I love books that are written from in-the-trenches experience in youth ministry and Thriving Youth Groups: Secrets For Growing Your Ministry is exactly such a book. Jeanne Mayo is one of those youth workers where calling her a veteran is putting it mildly and in this book she shares her wisdom on how to create a friendship culture in your youth group. Because that’s the secret behind a thriving youth group: a friendship culture.

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I came across this article in USA Today a while ago and wanted to share it with you. It’s an excellent example of how companies are marketing their products towards teens. Who would have thought gum would become a statement of identity, belonging?

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[This book is part of our Reviews of the Top 100 in Teen Fiction] Thirteen Reasons Why (the debut of author Jay Asher) is a book that won’t let you go immediately after you’ve read it and I mean that in a good sense. It’s a story that will make you think, especially about how your actions can impact someone else.

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“A hundred years from now, what will you have left behind? What will your legacy be?”

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Usually I’m not a big fan of books that start with fictional stories. Andy Stanley’s Communicating for a Change for instance was superb because of the last part, the story at the start didn’t do much for me. It was the same with other books, like Ken Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager for instance. The reason is that I love stories, I love fiction, but it’s not meant to get a lot of information across. In writer’s terms that’s known as infodumping and it pulls the reader out of the story.

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Being Dutch, I have mixed feelings on the British Royal Navy as it has kicked ‘our’ behind in several wars centuries ago. But there’s no denying the glorious past of the Royal Navy and I love watching TV Series like the brilliant Horatio Hornblower (which are based on the slightly less accessible series of Hornblower books by C.S. Forester).

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Speak is a controversial book, it’s been banned from several libraries and high school curricula for its supposedly ‘pornographic nature’. I have read a lot of young adult fiction lately and Speak is actually one of the novels with the least sexual content, so I don’t get this. Aside from that, I’m really not a fan of censorship and that’s putting it mildly…

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It may seem like a funny title, but Hermeneutics are like Belly Buttons is a very serious minded book. Anthony Delgado, a youth pastor from southern California, has written a concise how-to-book on hermeneutics (which is a fancy word for interpreting a Bible passage to distill God’s intended meaning) aimed at youth workers and other ministry workers.

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Until we moved to Germany in the summer of 2010, I had no experience with rural youth ministry. I’d lived in cities all my life and the last few years in Holland, we’d lived in the most densely populated area known as the ‘Randstad’.

But youth ministry in the small town (pop 1250) where I live now is completely different. Just yesterday my son went to a nearby forest with the Kindergarten to do a Easter egg hunt…and they went with tractors, not cars or buses. That’s life here and it’s different, just like youth ministry here in a lot different from what I was used to.

I’m still adapting to the realities of rural youth ministry and that’s why I loved reading Brent Lacy’s book Rural Youth Ministry. This guy knows what he’s talking about as he has a lot of experience in doing youth ministry in rural areas. A lot of what he wrote was familiar to me, as I’ve made the same discoveries.

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I didn’t get this book, number 37 on the NPR’s Top 100 of Teen Fiction. It was an easy read and I get the deeper meaning of the story about nonconformity and individuality, but somehow it didn’t work for me.

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