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5 Jan 2024

Shifting Focus in Youth Ministry: Prioritizing Discipleship Over Spectacle

By Justin Knowles|2024-01-15T11:13:16-08:00January 5th, 2024|Leadership|6 Comments

In the world of youth ministry, we often find ourselves balancing between what seems spectacular on the surface and what truly fosters long-term spiritual growth in our students. It’s a delicate dance—one that involves reevaluating our strategies, being willing to shift gears, and prioritizing substance over spectacle.

Recently, we made a decision that might seem counterintuitive to some. We chose to cancel one of our biggest events, an event that seemed impressive, drew large crowds, and generated significant buzz. Yet, upon closer examination, we realized that the expected fruit, the lasting impact we envisioned, wasn’t materializing as we hoped.

Why did we choose to take this step? The answer lies in our deep commitment to discipleship.

As leaders in youth ministry, our ultimate goal is to nurture and equip young hearts to become lifelong disciples of Christ. While flashy events may draw attention, our core mission is to instill a genuine, lasting faith in our students—one that extends beyond momentary excitement and into a lifelong journey with Jesus.

Our decision to cancel the event isn’t a step backward; it’s a leap forward in our approach to discipleship. We’re making a deliberate shift toward a more intentional and impactful strategy: focusing on making disciples who make disciples.

Enter “Catalyst groups.” This 10-week strategy isn’t about grandiosity or outward showmanship. Instead, it’s about the heart transformation and equipping students to actively engage in the Great Commission—to go and make disciples of their peers.

The essence of these Catalyst groups lies in fostering deep, meaningful relationships among students. It’s about creating spaces where discipleship isn’t a one-time event but a continuous journey. Here, students learn to walk alongside one another, to wrestle with questions, to explore faith, and to ultimately share the love of Christ with their peers.

Our church has already implemented this approach with our core leaders, and we’re extending an invitation to our core students to engage in this curriculum, led by their youth leads. The curriculum is designed to equip them with the skills to ‘go and make disciples’ themselves covering the vision of disciple making, characteristics of a disciple maker, evangelizing, establishing relationships, equipping them how to share, exporting it into our lives and helping them make a plan and empowering them to take it to their friends.

After completing this training (ideally in groups of 3-8 at each campus), we’ll provide three tangible and achievable next steps to support their efforts in doing just that. Currently, I have two steps finalized and am still refining the third: 1) Serve kids if you’re not already engaged in service. Take on leadership of a younger group and mentor them. 2) Initiate a Bible study before/after school/practice with friends who aren’t involved in church. And 3) To be announced.

These steps aim to empower students to embrace evangelism and discipleship personally, allowing them to take practical steps toward implementation.

While the decision to cancel a significant event may raise eyebrows, we firmly believe that the impact of empowering students to disciple their peers is immeasurable. It’s about equipping them with the tools, resources, and most importantly, the heart to genuinely reach out and share the Gospel within their spheres of influence.

We understand that this shift might not be as visually striking or immediately impressive as a big event. However, the true value lies in the lasting change it can bring about in the lives of our students and their peers.

As we embark on this new journey of prioritizing discipleship, we anticipate challenges. It won’t be a straightforward path, and the results might not be immediately apparent. But we’re willing to embrace this challenge, knowing that the investment in nurturing disciples who actively disciple others is worth far more than a momentary spectacle.

The decision to cancel a major event isn’t a setback—it’s a strategic move toward building a youth ministry centered on the core principles of discipleship. It’s a commitment to investing in the future, nurturing young leaders, and empowering them to impact their generation for Christ.

27 Nov 2023

Take Some Time Off to Plan Your Youth Ministry

By Ronald|2023-11-27T07:43:34-08:00November 27th, 2023|Uncategorized|12 Comments

It’s (almost nearly) Christmas!

I know that means a lot of your ministries are going nuts. There are parties galore and lots of desserts being passed around. But January 1 is coming.

Do you know what next year holds for you and your youth group?

If you’re not yet planned out for the next year, consider taking some time off this month to plan. I don’t mean take a vacation day to plan your youth ministry. I mean, take a day off of what you would normally do and use it to schedule out what next year is going to look like.

