December 11, 2014 By Lauren Visser | 8 Comments

Confessions of an Unqualified Youth Leader

If you had told me a few months ago that I’d be leading the high school and junior high youth groups at my church, I’d say you were crazy.

Working with kids is something I’ve always told myself I wasn’t cut out for. I’m not patient, I’m not great with following up on things, and I can be a pretty awkward person.

Can you guess how this story ends though? Now I lead youth group every Wednesday night for both high school and junior high, and I prepare Sunday morning lessons with high school students.

God can use anyone to build his kingdom—even if we think we’re terrible candidates for the job. God knows where he wants to use us, we just have to accept the call (Jeremiah 1:6-9).

About three months ago, I prayed for an open mind and a heart to accept new challenges and opportunities. A week or two later, someone at church approached me to take on the youth director role for the current school year while we search for someone to fill the gap. So, with a newly open mind and heart, I said yes!

Youth ministry is fueled by volunteers. But like me, a lot of people don’t think they’re right for the job. What you may not know though, is that there are lots of ways to get involved, make a difference, and contribute to your church’s youth ministry.

Here are a few ways you can get involved:

1. Bring snacks

Just the other week, an elderly woman from my church asked me to put her down to bake treats for the youth group once a month. That may seem like a small contribution, but that’s one week every month now that I don’t have to think about treats for our events. It alleviates the budget once a month to contribute to other needs, and it allows Mrs. Polinder a way to be involved in our youth ministry. Whether you make the treats yourself, or buy snacks at the bakery or grocery store on your way home, your thoughtfulness and generosity in bringing snacks will be greatly appreciated.

2. Get prizes

Occasionally at youth group events we’ll host a little competition: Minute to Win It, Bible trivia, bowling, you name it! If I showed up to host one of these competitions without some prizes, there would definitely be some screaming and gnashing of teeth. Prizes—even silly ones—make a big difference in how invested kids are in these competitions. Think about it—do you have access to goods or services that kids in your church would be interested in? Old gift cards? CDs? Candy? Movie tickets? Anything at all? Consider making a donation to the youth ministry at your church!

3. Host meals

At my church, one of our youth group traditions is having CRASH nights. CRASH stands for “Come Relax At Someone’s House.” About once or twice each school year, a family in our church offers to have the high school kids over to their home for a night of food and fun. The ones that stick out to me are the times that we get the whole group, including the hosts, playing a game together. The community that comes from nights like these is truly a blessing. Hosting a night like this is only a one-time commitment, and at the end of the night you’ll even have some new friends!

4. Mentor leaders

Maybe mentoring students is too overwhelming . . . but have you thought about mentoring the youth leaders? Many youth leaders don’t have teenagers of their own, so having the perspective of someone who does is a welcome resource. Youth leaders pour their lives into the kids they work with, which is exhausting if no one is pouring into them. Even a meeting once a month to talk about how things are going with the ministry or work-life balance or new activity ideas is a great way to invest in the kids. You’re investing in the people who invest in them.

5. Encourage leaders

When I show up to church on Sunday morning and find a nice, handwritten note in my mailbox it fires me up for the week. Knowing that someone has noticed and appreciates the work I’ve put in means the world to me. Writing a short note of encouragement to someone doesn’t take more than five or ten minutes out of your day, but will have a lasting effect on the person who receives it—and the people they work with. Some churches have teams designated to make sure people are being recognized and appreciated, but anyone can be an encouragement to others. Try choosing someone different to encourage every week.

6. Pray

Every ministry desperately needs prayer to be successful. It is easy to get caught up in making youth ministry a fun event or an entertaining place to be, but the root of youth ministry needs to be planted in the Word of God. If we are not preaching the gospel, then we are not truly a ministry to youth. Pray for spiritual guidance for the leaders of your youth ministry, for open minds and hearts for the youth that attend, and for resources and opportunities to bless the youth as well. No ministry can succeed without the power of prayer.

As this year is quickly coming to a close, think about making one of these a resolution to pursue next year. The need is out there, and many spiritual gifts are needed to make the ministry go round.

* * *

Want to read more about youth ministry? Check out “10 Ways to Be a Better Youth Leader.”

