Post-apocalypse life has meant that this year, the Spring Slump is hitting a little differently.

I don’t know about you, but every year we go through some type of slump in the spring. Maybe it’s because the school year is dragging on. Maybe it’s because we’re getting ready for big summer activities. Whatever the reason, our student ministry encounters a bit of a slump in the spring.

This year, it’s been a bit of a different feeling. While we do have students and families coming back to our in-person gatherings, which is exciting, there still is a bit of a slump feeling in the air. Leaders have it. Students have it. Heck, I’ve got it.

So what are we doing to combat the Spring Slump?

Fill Your Cup

Read the Bible. Sing worship songs. Take a day off to just experience God’s presence. Get somebody else to teach one week. Whatever it takes, make sure you’re not ministering from an empty cup. Work on your own spiritual health so you can lead through the slump!

Encourage Your Leaders

I’ve found that if I’m tired, more than likely my leaders are too! There are lots of ways to encourage your leaders. Take a picture of them with their students and put it in a frame. Write them a note to say specifically how they make your ministry better. Take them out to lunch and ask them how they are doing. Getting your leaders re-energized will help them make it through the low times!

Minister to Who Is Present

It can feel tough when the room isn’t as full as you’re used to. Just take it from Doug in this video! Smaller groups give you the opportunity to really pour into the students who show up! Don’t just wish that more had been a part of your evening. Play the game! Ask deep questions. Spend time really getting to know the students who are present with you in the slump!

What would you add to this list? How do you get through the summer slump? Let us know!

Ronald

Searching for Youth Group Games? Discover thousands of turn-key resources at Download Youth Ministry.

I don’t know if life and ministry has ever been as messy as it has been over the past 11 months.  I imagine your story is similar.  If we, as grown people are struggling to process all of the change, as resilient as teenagers are, our students are facing things that no one has ever had to face before.  It’s messy. Here are four tips that were brought back to me from the 2017 GLS that can help you lead well through the mess.

1. Be Close

We have so many students who are running through the gauntlet of life and if we are not close to the students we are ministering to we are not going to have earned the right to really influence their lives.  This is why our “Sunday to Sunday” or “Tuesday to Tuesday” ministry is so important.  If we are engaging with our students at some point during the other 6 days of the week our students are far more likely to open themselves up to us when they need it.

2. Change Lenses

COVID has taken its toll on everything and everyone. Even the individual issues that our students face on a day-to-day basis seem to be significant ad constant.  As we are ministering to our students, we get the really cool opportunity to bring the perspective of God into their situations.  If you and I are struggling to keep perspective on Jesus through this whole ordeal, you can be sure our students are too.  If you have done #1 correctly, then you have earned to right to gently guide your students’ perspective of a situation back to an eternal one.

3. Stay Hopeful

The world is hopeless.  Any hope that our students have outside of Christ will not last. But that’s not for us.  We have the hope of Jesus. Any situation. Any story. Any sickness.  We have hope.  If our students look at us and see us floundering in the deep, then they will flounder as well.  We must lead our students by example.  With our hope firm resting on the anchor that is Christ. For us to do this effectively, we must maintain our spiritual disciplines.   Whatever it takes for you to find your refuge in Jesus.  Be sure to stay connected to Jesus so when the storms of life hit your students, then can you as a rock, a safe person they can trust through the circumstance.

4. Be Willing

This is the same drum that everyone has been beating since COVID hit.  But we must be willing to change.  Change is uncomfortable.  Change is scary.  But change is absolutely necessary.  I came to a realization sometime around late summer that we were essentially hitting the reset button on our ministries.  I had to grief what we lost.  But then, we got to praying.  Asking God for a fresh vision.  We couldn’t go back to ministry as usual and we changed up some significant things in our ministry.  Some haven’t been great.  Others have been amazing.  At this point, we just have to try.  Trusting that God is on His throne and that the word of God will never return void.

What do you think? Are you doing these well?  Can you do any of these better?

David Wood is a wizard.

Before I lived in Modesto, my wife, my three daughters, and I lived in Belize as missionaries. Before that, we lived in Southern California where I had an awesome opportunity to travel the U.S. performing at colleges and churches sharing the gospel through my illusions for about 3 years. I’ve experienced a whole lot in my life, and I love to share God’s story through my life as often as I can.

Searching for Youth Group Games? Discover thousands of turn-key resources at Download Youth Ministry.

As a black youth pastor and 16-year youth ministry veteran, I’ve never seen this much hype in the broader culture around black history month. It seems as though everyone is jumping onto the bandwagon to specifically acknowledge African Americans like never before.

The question is, should the church follow suit?

Should the bride of Christ focus on a single people group during an entire month within our church communities? This question was sparked by a woman named Sarah on our DYM Community Facebook page. The responses she got were varied, which sparked my desire to write this up.  To answer this important question, I’d like us to consider the following:

Where are we currently?

