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4 Dec 2017

INTRODUCING: The Youth Pastor Diet 2018

By |2017-12-03T23:45:29-08:00December 4th, 2017|Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments


We’re excited to announce Youth Pastor Diet 2018!

You’ve always been a little bit bigger, but back in high school the weight was blamed on football. Then you became a youth worker and the persona of humor-filled youth pastor embraces the bigger you. And ministry involves food. A lot of food. You hang out with a student and grab some Taco Bell. Of course you already had lunch with your spouse, too. You head back to the office and find Christmas candy everywhere. You get coffee with a volunteer. You eat dinner with the family, grazing throughout the evening then having another midnight snack since you’re up late working on your talk. Before you know it, you weight 326lbs.

OK, maybe that isn’t you – but it has been me before! I started the Youth Pastor Diet to help myself and other youth workers lose some of the weight. No more fat pastors!  Hahahahha … so starting January 2nd, join youth workers, spouses and volunteers from all over the country in the 2018 edition of DYM’s Youth Pastor Diet competition and have fun losing weight in the New Year.

Almost 15,000 lbs have been lost in the previous few seasons combined – we’re hoping to lose 15,000 in 60 days from this campaign along. Get in on the fun and start the New Year off right losing some of that ministry weight! SIGN UP TODAY IF YOU’RE EVEN MILDLY INTERESTED and we’ll send out the details next week!

JG

“let us strip off every weight that slows us down...” (Heb 12:1 taken completely out of context)

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9 Oct 2017

Replace Hype With Hope & Attendance With Engagement

By |2017-10-10T10:39:23-07:00October 9th, 2017|Leadership, Youth Ministry Ideas, Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments

This is not meant to knock anyone, maybe because I’m 31 and it means I am officially getting old but when people over 25 use words like “let’s get hyped” “shook” or “its going to be 100” and things our culture says, my eye twitches a bit. Maybe it’s a context thing but I wont lie I tried to say it and use it and I just felt a little ridiculous. I think we live in a culture today where everything is “hyped”. Should we be hyped about church? I hope so.

I think in our culture, we think church needs to be “cool”. We have to be the cool church in order to effectively reach students. If it’s not cool or hyped, they wont be interested and I think that is just a gross lie. We use hype to drive attendance.

We need hope over hype. Engagement over attendance.

Let me explain. I want my ministry to grow. I’m sure you do to. No one would say, “You know what, I think we are good.” Right?

Attendance used to be THE THING to determine growth and healthiness but I think it should only be A THING and maybe your church still thinks like this. Whether you are the leader of your ministry, or you lead a small group of students, when students don’t show up it’s a downer on the mood. I won’t lie.

There are some Wednesdays where our attendance is booming and I get so pumped and then the next week 70 of the students who were there last week are not there. 70. That’s a true story. Talk about a roller coaster.

I’m still working on this one. In our culture today I think our minds need to shift to a new perspective. I don’t know if it’s just a Southern California thing but our students are so busy. They are busier than I am. I feel bad about my life because I don’t think I’m doing enough because all my students are everywhere doing everything (HA!). I do believe our ministry is twice as big as we see on Wednesdays just because our students don’t come all at the same time and they maybe come twice a month at best (and those are the ones who love our ministry and call it “home”).

Hype will drive attendance, but hype dies out. Students stick around when they are engaged.

So instead of just focusing on attendance focus on how we push our students to engage. Students are so mission minded now. They want to make a difference. They want to be a part of a cause. So how do we engage them?

I’m sure there are a bunch of different ways to do this. This is how we are working to engage our students in different ways:

Small groups – When people ask how many students we have I should say 43%. “What?” 43% of our students are in small groups right now. I know when students are in small groups they are engaged and they are cared for. They have an adult who cares for them and they are studying Scripture. I don’t think we are not doing great at this right now. We are in the middle of working on this way to engage students and I am so excited about the future.

Campus ministry – We try to be on campuses a few times a week. One of the best ways to engage students is to go into their world. We ask them to come to us weekly, so go to them. I think when we can shoot a few texts to students saying we are on campus and they come and say hi and stick around for a while, we are engaging them on their turf. It’s huge.