Go find a coffee shop or fast food place nearby, put in your headphones, and really focus down on getting the next year planned out. Bring along your team if you’ve got one.

If this isn’t a part of your normal routine, consider adding it in this year. This is what it could look like.

Grab Every Calendar You Can

Take advantage of all the calendars that are available to you. Your church calendar with the men’s retreat and the women’s overnight trip. The local school calendars should be out too, so you can plan around spring break, fall break, when school starts and when it finishes.

If you plan with these calendars in mind, you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache knowing that your weekend trip isn’t the same as homecoming.

Tent Pole Events

You know what these are already. You may even have them on your calendar. Summer camp. Your big Disciple Now in-town retreat. A big conference in the spring.

These are the events that your youth group always does and ones that, frankly, take up a lot of time on your calendar. Plan these out first so you know NOT to plan a massive all-night lock-in in three weeks before you go on a week mission trip. When you start with your big events, you can plan margin in intentionally.

Small Events

These are the things that might not take up as much time but are still good to have on the calendar. Maybe you have a big kick-off night for your small group Bible studies. Or maybe you always take a group to go play minigolf on the day after school gets out. Place these on the calendar for your sake and so that you can let parents know as far in advance if something is coming.

Teaching

Now that you know your big and little events, you can plan out your teaching calendar to help supplement what you already have on the calendar. Maybe you know your theme for summer camp, so you can teach with it in mind the month before and help break it down the month afterward. February is probably a good month to do a relationship series, and Christmas will usually be Christmas.

Then you can take a good look at what your teaching calendar has on it and what it’s missing. That way you’re not trying to figure out what to teach next week, because you’ve already got it planned. Or, you could use Co-leader’s Roadmap to help you!

Leader Training

Since you’ve got fantastic leaders helping you along the way, why not go ahead and plan times for you to get together with them and train them? You can make these happen right before a youth group meeting or right after church on Sunday. As long as you include lunch of course! DYM is getting ready for it’s National Day of Volunteer Youth Ministry Training this year. AND, big news, you can have it on whatever day works for you! Check it out here and put it on the calendar now.

Parent Meetings

Sprinkle these in. I usually had three a year: one in the fall, one in January, and one right before summer. That way parents are always a step ahead and know important dates. I would also pitch resources and whatever big student ministry news I had at the moment. If you have these consistently, you’ll develop clout with parents and help them stay on top of youth group!

Everything else!

There are a lot of things you can plan out ahead of time: social media, emails, when volunteers are going to teach for you, your vacation, and a whole lot more. The more you have a plan, the less you’ll have to stress out at the last minute. Save yourself some pressure and take some time to plan now!

Struggle to plan? Check out these great resources from DYM!

6 Nov 2023

Creative Ideas for Indoor Youth Ministry

By Ronald|2023-11-06T06:58:45-08:00November 6th, 2023|Youth Ministry Ideas|10 Comments

As it gets colder outside, you probably are going to start thinking that doing indoor events is the way to go. You’ve had your fun fall festival and annual bonfire, but now it’s just too cold to be outside! Or maybe it’s been snowing in your state for the last two months. I don’t know how snow works; I live in Texas. If you do find yourself retreating indoors because your students complain about the cold, here are some tips on how to have some great indoor events!

Learn to be creative with your space

If you were lucky enough to have a youth room, think of some ways that you can spice up your space for an event. Maybe you can move the orientation of the room. Perhaps you could put a projector on a different wall than normal. You might even ask a couple of adults to come in and decorate the place for you. Whenever you do an event that’s outside your normal programming, it could be a chance to make your space feel really different. Go for it!

Take what you do before youth group and AMP IT UP

Do your students like playing video games before you get started? Do they go play nine square in your church gym? If you’re looking for an idea of an event to host, maybe you could take one of those things that you normally do and really amp it up to make it a big deal. My students were constantly asking to have a Smash Brothers tournament. What a great event to really buy into what students were excited about. Or maybe you could play volleyball if you’re one of those lucky youth pastors who have a gym to meet in. You can think of a whole bunch of different ways to make volleyball crazy and exciting. Use a giant 6-foot-wide beach ball. Make it teams of 20. You’ve got a lot of options!

