The number of students we have since reopening is different than before.

I bet that’s the same for you too. Whether it’s more or less, you’re probably in a weird “new normal” territory.

My own group is seeing a smaller group than before. Rather than getting defeated by the number of students who are currently coming, I’m trying to count them in a different way. I want to report to my pastor how things are going and that’s what these different ways of counting help me do!

I could spend a long time explaining that we USED to have this many on a Sunday in student ministry, but realistically, the whole church has changed. So the way I count needs to change too.

Find the percentage!

How many people attended your big worship service? Of that group, what percent of that number were students in your weekly program?

If you’ve got 200 people in “big church” and 20 students attending weekly youth ministry, that’s 10% of your attendance. I’ve heard that’s a healthy youth group statistic. You might even run the percent of adults in small groups and kids in kids ministry to have some comparisons.

Counting this way helps you see if your youth ministry is matching your church’s comeback pace or if you’re possibly ahead of it!

What’s your Four Week Average?

Take the amount of students you’ve had for the past four meetings and divide by four. 

Then, next week, take off the last week and add the newest, but keep that running average for your records. This way you can see if you are trending up or down over a month period. Say your attendance numbers were 19, 18, 22, and 20. Then your 4 week average is 19.75. What did you do with 3/4’s of a student!?

What if next week, you had 26! Then your four weeks are 18, 22, 20, and 26. Now your average is 21.5! You found half a student! This way of counting lets you see if you are being consistent with your attendance, but it doesn’t reflect on “the good ole days” four years ago.

Keep it mind, holidays might make this number way high or way low.

Not Just Attendance

Find out how many students are serving your church during the week. Are they greeting at doors? Helping with kids? Setting up the worship center? This number is great because it shows that your student ministry goes beyond your basement room (or wherever you meet!).

Show your pastor that your youth are INVOLVED. This is great.

Is there another way you can help keep track of your students this year rather than looking back at the time before COVID and lockdowns and pandemics?

Let’s hear them!

Ronald

Sermons that nourish require slow cooking.

– Kent Anderson

You may be the person who plans an entire year’s worth of talks without blinking an eye (by purchasing them on DYM!). Or you may be pretty sure what you’re going to talk on next Wednesday night sometime on Tuesday. Or somewhere in-between.

If you’re a youth pastor who wants to write your own messages, let me challenge you to think about how you go about writing a series in a new way!

Instead of only looking at the youth ministry talk you’re doing next, look at the series as a whole. Or if you’re teaching through a book of the Bible, look at the entire book all at once!

This way, you get a better sense of what each talk will be and how they fit into the whole series.

Have you ever finished a talk and thought “Oh man, I should have told THIS story because it would have helped me set up next week!” Well, the “crock-pot” method will help!

Here’s what I do:

I look at the series I’m going to be teaching. Like this summer we’re doing a study on Joseph. So we’ll be studying Genesis 37-45.

Then I borrowed (aka, stole) Doug Field’s method of teaching:

Pain: Why should they listen to me?

Passage: What does God say?

Point: What’s the BIG idea?

Path: What do I want them to do when they leave?

For each part of this four part teaching method, I fill out a quick sentence or two as I’m reading the whole story of Joseph from the Bible. This helps me outline the WHOLE series. There’s a lot I’ll fill in or change during the week of the message, but this way I’m already thinking of where I want to land on Week 7 of our series even when I’m writing Week 1.

The Passage section is always where I focus a lot of time. But as I’m reading the Passage, I see where the Pain is, where the Point is, and what the Path should be.

Plus, during the summer, with VBS week, mission trips, and other crazy events, having my talk outlined a week (or several weeks!) ahead of time gives me the chance to be ahead of schedule instead of scrambling to catch up when I roll in from a vacation on Saturday night.

What do you think? Would preparing a series like this help you out?

Let me know!

Ronald

Like most mid-thirties guys, I’m thinking about being healthy.