Serving – You are never more like Jesus than when you serve. When we can push students to serve, they get engaged in your church so much quicker. God grows us when we are stepping out of our comfort-zones. When we can get students involved somewhere, they realize they are a part of something bigger than themselves. In such a cause-driven generation, this is how you engage students. Let me brag on my students for a second (proud pastor moment). We have over 100 students serving in our children’s ministry. THE BEST! I love walking around on Sunday mornings and seeing students engaged and investing into others. They stick around when they are surrounded by people pouring into them and being stretched to serve.

Now I want to clarify, I love the hype. Get me up on stage and I’ll be the most hyped guy out there because I don’t think church should be boring. I think we offer something hype doesn’t…hope. Everything we do and want to engage our students in is to show our students the hope that only Jesus brings and when we engage them in these ways, we show them snippets of Jesus. When “butts in seats” is EVERYTHING and hype is ALL we offer, you will gain a crowd that will go away when the next thing comes. But when we engage our students and offer the hope they are looking for in Jesus, you will see a much healthier ministry.

What do you do to engage students?

 

@justinknowles3

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25 Jul 2017

Why You Need Students To Share Regularly In Your Service

By |2017-07-25T00:38:33-07:00July 25th, 2017|Leadership, Youth Pastor Life|1 Comment

Last week we had a our summer camp reunion service. Basically, we come back from summer camp and do all the things we did at camp and do them in our service. We sing the camp songs, play camp games, and we share camp stories.

Usually at service I will get up and teach a little bit. I do love teaching. Especially after camp because energy is super high and they are tuning in because they just spent a whole week doing this. Of course I want to teach in that moment.

But I don’t.

We let students share. We had 7 students be the sermon at service and had them share what God did at summer camp and it was super powerful. Let me share why I think we need to let students teach and share regularly:

Students teach students better – The selfish side of me wishes this was not true. But it is. the human side of gets bummed out when I know for a fact that all of the time and effort I put into a sermon only to have it not remembered by students over the years. “Not my sermons, mine are rememberable” says the first year youth ministry guy. What did your senior pastor teach 7 weeks ago? Did you look it up without looking on Planning Center? Students listen to students better. Students teach better to their peers. We have students write out their whole testimonies and they read it straight from the paper and it’s way more powerful and engaging than if I were to memorize and give to most epic sermon ever. When they see someone like them on stage, they are bought in and God can grab their attention in a way that you as an adult cannot.

When students say “me too” it’s powerful – When students have the opportunity to share, they can hear the story of one of their own and have the opportunity to say “me too”, and that is powerful. When a student can hear another student’s story and hear about the sin, addictions, struggles of those students and say “me too” it’s memorable. Then they God hear what God does when lives are fully given to Him and then they can say, “I want that too”. It gives hope that God can move in their lives too.

I’m not saying we should have students share all of the time, but I am saying we can be more intentional about them sharing more. Especially when it comes to summer camp. My challenge to youth workers is to give up the stage every now and then and yield it to an unpolished, nervous to be on stage student who tells the story about how God has worked in their life and watch God work.

It’s pretty incredible.

 

@justinknowles3

 

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6 Jul 2017

When to Report Up

By |2017-07-06T11:05:55-07:00July 6th, 2017|Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments

As a youth pastor, as much as you might like to be the one who’s in charge of your church, you’re not. Whether it’s another person in the youth ministry or an associate or senior / lead pastor, you’ve got a boss who directly supervises you.

One of the best things you can do for that relationship is to learn what you should report to your boss and when.

Right about now, you might be wondering: “Isn’t it my job to problem solve? Shouldn’t I be trying to keep things off my boss’s radar?”

Well yes… And no.

Here’s what I mean.

My first year in ministry, I led a mission trip that went horribly wrong. One of our adult leaders said something that deeply offended a number of our students. Those students promptly called home and proceeded to tell their parents what had happened. Before long, those parents called our senior pastor (my boss) and told him what had happened.

By the time we returned home, I’d worked with my team to resolve the conflict. Unfortunately, that part of the story never made it home.

So I arrived home to an irate group of parents and a boss who was ready to fire me for my gross incompetency.

While I’d successfully resolved the conflict on the ground, that didn’t matter because I’d failed to report ANY of it – both the conflict AND its resolution – to my boss. With no information from me, he could do only one thing: Believe the one-sided story he was hearing from the parents.

That botched reporting incident has deeply shaped me and helped me learn what to report to my boss and when to do it.

Nowadays, any time there is a serious conflict in my ministry (especially one that has the potential to escalate), I let my boss know as it’s happening, not just when it’s been resolved. Doing so does three things.