Meet in a different spot in your building

If the event you’re trying to do can take place in a different space in your building, why not take advantage of that? Instead of meeting in the youth room, consider meeting in the fellowship hall or the gym. Giving your students a chance to switch things up might put them in a different mindset and allow them to think about whatever it is you’re trying to do with your event. Familiarity can be good, but putting students in a different space can also open them up to thinking differently!

Be a good steward of your building; clean up afterwards!

Last, but not least, if you’re meeting inside at your church, be considerate to the people who have to come behind you and clean it up, or to the people whose room you’re borrowing for the evening. Make sure you plan to have people help you clean after the event. I always struggled with that and thought that I would just clean it all up myself. Don’t do this! Ask people specifically to help you clean up so that you don’t come in the next day to a trashed youth room or an angry email from the cleaning crew.

Do you have any other ideas? I’d love to hear them! Comment down below or reach out. You’ve got this!

Also, if you’re looking for a few ideas for indoor events, check out the resources below.

Get your students thinking with this fun interactive game!

All students need for this one is their phone and the instructions on the screen. Super fun!

5 Oct 2023

4 Strategic Focuses this Fall

By Justin Knowles|2023-09-21T08:42:10-07:00October 5th, 2023|Leadership|0 Comments

Goals should be reachable on strategy but big enough where God needs to move fir it to happen. As leaders we can do our part by planning and creating strategies on how to be effective. Over the summer our ministry had decided to focus on a few main areas in our ministry to give a great start to the fall. We created a playbook which has our focuses laid out in detail per campus and a month into fall it’s awesome to see it in action. Is it perfect no. But provided a clear direction.

4 focuses:

1st Wednesdays – This is nothing new to Wednesdays but we wanted to get ahead. Part of a great event is the planning and promotion. If we want students to invite friends but we don’t have our plans in order early, how would they invite them to something they don’t know about. I feel one of the biggest downfalls of youth ministries is their lack of getting ahead and it causes people to do a bunch of last minute planning… which is never the best result. And getting ahead now allows for margin later.

Rosters and small groups – We had two focuses. For larger campuses groups can get too big. So we focus on getting groups to a 2:12 (leader/student) ratio. Multiplying groups off to make smaller ones means more intentional discipleship. And for smaller campuses, more options of groups. If a student comes and there is only one group for guys because of the size, and they don’t like it, where do they go? They go home. We are having a huge focus on being highly aware of how big our groups are in order to create more room for students who are coming.

Youth sections – We launched youth sections for connections on Sundays. We do not have any weekend services for youth. We want them in service in corporate worship or we want them serving on teams on the weekend. Our church has had a ton of new families and youth sections let them know there is something amazing happening on Wednesdays for the community and discipleship of our youth.

Schools – I know this is a youth ministry staple. I don’t know about others, but CA schools are like prisons. Feels impossible to get on, but it isn’t. Post Covid, we lost all connections and we are focusing on getting them back and being in school. I know that not every student will come to SCY but every student can know at that school what SCY is about.

Is this all ground breaking stuff? Nope. But I’d like this something we have prayed about, something metrics have revealed to us, and something we are striving for as a ministry in hopes to see Jesus move through us and our amazing leaders.

Justin

5 Sep 2023

Maximizing Youth Ministry Impact: The Benefits of One-Night Events

By Ronald|2023-09-05T08:04:35-07:00September 5th, 2023|Youth Ministry Ideas|14 Comments

Youth ministry is more than just Sunday gatherings and midweek services; it’s about fostering deep connections, spiritual growth, and memorable experiences for our students. While regular meetings are the backbone of any youth ministry, one-night events can add an exciting and transformative dimension to your youth program. In this blog post, we’ll explore how hosting one-night events can be incredibly beneficial to your youth ministry and the students you serve.

Building Excitement and Anticipation

One-night events offer a unique opportunity to break away from the routine and create a sense of anticipation among your students. Whether it’s a themed worship night, a fun game night, or a service project, the idea of a special event can generate excitement that extends beyond the event itself. This anticipation can help boost attendance and engagement among your youth group.