One of the way I try to do my part to be eating pizza and drinking coke until I’m 70 and the grandfather of the youth group is by working out. And also, eating less pizza and drinking less coke.

I go to a class because people get me motivated. I’m not much for working out by myself.

Usually, I’m rushing to the gym in order to make the class in time and something I am ALWAYS fighting with is rushing to untie my shoes.

No matter what I’m wearing that day, be it tennis shoes because I’ve got an event later on or dress shoes because I need to look presentable to a parent, I change my shoes to work out. In my mad dash to get ready to do something healthy and important, I find myself slowed up by the fact that I just quickly tore off my shoes when I was done with my last workout without bothering to untie them.

Then it hit me.

What if I just untied my shoes when I’m leaving the gym?

That way, I save myself the rush and the agony of being late (again) to class! 

The same idea can save us a lot of stress in ministry. There are lots of “small things” that we can do to help us get organized, prepare ourselves for the next day of ministry and keep us from rushing around when we could be spending time with students. 

Here are some of the things I thought I might do.

Contact the new student before I leave for the night

I don’t want any student to feel like they aren’t connected to the group. So, after I get a student to fill out our connection card (DYM has a great one of these!), I go ahead and send them an email before I leave.

https://www.downloadyouthministry.com/p/student-information-card/admin-tools-3602.html

I’m notorious about forgetting things like this and I don’t want to be. If I save it for tomorrow, I may forget it all together. So before I leave for the night, I want to email, text, or contact the new students before I go. 

Bonus points for having an email already written that you can change out the names or add a quick personal message at the top!

Get my desk ready for the next day

I want to rush out and head home as soon as the “work day” is over. Whatever time of day or night that might be. But I often find that when I return to the biohazard that is my desk, I spend the first bit of my morning trying to remember what in the world was going on before I left.

I am MUCH more efficient when I come into my office with a clean desk and a list of the things I need to get started on waiting for me. It usually only takes about five minutes to do this as I’m leaving and it’s SO worth the effort the next day.

Create a folder for “next year’s event” when I’m planning “this year’s event”

This was huge for me. While in the thick of the event, I find myself thinking of “Next year we should totally do this!” or “Wow, that was a bust. We shouldn’t do that ever again.”

When I have a folder on my computer or a note on my phone of all these ideas, it’s great when I want to plan the next “St Patrick’s Day Snake BBQ” and see that it was actually way better when I had the list of people who volunteered last time and tips for keeping the snakes at bay in my “Next time” folder.

These are a few ways I “untie” my shoes in student ministry to help prepare for the next day, next event, or next task.

What else would you add to this list?

I have been chatting with our team about the 1st Wednesday events that we have been doing since last year. In short, the 1st Wednesday of the month we do what a “typical” youth group would do: Welcome, announcements, worship, game prizes, message and groups with an event after. The other Wednesdays of the month are basically just focused on messages and small groups and that’s it.

The thing is: 1st Wednesday is ALWAYS coming. Every month has a 1st Wednesday and we need to be prepping for it. The reason is that we have seen in our ministry context, 1st Wednesdays work in bringing in new people and they set up our students well to keep on inviting them. We saw over 850 first time students last year and 50% of those student came on a 1st Wednesday. So in our context, the strategy works. They are important and they are worth the time we put into them.

So I will ask you the same questions I asked my team in regards to event planning as part of our strategy:

1. Have you done your due diligence?

We know that 1st Wednesdays are coming. You have a month to plan the next one. Have you put in the time and the effort to make sure your students and leaders can win? If the purpose of them are to have them invite new friends, have we done what we can to plan ahead and let them know what they are inviting them to? Or are we waiting until the week of to plan it and not able to promote it fully? Think about the events that you put on. Do you manage your time well to make sure everything gets taken care of? The promotion plan? The little details? Getting your leaders involved? All of that comes with being ahead of the game.