  1. Reporting conflict allows me to control the story and to tell my boss what’s happening from my perspective.

  2. Reporting conflict keeps my boss from being caught off guard by a frustrated parent, student, or parishioner. Information allows my boss to better respond, support me, and sometimes, defend me to angry parishioners. Information also unifies my colleagues and I. Although we’re responsible for different aspects of church programming, we work together and keep one another informed about what’s going on in our ministries.

  3. Reporting conflict gives my boss the chance to help. Sometimes, this means my boss can call me out (in private) about something I’ve mishandled. It also allows my boss to help troubleshoot the conflict. This can be especially important if your boss has been at your church longer than you have. In that instance, they know the players better than you and can often provide you with unique insights in regard to how to deal with a particular person.

In addition to reporting conflict, I also let my boss know about any injuries that occur at youth ministry events, any property destruction that occurs (we’re in youth ministry… it happens), as well as upcoming events and topics of discussion. Essentially, my goal in reporting is to keep my boss in the loop so they are never sideswiped by information they should have heard from me.

Since I never want to create the perception that our youth ministry is nothing but trouble, whenever I have something negative to report, I try to balance it out with something positive, like a way that I’ve seen God recently move in our youth ministry.

In the 14 years since my failure to report something I should have, I’ve learned that reporting up has never made my boss question my competency. Instead, reporting up has always led to guidance, support, and the formation of genuine community.

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29 Jun 2017

The Youth’s Pastor

By |2017-06-29T05:42:25-07:00June 29th, 2017|Leadership, Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments

After three years without an associate pastor, my church finally hired a new one. He’s a former intern from my congregation that I genuinely respect and enjoy working with. He’s also young, cute, and far cooler than I am (or ever hope to be).

Part of our new associate pastor’s job description, as presented to our congregation at the meeting in which we voted on him, is “youth”. As the person who serves as my church’s youth worker, this struck me as odd. Isn’t that my job?

Because of this (and a few other things), our associate’s first few weeks in his role were rough for me – especially since he kept showing up at my youth ministry events. (Mind you, he always asked first but nevertheless, despite being in youth ministry for 15 years – 9 in my current context – his constant presence still made me feel insecure.) I wondered, “The next time our congregation has a budget shortfall, will my job be eliminated because people will think our new associate pastor can do it?”

My insecurities grew until they finally reached a boiling point.

For about a week in late April, I seriously contemplated quitting.

But then early in May, our associate pastor asked to meet with me. He was doing one-on-one’s with each of our staff members and my turn had come. So I sat down with him.

He asked me good questions – about what I need from him; how he can be supportive of me and my ministry; where our congregation is at; and my worries and concerns about the future of our congregation.

As I listened to his questions, I realized our associate pastor had no idea how much I was struggling – not because he’s oblivious (he’s a pysch major who’s actually really aware of other people’s emotions) – but because I’d carefully hidden my frustrations from him.

In that moment, I made a choice. I shared (rather vulnerably) about how hard his transition had been for me. I named my fears and told him that I feared his presence would ultimately cost me my job.

After a moment of stunned silence, he said this: “I don’t want to be the youth pastor, Jen. I want to be the youth’s pastor.”

That one comment has made all the difference for me, helping me to realize that our new associate is not after my job; He’s simply trying to be the best pastor he can be.

What a gift it is to have a pastor who wants to pastor not just the adults in our congregation, but the youth as well.

What a gift it is to have a pastor who’s supportive of the work I do in our youth ministry and who wants to participate in it  simply to build relationships with the teens and show his support of me.

Years ago, I interviewed youth ministry expert Chap Clark for a Youth Worker Journal Roundtable. I no longer remember what we were even talking about, but I do remember this. Chap talked about the importance of reversing the 5:1 youth ministry ratio. Rather than have one adult for every five students, Chap urged youth workers to find five adults to invest in every teenager in your congregation.

This comment deeply resonated with me and ever since then, I’ve been trying to achieve it.

What a gift it now is to have an associate pastor who I can count among the five adults pouring into the teens in our congregation, who knows more about our teens than their names, who’s listening to their stories, sharing in their doubts, and investing in them and our youth ministry.

Our teens, our congregation, and our community will all reap the benefits of this.

