiety, fear and worry because you don’t have a plan to solve any number of youth ministry problems you have to grow your youth ministry to disciple your students to…
Nick Sirianni is the head football coach of the Philadephia Eagles, who I hate, as a football team because I am a Giants fan. Yes, I’m petty and a little salty considering my Giants are in the toilet this year and the Eagles are probably going back to the Superbowl. Regardless of my feeling towards…
I think every church youth room in America should have a wall of pictures. Why? Because, pictures tell the story of your youth ministry. Let me offer four reasons you should have more pictures in your youth room. The Original Instagram A picture wall is where students see themselves in the story of your youth…
Teenagers, by nature, are inappropriate. Their immature brains, sometimes, come up with terrible things to say and do without any guardrails or filters. I’ve never had to create a formal code of conduct, mostly because I’ve never needed one. The students who came to my youth group were mostly well behaved, I had a good…
I was always taught Summer Jump not Summer Slump. This means that while other churches shut down/wind down for summer, our church was going to grow. I just had to figure out how to make that happen. For the past ten year and two churches I have used the TRIBES outreach program. The 10 week…
Although we call them spiritual disciplines or habits, we can’t let the “check list mentality” creep into our walk with God by becoming legalistic about it. I think we can agree that the goal of starting spiritual disciplines in the first place is to create a deeper intimacy with God, not keeping a list like…