July 31, 2014 By Ryan Nelson | 103 Comments

10 Things Every Youth Leader Should Know

A lot of Christians think they aren’t cut out for youth ministry. But if you love Jesus and you care about kids, everything else falls into place.

In my five years working with middle school students I’ve met multiple 80 year olds who are incredible youth leaders—and it’s not for their spunky personalities and crazy dance skills. They love Jesus and they love kids. When you boil it down, that’s what really matters.

If you start with Jesus, all of the intricacies of youth leading should align conceptually, biblically, and practically. You should be able to trace everything back to Jesus.

Here are ten things every youth leader should know:

1. Have a purpose for everything

Let’s be honest. From the outside looking in, there’s a lot of weird stuff that happens at youth groups. Beach ball ballet, cricket-spitting contests, fruit baseball, and an endless list of games, skits, and programs that don’t seem in any way connected to sharing the gospel.

But if you know the purpose behind each component, then even the goofy and weird parts make sense.

Some games give lonely, left out, or neglected kids the chance to be noticed, cheered, and celebrated. Other games force kids to work together—regardless of who they’re friends with at school.

Wacky leader skits can create laughter, break down walls, and show kids that there is a childlike joy in everyone. For leaders, those same activities can offer an opportunity to step out of their own comfort zone and put kids before themselves.

I’ve worked with leaders who refused to put themselves in front of kids and be goofy alongside them because “it wasn’t their gifting.” It’s definitely important to recognize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at (so you know how you’re best suited to serve your team), but if we understand the why behind each aspect of youth group, it becomes a lot less about us and a lot more about the kids, Jesus, and the ways we let God use us.

2. Humble yourself

The more cool, holy, or amazing you present yourself as, the more distant kids will feel from you.

You’re also the person who happens to be proclaiming the gospel and sharing about Jesus—do the math.

Leaders should show kids that Jesus meets them right where they are, loves them as they are, and desires to be a part of their lives right now—not once they become as cool, holy, and amazing as their leaders.

*When Kids Hurt* is a great resource to help you navigate the adolescent world.

You were a kid once. If you’re made of flesh and blood, you probably sinned once, too. It’s not always best to share all the details of your sin without a relational foundation, but the more vulnerable you are with kids, the more likely they are to share the sin in their lives too. If we hide, so do they.

Humility isn’t just important for our relationships with kids. If you serve in a youth ministry, chances are good that you work with a team of volunteers.

Serving in ministry together is a surprisingly dangerous opportunity for selfishness to creep into our lives. It’s easy to feel like by being on the team we are fulfilling our duties, checking the box, or doing our time. But if you’ve committed to being a part of the team, share the load. Don’t dump everything onto one person—especially not the person giving the message. If someone else on your team is directly communicating the gospel, help that leader give kids their best by allowing them to focus on preparing their message.

3. Seek the kids in the corners

No matter how awesome your youth group is, there will always be kids in the corners. The ones who show up because their parents made them come, or a cute boy or girl is there too. They think the games are dumb and the leaders are weird. Or maybe they just want everyone else to think they’re too cool to be there. Either way, God has brought them to your youth group, and he’s entrusted them to you for an hour or two each week.

Sometimes kids genuinely aren’t interested in what’s going on, and you can’t and shouldn’t force them to join in. But sometimes kids stand in the corners to see if anyone will notice.

If a kid without friends comes to youth group, where he/she doesn’t have friends, how do you make the body of Christ look different than school? Involve them. Love them. Imitate God’s relentless pursuit of their hearts.

4. Share the joy of the gospel

The gospel isn’t boring. A lot of kids think it is, because their only exposure to it is from reading a translation of a 2,000-year-old book, or listening to messages crafted for adults. Jim Rayburn, founder of Young Life (a youth ministry designed for kids who don’t go to church), once said “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.” Whether or not you agree with Rayburn, Christians can’t overlook the potential damage of presenting the most exciting truth in the history of the world as stale, old, and irrelevant. The Bible is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), and there are countless ways to show kids that the life and truth it contains is applicable to their lives today.

5. Know your kids

Knowing your kids means more than just knowing who they are. It means knowing how they will respond to different situations, and preparing your events with them in mind.

Some kids love being the center of attention, and some kids fall apart when you put them in front of a group. It’s important to give kids equal opportunity to shine, but the risk of humiliating a kid or making them feel alone and outcast is not worth the potential reward of making them feel adored.