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5 Jun 2017

4 Questions To Ask About Your Ministry Program

By |2017-06-05T08:44:45-07:00June 5th, 2017|Leadership, Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments

This Sunday we said goodbye to a Sunday program that for the longest time served a great purpose and was a needed thing at one time, but as we gear for the future this program was not going to be needed anymore. For some, it was not a popular choice. But as leaders we need to get used to knowing that every decision you make isn’t going to please everyone… and that’s ok. You’re the leader, lead through it.

But as we have been planning, here are some great questions we had to answer in order for us to move forward effectively:

Why are we doing this? – We don’t want to do something just to do it. As tempting or cool as something might be, we want to have a purpose or reason why we are doing a certain series or event. When we answer this, we then can help get everyone on board, get our volunteers excited and everyone knows what the goal is. When you know where you are going, you can actually get there.

Is this the best we can do? – When we decide what we want to do and why, the question is, “Is this the best way possible to do it?” Am I able to give this my best? Is the best use of our resources? Can we do something else that is more effective? I stole this event process from Josh Griffin and it’s “best idea wins”. What is the best way to pull this off to make it awesome.

What are we doing that is not working? – This one is a little tougher. This is going to have you and the team look at what your ministry is doing right now and evaluate it. We might have started something a while ago but it has lost its touch, effectiveness, and spark. This will lead you to the last question, which is…

What needs to die? – When something needs to die, it needs to die. I know that everything you do in your ministry right now at one time solved a problem at one time. The question is, “Is that problem already solved and are we still doing that thing?” If the answer is “yes” then it is time to look at that thing and kill it. It points you back to the first question of “Why are we doing this?” If you can’t answer it, kill it. If the answer to “Is this the best we can do?” is “No”, then kill it. If you determine it’s not working as well as it once used to, then kill it. You will see how much more momentum you will gain when you don’t have that dead weight.

I know these questions have helped our team move forward, and maybe it can help you and your ministry move forward as well.

 

@justinknowles3

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8 May 2017

A Few Tips On How You Can Begin To Change The Culture Of Your Group

By |2017-05-08T08:50:53-07:00May 8th, 2017|Leadership, Volunteers, Youth Pastor Life|0 Comments

I was talking with our worship leader and he said, “It’s like we have a whole new group of people and values than we did 2 years ago.” It’s true. The atmosphere is way different now, intentionally so, and it’s been something we have been working towards for the past few years. We have been striving to change the culture of our Wednesday nights to one of actively seeking Jesus, leaders who are bought in, one of fun, and all of the things we have done are starting to pay off. 

Let me just preface though, because I have seen some posts regarding this on our awesome Facebook Community, changing the culture of your group is not an easy thing. After almost 3 years of casting the vision, modeling to out leaders, repeating myself over and over, countless leader meetings to chat about the state of our youth ministry, I think we are just beginning to see the fruits of it all… 3 years later. So be patient.

So how do we do that? It got me thinking about some of the things our team has done to implement this change in our group, so I thought I would share.

Pray – Our team spent time in prayer together. We got together to dream and wrote down our values what what we wanted to see in our ministries and we began by giving it up to God. Yes, people can change the culture to a point, but the type of change that we feel called to introduce to our students can’t come from us, we don’t have that power. Only Jesus does. Give it up to him.

Observe – For 4-6 months I just observed our group. I took crazy detailed notes. I looked like a creeper in the back as I took notes and began to write down things that could/needed to be changed. From the tech, to stage and program, to volunteers, job descriptions etc. Everything was under the microscope. After months of seeing how our systems were set up and looking at what they were producing, we began to address them one by one. If you have had some veteran leaders who have been around a while have them do the same. Do it with new leaders too so you can get fresh eyes on all your programs.

Apply slowly – At first there was just cosmetic stuff to make services flow better or look better. Everything we changed first were things we had the power to easily change. Graphics, social media, sermon illustrations, song choice, band and games we played. Changing the culture is not a “band-aide” mentality, you can’t just rip it off. People are biologically ingrained to resist change… so do it gracefully. After the services were were we wanted and we found a good balance, then we moved to people.

Volunteers – People are different than programs, we all know that. From the very beginning of me starting my position, I cast vision of where we want to be. Along the way, some people realized they were not on board, so they decided to get off. Others, not so easy and hard conversations followed. You can never repeat your vision enough. By the time you are tired of hearing your vision, your volunteers are just beginning to get it. Adjusting the vision of current volunteers can happen and when they get it, they go after it. Once we established who is in or not, we began seeking after new leaders with this new vision who all they know is the new ways and when they get it… they are bought in. Culture begins to leak from them to your students.