How can the Bible speak into this moment?

What should we do?

Where Are We Currently?

What is the current environment we and our students find ourselves in in 2021? I am about to list some things which may make some feel a variety of emotions or assume bias, but please allow me to elaborate further before you stop reading. Over the past year:

• Ahmaud Arbery was shot.
• Breonna Taylor was shot by police in her bed while she slept.
• George Floyd died with a police officer’s knee on his neck.
• In the summer of 2020, millions of people across the U.S. and around the world marched all summer long for racial justice in response.
• Communities burned as some rioters and looters took advantage of the situation.
• The phrase “Black Lives Matters” reemerged as both a rallying cry and a polarizing slogan.

Our teenagers saw and experienced all this. If church leaders aren’t intentional about helping this younger generation walk through these messy times with a biblical foundation seasoned with grace and understanding, someone else will direct their responses according to their own paradigms.

What Does The Scripture Teach?

Some may object, “But aren’t we called to be in the world but not of the world? Aren’t we supposed to be set apart? Aren’t we taught not to bow down to false idols of our culture like in the book of Daniel? Aren’t we supposed to be transformed by the renewing of our minds?” All this is true. However, culture alone is not a terrible thing. Every culture has both beautiful and broken parts. I serve a God who is able to redeem even the broken parts to point people back to him. Black History Month has been a staple in our culture for many years and serves as another opportunity for us to lean into events our students are already talking about and forming opinions on in 2021.

What does the Bible say about leveraging culture for the sake of connecting people to Him? In Acts 17 Paul was walking through the city of Athens and noticed an area with many idols. Now, Paul could have completely ignored this. He could have condemned the people for having idols made of stone or wood. He could have made fun of them because he knew the true God and their theology wasn’t even close to being accurate. He could have chosen to completely ignore this aspect of their culture and just get right to “preaching the gospel.” However, Paul graciously acknowledged the Athenian people’s desire for religion.  He looked into their customs and used an altar dedicated “to the unknown god” as an opportunity to talk about the ONE true God. I love that Paul quoted back THEIR OWN CULTURAL POETS as additional reasoning to believe what he was saying: “‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28 NIV). Paul recognized the moment of the culture. He saw an opportunity to use their limited/false understanding of God as a bridge to a relationship with Jesus. I also love 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 where Paul recognized the power of adapting to certain cultures and customs for the purpose of helping people hear the gospel! Paul was truly a cross-cultural missionary. So what does this have to do with Black History Month?

What Should We Do?
Our students have experienced more racial unrest in the past twelve months than they likely have witnessed their entire lives. Black History Month offers a natural excuse to reach into the culture and say something meaningful to a generation of young people desperate to know God’s response. The following are two very basic ideas as to how you can leverage this season to connect with your students better, positively shape their thinking around race, and lead your students during a messy time.  Please understand that all of these ideas will need to be adjusted and modified based on the ethnic makeup of your group. Contextualization is very important!

• Intentionally use examples of African Americans positively in sermon illustrations.

Because we live in a predominately white society, we naturally have more current and historical examples of white people doing and saying stuff worthy to share. That’s not a bad thing. However, representation matters. It matters to the students of color in your youth group, and it matters to the white kids in your group who may have unspoken stereotypes in the backs of their minds. Being intentional about using positive examples of African Americans doing great stuff, saying cool stuff, and becoming amazing people does two things. First, it lets your students of color know you see them. They will feel loved and cared for. Second, it helps shape your white students to value the voices and accomplishments of people who don’t look like them if they don’t already. So, during your series on sex this month (because of February), consider what positive examples you could use where you highlight African Americans.

• Have a specific conversation on racial injustice in your youth group.

Regardless of the ethnic makeup of your group, invite a guest speaker to have a conversation with you (on stage or on Zoom with your students present) about race in their area. This can be an eye-opening experience not only for the students, but for youth pastors as well. Consider the following:

• For groups that are mostly or all minorities, this conversation helps those students not feel crazy. It helps them feel seen. And with the right voice, it can redirect their possible anger and frustration toward healthy ways of expressing themselves and toward considering how they can help change society.
• For groups that are very mixed (I used to lead a highly diverse group of 300 students at my main campus at my last church), it helps all these students from various backgrounds have some common language and understanding for how to have discussions around race. It teaches them how to understand and empathize with one another. It helps them understand some much-needed history. With all this learning and understanding, deeper relationships can form within the group. Your students will take this unity back to their schools.
• For groups that are mostly (or all) white, have this conversation too! Stereotypes, prejudice, and racism are often subtle in culture, and it starts at a young age. Even though you may not have students of color in your ministry, there are likely students of color at their schools. And if there aren’t, I can assure you they are interacting with them online. Be a pioneer in helping students value all people by intentionally exposing them to diversity of thinking.

