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25 Nov 2024

Show Some Love to Your Volunteers!

By |2024-11-25T11:55:35-08:00November 25th, 2024|Volunteers|0 Comments

Volunteers are the backbone of every youth ministry. They invest their time, energy, and hearts into making a difference in the lives of students, and we often couldn’t do it without them. But how often do we let them know just how much we appreciate their efforts?

Showing gratitude doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive; small gestures go a long way in making your volunteers feel valued and supported. Let’s dive into three actionable ways to show your team some love today:

1. Write a Handwritten Thank-You Note

In a world of quick texts and emails, a handwritten note feels like a warm hug. Take a few moments to write a heartfelt thank-you to one of your volunteers. Be specific about something they’ve done that made an impact—whether it was their leadership during a small group or simply their welcoming smile on a Sunday morning.

Why It Matters:
Personalized recognition reminds your volunteers that you see them and value their unique contributions. Plus, they’ll hold onto that note as a reminder of why they serve.

2. Publicly Celebrate Their Efforts

Whether it’s a shout-out during your youth service, a post on your ministry’s social media, or a highlight in your parent newsletter, take time to publicly recognize your volunteers. Share a quick story or fun moment that showcases their impact.

Why It Matters:
Celebrating them in front of others not only encourages the recognized volunteer but also inspires the rest of your team. It sets the tone for a culture of appreciation within your ministry.

3. Ask for Their Feedback

Sometimes the best way to show you value someone is to listen. Ask your volunteers how they’re feeling about their roles, what they need, and how you can better support them. A simple coffee meeting or a quick feedback form can open up meaningful conversations.

Why It Matters:
When volunteers feel heard, they feel empowered. Creating space for their input strengthens your ministry relationships and shows that you value them as partners, not just helpers.

Why Gratitude Matters

Expressing appreciation not only boosts your volunteers’ morale but also transforms your ministry culture. It fosters trust, deepens relationships, and makes your team feel like family. As you intentionally show love to your volunteers, you’ll see the ripple effects in their enthusiasm and commitment to serving.

So, who’s your first thank-you note going to today?

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30 Sep 2024

Avoiding Fall Burnout

By |2024-09-30T11:22:10-07:00September 30th, 2024|Youth Pastor Life|7 Comments

As the fall season arrives, youth pastors often juggle a packed calendar full of events, retreats, and holiday planning. While the season is full of exciting opportunities to impact students’ lives, it can also be a prime time for burnout. The fast pace and growing demands can make it easy to neglect your own well-being. To avoid falling into this trap, it’s crucial to prioritize self-care, not only for your personal health but also for the long-term effectiveness of your ministry.

Spiritually, staying grounded is essential. Amid a busy fall schedule, carve out time daily to connect with God. Whether through personal devotions, prayer walks, or simply finding moments of quiet reflection, these rhythms are necessary to keep your heart aligned with the purpose of your calling. Just as you encourage your students to seek God’s presence, make sure you model this in your own life. Set aside specific times during the week to rest in God’s word and be filled up so you can pour into others from a place of abundance rather than exhaustion.

Emotionally and physically, finding balance is key. Don’t be afraid to delegate tasks to your team or volunteers. Sometimes, youth pastors fall into the trap of thinking they need to do everything themselves, but allowing others to share the load not only lightens your burden but empowers others to serve. Take intentional breaks, prioritize sleep, and make room for activities that rejuvenate you, whether exercising, spending time with family, or enjoying a hobby. Physical care goes hand-in-hand with emotional health, and if your energy is depleted, it will eventually impact your ministry and relationships.

Finally, setting boundaries in ministry is essential for long-term health. It’s easy to say yes to everything, but protecting your time and energy is vital. Create clear expectations with your church leadership, volunteers, and even students about your availability, especially during busy seasons. Saying no to certain commitments is not a failure but a necessary step to ensure you can fully invest in the areas where God has called you. By setting these boundaries, you protect both your personal well-being and the sustainability of your ministry.

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9 Sep 2024

Addressing Anxiety and Stress in Students

By |2024-09-09T10:58:24-07:00September 9th, 2024|Youth Ministry Ideas|5 Comments

Being a teenager can be really stressful! It was stressful enough for us when we grew up before cell phones, social media, and constant plugged-in information. For students now, the stressors are multiplied! As youth pastors, we have the wonderful and difficult task of guiding students as they deal with anxiety and stress in their lives. Here are some tips on how we can better help students in our ministry handle stress.

Watch for Signs of Stress

The first thing we can do is to know the signs to watch for in students who show big swings in stress or anxiety. Withdrawal from activities, declining academic performance, irritability, or changes in sleep and eating patterns are all signs of stress. Also, watch for drastic changes in friend groups. Stress can bubble up and come out in anger or distancing in relationships. It’s also a good idea to equip your leaders and volunteers to know these signs. You can’t watch everybody all the time, but if you have leaders who are trained, it will help you identify students dealing with anxiety.