Relationships – Now that we have these leaders with this vision of where we are going and they know what success looks like, we release them out on students. Volunteers who understand the vision of your ministry and know what success looks like are unstoppable forces in the name of Jesus. This summer, all events we had were purposefully relational. Park days, beach days, summer camps with the leaders who get our vision has been one of the coolest things to watch. This has established our core group of students and now we get to build with an incredible foundation moving forward as we begin to launch small groups and continue to reach students far from God in hopes to see them come close to God.

I know there is a ton more we can all say when it comes to the culture of your group and I know the culture is different in every group. I do know, and have experienced, that if you don’t like the culture you can begin to prayerfully, slowly and change the culture you desire for your leaders and students to come to know Jesus in a way they have not been able to with the current culture that is in place.

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20 Apr 2017

How To Have Student Leaders Actually Impact Your Student Ministry

By |2017-04-19T10:19:38-07:00April 20th, 2017|Leadership, Youth Ministry Ideas, Youth Pastor Life|1 Comment

This post was originally for Jen Bradbury’s blog, YMJen.com, to help promote her new book on creative effective student leadership teams. I highly recommend her work and you can check out her book by clicking HERE.

We have a student leadership team in our ministry. I love it.

The question is always, “How do I actually utilize this time in order for these students to feel empowered and have them actually move the ministry forward in an effective way? How can these students really impact the student ministry?”

Here are just a few thoughts in order to allow your student leaders to ACTUALLY impact your student ministry:

Listen to them.  I look at our student leadership team as a pretty good representation of our student ministry. We have 6 schools represented, from 9th-12th grade students, both male and female… and they have good ideas! They have the insider information! They give a great pulse on how you’re doing and whom you’re actually reaching. They have some great thoughts on sermons and events. You could be planning an event and they could tell you their friends would not be interested in something like that. It could be huge.

Just in our last meeting, we went through the Intentional Churches exercise, “Right, Wrong, Missing, Confused,” with our student leaders. During this, we walked though what was right about our ministry, wrong with our ministry, missing from our ministry and confusing about our ministry. The info was super telling. We then were able to vote and pick out the top 3 things we need to work on to make our ministry better. As a student leadership team, we’ll work on those things all year long to take our ministry to the next level. This creates buy in, a common goal, and a desire to drive forward because they felt heard and they identified the things they want to work on.

Listen to them. Actually do what student leaders say. You want to know a sure fire way to kill any momentum in your student leadership team? Let them be heard but don’t do something they suggest. Our jobs are to make sure they will feel empowered to take action. So trust them a bit. They have inside information to what their peers need to hear or see. When you actually do something they suggest it will give you even more buy in with them. When students say to their friends, “That was my idea,” it’s a huge win for your student leadership team and ministry.

Give them easy, accessible steps to start. Every year every student has to reapply for student leadership. As we add and drop students we always start off the year with new people and team building. We want to slowly build confidence in their leadership, as some might not be able to step up as quickly. This is why we give them easy steps first and add on responsibility throughout the year.

Every student leader in our ministry has these things as a part of their time and service on Wednesday nights to start:
• Trash pick up in our worship center after service
• Sitting with new students during service if a student is alone
• Passing out the pens and bulletins for the message
• Passing out the offering and communion materials
• Welcome team – High fives at the door to begin service.

If you want to see students be built into leaders, give them things they can do right away. As the year goes on, you will be able to push and stretch them beyond what they think they’re capable of.

Give them complete control. Every year ends with a huge BANG! We do a series called YOU OWN THE NIGHT (which I learned from my time at Saddleback Church high school ministry). This is a series where our team works side by side with our student leadership team to run the service. We give the students complete control of our services for 4 weeks. Each one of our major high schools takes over for the night and our student leaders run teams of students from their own schools to plan, organize, lead, teach, play in the band, and decorate outside.

There are no adults on stage for 4 weeks. If you’re like me, you just fainted a little bit.

I cannot tell you how much more impactful these services are than the ones I plan. I actually get a little jealous. When you listen to your student leadership team, actually allow them to do the things they suggest, build up their skills throughout the year, and give them complete control, God moves in mighty ways. These services have been amazing.

Students have power and influence you will never have as an adult. When they have the chance to lead, they are set up well; they can actually impact your ministry.

Just get out of the way sometimes.

 

@justinknowles3

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