Final Thought.

If you’ve gotten this far but are still resisting the ideas presented in this article, I first want to say, thank you for reading! Encountering ideas contrary to one’s world view can be jarring. Thank you for making it to the end. This DYM article can’t do this conversation justice on why we need to have these discussions, so I would recommending picking up one of two books if you would really like to dig into American Church history of racism and how we can fight it today. The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism are two fantastic books by Jemar Tisby which are worth your time. Please leave a comment below if you would like to dialogue about this at all!

Theo Davis serves as the Multi-Site Youth Pastor at Restore Community Church in Kansas City, Missouri.  He has worked in youth ministry for 16 years in a variety of settings which include church plants, rural churches, and mega-churches on the East Coast and now Midwest. He received his degree in Youth Ministry from Eastern University in 2008 and has continued to leverage his education with real-world experience. He and his wife Malia are huge gamers and named their kids after video game characters — Zelda & Shepherd (from The Legend of Zelda and the Mass Effect Series).  Theo also loves action figures and spends his spare time developing his musical and visual art talents.  Follow him on Instagram @theo_davis

Searching for Youth Group Games? Discover thousands of turn-key resources at Download Youth Ministry.

I want to ask you the same question I asked my team this week in our meeting.

“If your leaders were hanging out with their students they lead as much as you have been hanging out with your leaders, would your students be discipled well?”

Stop spending so much time with students. Start investing your time with leaders.

I know that will probably rub people the wrong way, but hear me out.

I know it seems counterintuitive to spend less time with students, especially as youth pastors, to hang out with the adults who lead in your ministry. But you need to stop spending that much time with students yourself.

I am not saying not to hang out with students ever. 100% you should be with students.  All I am saying is we need to switch our priorities a bit and spend more of that time with leaders who hang out with students. I have seen that this is when ministry and the culture you want to develop really begins to take shape.

Why?

Because the more time you spend with leaders—pouring into them, spending time with them—they are getting to hear how you care for them and hear your heart and vision for the ministry. In turn, they repeat and replicate it with the students they lead. Maybe not word for word, but the same care you show to your leaders as an example will be replicated from them to the students they lead.

The more time you spend with leaders, the more they repeat and replicate your heart and vision with students.

I know I am good at developing people. But I am not good enough at it to care for all our students in the same way. We should treat our leaders as if they were in a small group we are leading. So the same care, the time, the energy we would spend with students—spend it on leaders.

Why?

There is always a return on investment, and not just any return. Exponential return.

Why?

Because you can multiply yourself. This will help with leader care, student care, the culture you are striving to achieve for your services and groups, and ultimately it will allow you to be more effective.

This is something I see a lot of youth leaders get stuck on. I believe if they were to switch some of their time and energy to leaders they would see a dramatic difference in their ministries.

This is part three of a series based on New being potentially better than Normal. You can find the other parts here and here. 

Look. 2020 was a wreck. We were forced to do some things that weren’t normal. But the new might be better. And that is especially true in the digital landscape as well. 

I’m not sure what digital stuff you tried or did during any lockdown you had to face. Maybe you shifted to phone calls. Maybe you prioritized handwritten notes. Maybe you stuck with Instagram. Maybe you went for the full boat and started streaming.  

Regardless, the notion that digital is impossible or unattainable went out the window when we were left with fewer ways to connect. The idea that we CAN’T do digital because it just seems like a hassle became less of an excuse when it was the best way to inspire students. 

All I’m saying is, we found that we could do SOMETHING on a digital platform and it could work and it can be powerful if you just do one thing digital. Here are two reasons and one simple list of solutions to doing something digital: 

1. They are already there. Even in the most rural areas, students are engaged in some way on a digital platform. Maybe it isn’t TikTok, Snapchat, or Facebook. But it’s probably Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. And at the very least it’s texting and messaging.

It’s how they listen to music, it’s how they discover what’s going on, and it’s how they form their way of thinking. Why would you not want to at least inject SOMETHING into the space that they occupy? 

The statistics are overwhelming and reveals a very real opportunity to be where they already are. 

2. Digital connection is a self-selected relationship. The people they follow, the accounts they turn notifications on for, the groups they align with are self-selected. Sure, there’s the random promoted posts that show up for everyone, but by and large, they have chosen to engage the accounts they are connected to.

If you are putting something out that inspires them, encourages them, or reminds them of the hope they have in Christ, it is one more way to inject light into darkness… and they choose to connect with it.  

3. Doing something isn’t as hard as we make it out to be. Nobody has enough time to do everything they want right now. I come to this realization almost every week. But we can get something out there and it only takes a few minutes and you don’t even have to be super focused on it.

