Giving youth pastors the tools they need to make and shape disciples.

The Content Driven Youth Ministry Part I

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Content Driven Youth Ministry

We live in a content driven culture. We want new posts, new videos, and a site with a long  tail of searchable content. Click bait on sites like BuzzFeed and Digg create titles that titillate and get us to click so we will stay on their sites longer. As youth workers, similarly, we want our kids to extend their time in the Bible. prayer. and living for Christ beyond out youth meetings.

I create content every week in our Sunday School and Mid-week programs with the prayer that the Holy Spirit will use use it to speak to kids and draw them into a deeper relationship with God.  A lot of my time, energy, and prep goes into those meetings, but I don’t want the content of the meeting to stay in the room once my time message concludes and I am shutting off the lights to leave.   I am doing my best to ask the question,  “How do I extend the content and conversation online and off?”. The first step I took was to realize that everything in my meeting is shareable, extendable,  content.

I look at my youth ministry as a combination of social media platforms crammed into one website. Kids come to check out the content and decide if they’re going to favorite my youth meeting so they can easily check it out every week or if this is meeting is ignorable.  According to an article on Hubspot, 55% of People Spend Less Than 15 Seconds On Your Website. This data is similar to the stat that kids will decide whether they like you and hence your  youth ministry within about seven seconds. I don’t understand all the science behind that but I find it to be true of myself when checking out restaurants.

No one likes to come by my blog if I have not written anything new or if my site is confusing to navigate. Here are some links to some terrible websites.

25 Worst Websites of 2013

As you try to navigate them, ask yourself what frustrates you about them? The design? The colors? The purpose? How are these websites are like your youth ministry and is your youth ministry frustrating your kids?

Join me this week as I explore the content driven ministry and how to extend our conversation with kids.

Your Turn

If our youth meetings are like a website,  ask yourself some important questions:

How often do I update my content?

How is my content designed and organized?

Can students easily navigate our youth ministry’s or is it confusing?

Is my information relative or outdated?

Leave me your  answers in the comment section.

 

 

 

 

 

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