Most of the time an event or a strategy fails is because we got distracted, we suck at time management or we have not deemed this event as important so we put it off. We get stuff done last minute and things fall through the cracks and we rush to try to do it all ourselves and what happens is not only the event suffers but the trust your students have to invite new people to come be a part of what you got going on suffers as well.

Have you done what you need to do to make this event excellent?

2. Is this event worth it?

For real. You should ask yourself this question for every event that you plan. You should ask it. You should ask your leaders. You should ask your students. They will tell you. This is important because if we are going to spend time, energy, and budget on something… well… it better be worth it. If an event it worth it, your students will invite friends because they are willing to spend some relational capital with non-churched to invite them to come. If the event is worth it, your leaders will be pumped and they will be on their A-game. If the event is worth it, you know you have not wasted your time and you didn’t have to plan an event you kind of thought was cool and your students didn’t at all.

Here is the thing: If you don’t do #1 you won’t get #2. Chances are if you really nail down #1, #2 comes along with it because everyone will know what is coming, what it is, why is awesome and it will be well-executed because you have done everything to make sure it will be a success.

Because this is something that works well, we need to make sure we spend enough heads-up time on what is coming so we can be the most effective in helping student reach their non-churched friends. After all, who really wants to throw an event that is not going to worth it for your students, leaders, and you as the leader? I know I don’t.

So make sure you nail #1 so you can get #2. And watch the difference.

@justinknowles3

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

If you’ve given up on Zoom in your ministry, hang in there! There’s still hope. Don’t get me wrong; if you’ve figured out face-to-face gatherings that please parents and keep students safe, keep crushing it! But for those who remain virtual, we have to up our game. Our students and volunteers need us to get creative. They need our virtual gatherings to be better.

I get it. Teens are staring at screens all day at school or for school, and many of our volunteers spend most of their workday in virtual meeting rooms. With “virtual meeting fatigue” setting in, kids would much rather tune in to Miranda Sings, Dude Perfect, Mr. Beast, and Good Mythical Morning than sit through another boring Zoom meeting. It is hard competing with YouTube stars, but our virtual gatherings can be better.

The founder of EVERNOTE, my favorite note-taking app, created “mmhmm,” a fun, interactive presentation tool that works in apps like Zoom, YouTube, Facebook Live, Google Meet, and more.

Mmhmm actually works in any app that allows you to choose which camera you would use. For example, in Zoom you may have multiple camera options: a camera built into your laptop, a WebCam, or an external video capture device. mmhmm shows up when it’s open as a virtual camera. Zoom lets you choose the camera you want to use. On a computer, it’s in the lower left corner of the Zoom window. Here’s what it looks like on my computer.

This user-friendly app (and a few years of youth ministry experience) helped me have a dozen middle school students, half of which I did not know, fully engaged and sitting on the edge of their seats while we connected and talked about the Bible. I created and dropped in slides, dumped in a couple of videos, and added a Download Youth Ministry game. It made this the best gathering we’ve had in a long time.

Here is a short video of Phil Libin explaining and demonstrating mmhmm.

This isn’t a tutorial on mmhmm (if you get stuck you can find those on YouTube). It’s an invitation to download this app and play around with it. It’s $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year if you pay annually. However, you will receive full functionality free for your first seven days, and then you still receive full functionality free for one hour a day. It’s an incredible tool that I have not yet had a need to pay for.

Currently, mmhmm is only for Mac, but if you click this link you could be a Windows Beta tester.

Five quick tips on making a virtual gathering better:

1. Keep it shorter. Just because you met for 90 minutes before the pandemic doesn’t mean you have to now. We want teens to leave wanting more, not wishing it was over sooner.
2. Leverage your relationship. Chances are your teens will never meet their favorite YouTube star, but they have a relationship with you. Be Jesus-centered, be accessible, be real, be fun.
3. Increase engagement. Try new ways to get students involved. Maybe it’s a game, small group breakouts, texting in questions, or other ways to put them in the story while Jesus is at the center of the story.
4. Don’t get too distracting. A tool like mmhmm has a lot of bells and whistles. Use it to grab their attention. Be cautious, though. If you play too much it might steal the show and take the attention away from your purpose.
5. Don’t solely rely on virtual gatherings. Make sure every one of your teens receives a regular contact outside your weekly gathering(s). Maybe that’s a phone call from you, a phone call from a leader, a letter or note card in the mail, and a text message.