If a kid is checking out your youth group for the first time and you’ve never had any interaction with them, you might want to be careful about throwing them into a game that requires them to be outgoing and comfortable in front of everyone.

It’s also important to know where your kids are at spiritually. This doesn’t mean you should ask every kid who comes through the door, “Do you believe in Jesus?” Those conversations should happen, but not before you develop a relationship with them and earn the right to ask those deeply intimate questions.

There are countless reasons why a kid might walk in through the doors of your youth ministry, and a lot of them aren’t Jesus (at least, not from the kid’s perspective). Over-spiritualizing a kid’s experience can actually prevent them from having a spiritual experience. St. Francis of Assisi is often attributed with saying, “Preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words.” Youth ministry is an excellent context to practice reflecting Christ through the way you love and live.

6. Don’t embarrass kids*

Kids live in constant fear of humiliation. The last place they should have to live out their worst nightmares is at youth group—where they are also learning that they are loved and valued by God.

*See #5 and #1. If you know a kid well enough and you’re confident that their class-clown spirit will allow them to embrace and appreciate the experience, and the embarrassment serves a purpose, mild embarrassment may be acceptable.

7. Meet parents

You could be the nicest, most caring and trustworthy person on the planet, but if parents don’t know you, how can you expect them to trust you with their kids?

Building a relationship with parents is especially important for middle school and elementary school ministries, where kids are fully dependent on their parents to even be able to show up at your events. Sometimes meeting parents is effortless because they actively seek out the leaders who work with their kids. Other times, meeting parents takes work.

Even if they don’t care who you are or who their kids hang out with, it will always be worth it to you in your ministry to get to know the people who have raised the kids God has placed at your feet. When kids leave, walk them out to whoever picks them up. Better yet, offer to give them a ride, and use it as an opportunity to introduce yourself to their parents. Don’t let the inside of the church be the only place your life overlaps with your kids’.

8. Put your relationship with Jesus first

This may seem selfish in a way, but the reality is, the more we put Jesus first, the more we love those around us. When you put your relationship with Jesus first, the purpose and significance of everything you do and say to others is amplified, not reduced.

Phrases like, “You can only lead someone as far as you’ve gone” may be cliché, but they still carry weight. If you aren’t pursuing your own relationship with Jesus, how can you honestly encourage kids that it’s important to their faith? If you aren’t reading your Bible, praying, and surrounding yourself with Christians who are wiser than yourself, you aren’t offering your best to your ministry, your kids, or God. These are your tools of the trade, and if you aren’t using your tools, how can you do your job?

9. Honor your commitment

Hopefully getting involved with a youth group wasn’t just a passing fancy you had in church one day. Stepping into ministry of any kind is something that should be prayerfully considered, discussed with God and with wise people in your life, and surrounded with spiritual preparation.

If you’ve committed to leading kids at your church or through another ministry, honor God, your kids, and the leaders on your team by being trustworthy, accountable, and invested in the work you are doing together.

Today’s kids have been dubbed “the fatherless generation.” Youth leaders can’t abandon them too. Leaving ministry should be considered just as carefully and prayerfully as entering it.

10. Get a mentor

One of the biggest dangers facing people in ministry is burnout. It’s easy to be excited about something when you first get going, but after a couple years, or a decade, how do you stay excited? And more importantly, how do you draw from your experience while still treating each experience and each kid as something entirely new and wonderful?

The key is having a mentor.

If you are constantly pouring into the lives of kids and nobody is pouring into you, sooner or later you’re going to feel empty. Whether that mentor is a pastor, a more experienced leader, or a wise friend from church, you need somebody who can offer you fresh perspective, hold you accountable, pray for you, love you, and inspire you to keep going (Hebrews 10:24).

What else do you think youth leaders should know? Tell us in the comments!

* * *

Want to build a volunteer program that lasts? Can Someone Please Volunteer? is a free ebook packed with insights to help you recruit, train, and retain more volunteers.

Sign up to get your free copy.

May 10, 2014 By Nate Smoyer | 19 Comments

25 Million Youths without Fathers and One Man on a Mission

With more than 25 million fatherless youths in America today, this generation has been tragically called the “fatherless generation.” How are we supposed to tackle such a monumental problem? How can we reach out to, love, and disciple this generation?