Depending on what platform you are using, scheduling apps and systems allow you to load up an automatic calendar and have it auto-post for you. And some of these are built right into the platforms themselves. 

So how do you do this? I’m so glad you asked. Here are a few simple solutions. 

1. Buy a Social Media Pack or Texting Pack from DYM. I’m honestly not trying to sell you on anything. I use this stuff and it makes things so much easier. One of the most time-consuming parts of digital is producing high-quality stuff. DYM makes it easy for you.

I’m loading this Social Media Plan for January into my Instagram and Facebook feeds. They will automatically post and insert something into a platform that my students are on daily. You can even load devotionals into them like this one on the book of Ephesians. 

This year, we have a couple students selecting scriptures that we are texting out daily at 7am via Remind. The students receiving these signed up for the text messages and get a scripture reminder each day. We have also used this texting list and all we did was buy it, load it up, and then go play golf! 

There are seriously so many of these resources available on DYM and you should see if one fits your needs here. 

1. Take an Hour and schedule a month of posts/texts. These days, if you have a business profile set up on IG or Facebook, you can use their “Business Suite” platform to schedule across both platforms. We use REMIND for texting students and they allow you to schedule as well. 

I run the social media for our church as a whole as well so I carve out an hour on Thursdays to load the next couple of week’s worth of posts. However, sometimes I have been known to be watching football and scheduling posts.  

You can also find a volunteer to help you. These don’t have to be super complicated or intricate. Often the simplest things are the most powerful.  

1. Just be yourself. There is a stigma around social media and digital to be the absolute best of everyone ever that has ever produced something online and if you can’t be that, you might as well not try. The truth couldn’t be further from that. 

If you are a high production church group, then you probably should have elements of your digital platform that takes that experience online. But if you are one person staff and the kids love hanging out with you just because you love to wear flip flops and drive bright green mustangs from 1995, then let your digital presence be the same! 

I used to do this thing on my IG story where I would say “UPDATE!” at the beginning of each story. It was nothing more than me being me and trying to make insignificant things seem more significant. It caught on and people started messaging me wanting more “UPDATES!” 

You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. But doing something puts you into their world.  

So, I’m curious. What have you done digitally that you weren’t doing before? 

Geoff Cocanower is a husband, a son, and the Associate Pastor of Student Ministries at Hope Missionary Church in Bluffton, IN where he leads the team of adults who minister to high school students as well as young adults. In addition to contributing to the DYM blog, Geoff co-hosts a podcast focused on the issues, questions, and blessings of leaders who aren’t in the driver seat of the organization called The Backseat Leadership Podcast. An interesting fact about Geoff is that he is a high school football and volleyball referee in his spare time and is a legacy member and loves all things DYM. You can find Geoff online here!

New year, new me right?

With the new year comes new things in order to try and get better in how we look, how we feel, how we operate and more. Same thing when it comes to ministry. I don’t know about you, but we take a 3-week break for Christmas and during that break there usually is a bunch of questions that run through my head when it comes to the ministries I run and how I as leader lead. I always want to get better. I think when I get better as a leader the people and ministry around me only can get better.

So I thought I would write down a bunch of questions I have been wrestling with and journaling through as we kick off this new year. Maybe these are things you already think through and maybe some of these things you AND your leaders need to think through to spark some good conversations as we enter into 2021.

In no particular order (welcome to the randomness of my mind):

• What is something this year that needs to go in your ministry?
• What is something that needs to start in your ministry?
• Do your leaders know what a win is for them in your ministry?
• What do you need to do in order to have your students understand the vision of your ministry and ACTUALLY act on it?
• When it comes to your students inviting friends, is your service worth being invited to?
• What is one habit you NEED to add in order for you to be more effective?
• What is one habit you NEED to give up to be more effective?
• If you have family, what are you going to do to actually “be home” when you are home?
• What exactly do you need to do to pour into more leaders?
• Do you have practical steps for your students to grow in their faith? What are they? How can you measure it?
• What do I need to do in order to have online ministry be more prominent in my ministry?
• What can I give away to a leader or two to free me up to do only what I can do as the leader of the ministry?
• Who do you need to ask out to lunch once a month because they are more seasoned than you so you can ask questions?
• How do you know if your curriculum is being effective for your group of students?
• How can you make sure you communicate better this year?
• How can you be more organized and be better in time management this year?
• Who needs to not be a part of your ministry in this season?
• Who do we need to recruit to jump on our team this year?
• How are my processes? Is it easy to join a group? Jump in to serve? How well do we follow up?
• Do our leaders know how to walk someone through excepting Jesus on their own?

I am sure there is more but these are the big ones that have plagued my mind over the last few weeks as we head into 2021. I know that if I were to sit down and think through a lot of these, I can easily make some better decisions this year and be more effective. My guess if you were to go through with you and your leaders, you would too.

Justin