Provide Tools for Dealing with Anxiety

Help students by giving them practical tools they need and can use to manage stress. From planning their day to deep breathing exercises and repeating spiritual truths to themselves, we can encourage students to lean on their faith during difficult times. We should remind them that by incorporating prayer, scripture reading, and worship into their daily routines, they can mitigate the negative effects of anxiety and stress. It’s also good for us to remind students that they might need outside help and that talking to a therapist or counselor about their stress is a great idea!

Invite a Mental Health Professional to Talk at Youth Group

Since we have a platform to speak to students, why not invite a professional to come in and tell students what they know about stress and how they can handle it? If you have a mental health professional who goes to your church, invite them to speak at youth groups and help destigmatize the idea of stress and anxiety. How great would it be for students to hear from a Christian perspective how they can deal with stress from somebody whose job is to help people manage anxiety? By giving them a platform, we can help students connect with someone who can offer them real help!

What other tips do you have for helping students address anxiety and stress?

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2 Sep 2024

Handling Academic Pressure and Expectations

By |2024-08-05T14:19:41-07:00September 2nd, 2024|Youth Ministry Ideas|0 Comments

As school starts back up and students get into the rhythm of handling homework, tests, projects, and sports, it can be tough to manage all the pressure and expectations that come with it!

As youth pastors, we have an opportunity to speak into students’ lives, offer practical tips on managing busy schedules, and encourage them to observe their academic journey within the grand landscape of their faith journey. Here are some tips for helping students navigate school and faith.

Host Youth Room Study Halls 

Students will have difficulty balancing homework and everything else they have going on. If you are a full-time youth pastor, there’s likely an hour or two of overlap where you might be required to be in the office, and students get out of school. Why not offer up the youth room as a study hall for students? They can come in, do their homework, and even consult other friends who might be working on a similar subject. Bonus points here if you can get retired adults in your church who happen to be math whizs or a social studies expert to come in and help tutor. Did somebody ask for intergenerational ministry?

Help Students with Time Management 

Time management isn’t just something that students struggle with; it’s something we all need to have a good grip on! As a youth pastor, you can model this to your students and give them tools to help manage their time. Whatever time management techniques you have used in the past, you might be able to share with your students so that they can learn how to better manage their time. We all have timers on our phones and calendars to set for reminders. Why not use our technology to help us get tasks done? This could be a big benefit for you as a youth pastor because you might be helping parents who are also trying to give their students time management tools. We like to say that different voices saying the same things help solidify important lessons! Maybe we can help parents by teaching students helpful time management tools.

Offer Encouragement and Vision 

Seven years seems like a short time and also an eternity. Trying to think of seven years is a wild proposition to a student. To a 14-year-old, that’s half of their lifetime! But to those of us who are a little older, seven years goes by pretty quickly. The reality is that school isn’t forever. Yes, we want students to have a good foundation for their lives immediately after their teenage years, but the reality is that school isn’t everything. You might remember that you didn’t use trigonometry well into your 30s. But will it really matter? We must help students understand that their education and school life are important but not the end-all experience. Helping students put their life journey now into context versus where they might be in 10 to 20 years is something that we, youth pastors, can help students grasp. We need to remind students what really matters. And yes, giving students verses reminding them of how much God loves them even when stressed can be incredibly helpful!

What other tips would you suggest here?

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26 Aug 2024

Integrating Technology and Faith in Youth Ministry

By |2024-08-05T14:15:37-07:00August 26th, 2024|Youth Ministry Ideas|1 Comment

I’ve been doing youth ministry long enough to remember when cell phones became ubiquitous. Before that time, we would often need to make sure that a student who didn’t have a cell phone could call home and reach their parent. Sometimes, even that parent didn’t have a cell phone, so there wasn’t any good way to contact them.

Now, cell phones and technology seem to be an inevitable part of ministry. I know some youth pastors want to remove all technology from youth groups to focus on the in-person aspect. I can understand the motivation there. I enjoy going for long stretches without my phone to be more focused.

But our students aren’t us! They grew up with phones as much a part of their lives as we did with TV. So, how can we use technology to help students grow in their faith? Let’s explore a couple of ways.

Bible Reading Plans

Encourage your students to do a Bible reading plan on the YouVersion app. It’s great when you have accountability for reading your Bible together. This free app lets that happen without buying into any program or putting down any money. As a youth group, you can advertise that you will be doing a certain plan during the month and get students to join you. You can even see other students’ comments on the plan. If our phones will send us notifications anyway, why don’t we have them notify us to read the Bible?

Social Media Application

It’s always great to have real practical steps that students can take after they hear a youth group lesson. What if we started incorporating social media into our application? What I mean by that is, is there something a student can do on social media to put the faith lesson into practice? Can you encourage students to post a Bible verse on their personal page? Can you ask them to share a youth group video that invites their friends to church? Social media doesn’t have to be a scourge on our society. We could use it as a tool for good!