Recently, I had the privilege of connecting with John Sowers, founder of The Mentoring Project. His heart for loving the “fatherless generation” is incredible. See how this man of God is working hard to bring the love of Jesus to youths across America.

For those who don’t know, can you briefly explain the purpose of The Mentoring Project? Where did the idea come from, and when did you start it?

The purpose of The Mentoring Project is to call and equip the church to respond to the crisis of fatherlessness. Reaching the fatherless generation has been a life-calling to me—it was my story before it became my mission. It’s very personal to me. In 2009, Donald Miller called me to start and lead The Mentoring Project—it was previously know as the Belmont Foundation. So in June 2009, I incorporated it and created the mission and model.

The project seems have really picked up some traction in the last year or two. Why do you think this is?

I think in the past five years the church has begun to examine the issue of fatherlessness. There has been an overall emphasis in service and loving the world, which is great. Still, one of my key roles at The Mentoring Project has been as a herald because it seems people get the international orphan crisis more than they do the local one. For some reason, when we think “mission” we default to another country, when the issue of fatherlessness is in our own neighborhoods or just across the railroad tracks. There is overall traction on the issue of fatherlessness, but still a lot of awakening needs to happen around the idea of “being missional” to the fatherless child right next to us.

The Mentoring Project’s website says there are 25 million fatherless youths in America. What is your grand vision as to how the church will be able to fill this need?

The idea of the church reaching the fatherless generation through incarnational ministry is our goal. To do this, the church needs to adopt a vision for local, community-based mentoring relationships. We want to see the church create sustainable mentoring communities, reaching both single moms and the fatherless kids right in their own context. How many single moms and their children sit quietly in the shadows of our own churches?

What’s one story of mentorship impacting a youth that has touched you personally?

One of my favorite stories has to do with one of our sites in Oklahoma City, where we work with high-risk youth and the Oklahoma City Police Department. At the first of the year, we asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up. They all said, “rappers, ball players, and rich.” After six months of mentoring these kids, we asked them the same question again. They said, “police officers and mentors.” Children aspire to be what they see.

Last year, The Mentoring Project ran a cool Father’s Day promotion called “Don’t Buy the Tie.” What was the reason for that campaign? Do you have anything planned for this year?

We loved Don’t Buy the Tie—and we will do it again this year. We feel like Father’s Day is a great space to say, “This Father’s Day, help a child without a dad—give the gift of a mentor.” We are also working simultaneously with the DC guys for My Brothers Keeper, and may be partnering with them for a Father’s Day event. Last year, we were blessed to send mentors and youth to the White House, and two of them met the president.

If someone is interested in getting started as a mentor or wants to partner with The Mentoring Project, how could they get started?

If someone wants to mentor, we have a cool set of tools called the “Mentor Toolkit,” which help people develop a foundation for mentoring. The training includes three videos and they can be watched alone or with a small group. It also has a field guide and some best practice tips. Our Mentor Toolkit is perhaps our best initiative. We’ve seen thousands of people use it in the past four years. We are rereleasing it this July in an updated and expanded version.

Thanks for sharing about the Mentoring Project. You get to have the last word. Go!

One theme that really has my attention is the idea of masculine initiation. We live in a culture with few elders, with no rites of passage or sense of “coming into manhood.” We don’t have a framework for masculine initiation—we don’t even have a language for it.

I started journaling about this idea the night my twin girls were born. I was thrilled but also felt exposed as a man. This is both a cultural and generational phenomenon—a generation of men without place. These journal entries became a book called The Heroic Path: In Search of the Masculine Heart—which comes out May 13.

At the root of most fatherlessness is the issue of fidelity. I believe if men can understand who they are as men and find their identity hidden with Christ in God, the fatherless pipeline will shrink. This is my hope for the book—to be a word for a generation of men who are trying to find the wild masculine, and in a divine sense, claim their mythic ground.

I believe we are all mentoring someone, whether we know it or not. The Mentoring Project is just asking people to be intentional. And if anyone is interested in connecting further, check us out online at TheMentoringProject.org or on Twitter @tmproject.

To learn more from Sowers, check out his book Fatherless Generation: Redeeming the Story.