podcast notes I am opening another night of coaching, Tuesday Sept. 10 – November 19th. Six one hour sessions to talk about how to make your youth grow, improving your leadership skills, how to handle church politics, whatever area you want to grow in, we’ll talk about. I’ll put the link in the show notes,…
Some youth workers don’t like their main youth meetings. In fact, preparing for their meetings make them anxious. For some, its the pressure to “get it right.” For other youth workers, they have a casual “God will do it” mentality and do not pour a ton of effort into their meeting. This attitude could be…
I was listening to ESPN Get Up this morning and they were talking about Russel Wilson asking for more money to stay the QB in Seattle. I think it was Louis Riddick who said, and I paraphrase, “Front offices are victims of their own arrogance. If they feel like they have enough cap space to…
I was absolutely clueless in my first three jobs as a youth pastor. Maybe that’s why I was let go from two of them. I did’t do an any thing wrong, I just couldn’t the signs that I was screwing up. Part of that screwing up was my inability to detect what my pastor wanted.…
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. – Leo Buscaglia Some might say I cared too much in youth ministry and I probably did. I…
I’ve treated every youth ministry I’ve led with the mentality of, “What we do every week is equally as important, or more, as what you do in band, football practice or key club” If I did not put the value on what we did every week, no one else would. Many youth ministries operate sloppy…
In my last weeks of being a full time youth pastor, I sat with my students in a small group and asked them a serious question, “What did I do well, so I can pass it on to other youth workers?”. I didn’t ask them to flower me with compliments or niceties, I ask them…
Texas Coach Tom Herman said something interesting after the Texas Longhorns beat the Georgia Bulldogs in the 2019 Sugar Bowl, “This locker room finally became player led instead of coach fed” This is a powerful statement about how discipleship in our youth ministries should look. Coach fed must happen at the beginning, but it should…
The real threat to your youth ministry isn’t outside the church, it’s inside. The world doesn’t care if churches have youth who have meetings The world doesn’t care if kids go to camps or retreats for spiritual renewal. The world has an entirely different expectation for our youth ministry and it does not include number…
I attended the TRIBE conference this past weekend, hosted by Jeff Goins, and a speaker used an illustration I had heard before. He began with, “What is the the most valuable land in the world?” Several possible answers included the oil rich lands of Saudi Arabia, the gold mines of South Africa, the real estate…