The shepherding we do now will determine the students who come back later. It is way too easy to default toward putting together a youth ministry program and expecting students to show up. Now is the time where students need us to go after them.

Brandon Early has been serving in youth ministry for over 20 years. He is currently the Director of Christian Life at Valley Church in West Des Moines, IA. He and his wife Keri have been married 20 years and have three great boys. Four of his favorite things are Jesus, his wife, Chicago-style pizza, and fighting off their three boys with sweet ninja moves. Follow Brandon on Twitter @iambrandonearly or Instagram and TikTok @brandonearly or eBay @uthguy9. For speaking inquiries send a message to [email protected].

This is a part of my ongoing series on complaints Youth Pastor’s often hear.

The first post was about why we play games in Youth Ministry. You can read it here.

The second complaint comes from parents who will tell you that your Bible studies are too shallow, or aren’t deep enough.

In our case, we were told that the Bible studies were not “intellectually stimulating” enough.  Here’s how I typically respond to that.

1. Not every kid is as smart as yours

No two students are the same! You can affirm the intelligence of their student while also recognizing you are trying to teach to everyone in the room! That means there are some students who need “the cookies on the bottom shelf.”

I will usually say “I often give students a chance to take the study a bit deeper by using our weekly devotional guide” or “Maybe your student is ready to do some Bible study on their own!”

You might have a service that’s meant for outreach and one that’s more for deeper Bible Study. If that’s the case, direct this parent and student to your deep dive!

2. We’ve got a lot of students who know nothing about the Bible

You probably have students who don’t know their Noah’s from their Nabal’s! We need to help some of these students get a grasp on the Bible as a whole! Even though some students have been in church nine months before they were born, you have some students who have never been in church at all.

You could easily say “I’m going to have to spend some time explaining what’s going on in the background of the Bible. Without context, a lot of the Bible just sounds crazy!” That may not seem stimulating to your student, but to others it’s crucial!

3. Here are some books your student can read on their own to grow in their faith

Nobody expects our only source of spiritual feeding to come from a church program, right? RIGHT!?

Just like we don’t just grow because we listen to the pastor, our students will have to grow by seeking out the truths of Scripture on their own. I’ll ask parents if their students are reading the Bible for their own benefit on a regular basis. If they say they are and still want more, no problem!

Normally, I have a few books that I recommend to parents right away. You may come from a different background than I do and that’s fine, but having a “shortlist” of books is always a great start!

For reference, here is mine:

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049U4WA6/

Spiritual Disciplines by Donald Whitney

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1615216170

Discerning the Voice of God by Priscilla Shirer

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006ODDU72/

4. Is your student ready to lead a small group or serve?

Some students are legitimately on another level. They know their faith really well and are really strong in their growth! These students should be serving! I usually lead with asking these students to help out in other areas, but having them teach in small blocks to the large group, or help lead a younger small group with a caring adult or two along with them might be a great win for everyone!

Parent tips

More often than not, this complaint either comes from a parent who thinks their seventh-grader is ready for college or a student who tells their parents whatever they think they need to see in order to not come to youth group.

For the first type of situation, I will often flood this parent with information. This is our teaching scope. This is why we teach the way we do. These are all the chapters of the Bible we are going to cover. Once you show them that you know what you’re talking about, the real issue tends to rise to the surface.

For the second situation, I love to ask the student if we can meet and talk about youth group. Usually, they’ll come clean, or at least be more specific with their complaint. Either way, it’s a win to the parent because I’m reaching out to the student personally.

What do you do with this complaint?

@Ronaldglong