Reaching Out to New Faces

One-night events are a fantastic way to introduce new students to your youth ministry. They provide a low-pressure, non-committal environment where newcomers can experience the warmth and welcoming atmosphere of your group without feeling overwhelmed. These events can serve as a gateway for students who might later become regular members of your ministry.

Addressing Specific Topics or Needs

Sometimes, youth face unique challenges and questions that require a more focused approach. One-night events can be tailored to address specific topics or needs, such as mental health, relationships, or faith questions. These events can provide a safe space for open discussions and support, helping students navigate these crucial aspects of their lives.

Strengthening Community Bonds

Community is at the heart of any successful youth ministry. One-night events offer an opportunity for students to bond in a different context, strengthening their relationships and creating lasting memories. Whether it’s a retreat, a camping trip, or a simple game night, these events encourage fellowship and unity among your youth group.

Providing Spiritual Growth Moments

One-night events can also be spiritually enriching experiences. You can organize prayer nights, worship services, or guest speakers who can inspire and challenge your students in their faith journeys. These events can serve as catalysts for personal growth and spiritual awakening.

Reigniting Passion

In the midst of the challenges and distractions young people face, it’s not uncommon for their passion for faith to wane. Hosting one-night events with powerful worship, impactful testimonies, or engaging activities can reignite their passion for Christ and His mission. These events can remind them of the joy and purpose found in their relationship with God.

Creating Lasting Memories

Youth ministry is not just about imparting knowledge but also creating memories that will last a lifetime. One-night events often become cherished memories for students, reinforcing their connection to your ministry and to each other.

Conclusion

One-night events are a valuable addition to any youth ministry’s toolbox. They can help build excitement, reach new students, address specific needs, strengthen community bonds, foster spiritual growth, reignite passion, and create lasting memories. By incorporating these events into your ministry plan, you can enhance your ability to nurture the spiritual and personal growth of the young people you serve. Remember, it’s not just about the event itself but the impact it has on the lives of your students that truly matters.

Need an idea for a great one night event? Check out these two ideas out from DYM!

19 Jan 2023

4 Tips to Create Event Hype!

By Ronald|2023-01-19T06:41:10-08:00January 19th, 2023|Uncategorized|7 Comments

We all know how hard it can be to get our students excited for upcoming events like retreats and dance parties and whatever else you might have on your calendar for the year. Whether it’s because there are a hundred other things on their calendar or they haven’t checked their email, social media, bulletin, or the youth room announcement board, students can sometimes lack the hype we’d love for them to have.

Here are a few tips to help get your students motivated and participating!

1. Get them involved in the planning process. Encourage your students to come up with ideas for the event. Have them help plan activities, pick a theme, and design promotional materials. To get them involved in the planning process, you could start by having a brainstorming session with your students. Let them come up with ideas for activities, themes, and promotional materials. You could also have a voting session where they can vote on the ideas they like best.

2. Create a “Countdown to the Event”. Have your students track the days leading up to the event and post photos or videos on social media. You could create a countdown calendar for your students to follow. You could also have them post pictures or videos on social media of them getting ready for the event with the hashtag #countdown2event.

3. Have fun and be creative with promoting the event. Have your students create fun videos or memes to share on social media and with their friends. To get your students excited about creating promotional materials, you could offer a prize for the best video or meme. You could also have them post the promotional materials on their own social media accounts to reach more people.

4. Share stories. Have your students share stories of past events and the experiences they had. Hearing stories of past events will help get your students excited for the upcoming event and give them something to look forward to. You can also ask your students to think of ways they can make the upcoming event even better than the last one.

We hope these tips help you get your students excited and ready to participate in your upcoming event. We can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Need to generate some hype right before an event? Check out this Dancing Beast Countdown from Matthew McNutt!

It’s a hairy beast dancing for five minutes to fun music. What more could you want in a countdown video?

Gold member’s got this for free this month! Want to check out what all you could get by going Gold? Click here to see all the great member perks INCLUDING some sweet new Co-Leader credits!