Give Students Tools to Grow

I know I like creating resources for my students. But we don’t always have to reinvent the wheel! Is there a podcast that you find personally encouraging? Is there a Spotify playlist that you use to connect with God? Sharing these with your students can show them how you are personally growing in your faith and can encourage them to do the same. You can record your youth group lessons and put them into a podcast or YouTube video for your students to digest later. Or you could do a quick 5-minute recap for your students so they can listen back to what they learned. Bonus points for sending it out to your small group leaders, who will be rehashing the lesson for students!

How would you use technology for your student ministry? How could you incorporate phones into students’ faith journeys? I’d love to hear your suggestions!

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19 Aug 2024

Building Strong Relationships with Parents and Guardians

By |2024-08-05T13:47:39-07:00August 19th, 2024|communication, Parents|3 Comments

I heard a youth pastor recently say that youth ministry would be easy if it weren’t for the parents! I know it can often feel like we are ministering to very willing students who are parented by flaky parents. I’ve certainly felt like that over my years of student ministry. But now that I’m getting older and have students in my own ministry, I’m beginning to see that those flaky parents just needed a little help from their youth pastor, especially since that parent is now me!

Here are some tips to help you build strong relationships with parents and better minister to them and their students.

Communicate Well and Often

I have seen youth pastors send out an email that announced for the first time that a retreat was happening in a month and that a $200 per student fee was all it took to sign up! As a parent, I realize I need much more time to plan things! As a youth pastor, try to make sure that you let parents know when big events will be as soon as possible. Fall retreats need to be communicated as soon as summer wraps up. Things happening in the spring should really get communicated in December. Summer camp and mission trips must have save-the-dates sent out sometime in January!

This comes from a parent who loves to hear about things frequently. Don’t just think one email is enough. Communicate regularly! It would be great to send a weekly email to parents reminding them of big and small events and even the teaching series you’ve got going on. The more you communicate, the more trust you build!

Host Parent Meetings

As a parent of teenagers, I can often feel like I’m alone in this endeavor. What helps me out is knowing that other parents are also parenting their students and going through the same struggles as I am! Parent meetings are a great place for parents to see that there are others in their church who are having the same issues.

You can also use parent meetings to remind parents of upcoming big events, let them meet their kids’ small group leaders, and get them involved in what’s happening in the student ministry! I always liked to host these during the big season beginnings—one in the fall, one in the spring, and a much more informal get-together in the summer.

Provide Parents Resources

The most frequent question I would get as a youth pastor from parents was usually something like, “Do you have any resources to help me with…?”

Knowing what resources I could send to parents was such a help for the parents who came up to me at that time. As a youth pastor, you are an expert in students. Because of that, you probably see many resources that deal with what students are going through. Keeping a list on your phone of books, podcasts, and blog articles dealing with specific issues will make you look like a rockstar when a parent has an issue they are struggling with. I have always liked highlighting resources like this during parent meetings and emails!

The more we communicate to parents and show them that we are student ministry experts, the more trust we will build with them as we minister to their students. And the more trust we have with parents, the easier time we will have ministering to their students!

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20 May 2024

Launching Youth Ministry Seniors

By |2024-05-20T06:17:19-07:00May 20th, 2024|Leadership|8 Comments

May is a big season for youth ministries! Your seniors are graduating, and it can be a wild ride. These may be the students you’ve ministered to and spent time with over the last six or seven years. And you may be trying to figure out how to honor them and launch them into the next season.

And you’re also figuring out how to do that without making anyone upset or leaving anyone out!

What can you do?

Here are some ideas for honoring your seniors and even having them speak into the lives of the students who are coming behind them.

Have Seniors Speak at Youth Group

While not every senior can deliver a 30-minute message, you might be able to ask a senior to give the group following them some life advice. The high school pastor I worked with would do this regularly. He would schedule 3 to 4 seniors during a youth group program and have them offer advice to the next class. It was usually great to hear what the seniors would come up with and how they would take the lessons they learned in youth group and pass them down to the students following them.

Recognize Them on a Sunday Morning

On a particular Sunday morning, call up students who are graduating and have them stand on stage. It’s always a great moment to recognize them in front of the whole church! You can either hand them a microphone and have them go down the line saying their name, where they are from, and what their next season of life holds for them. Make sure you communicate in advance what this will be so that students and parents are prepared for it!

Get Them a Gift

Try to get students something to mark the occasion. Maybe it’s a Bible where their family and friends have highlighted verses to take them into the next season. Maybe it’s a devotional aimed at seniors so that they can enter this next season walking with God. Maybe it’s exclusive Youth Ministry swag that only graduates get. Whatever you do, think about how a student might look at this gift and remember their time in Youth Ministry fondly.

Set Them Up for What’s Next

Do your new seniors know how to look for a church? Do they know how to ask and get plugged into a new ministry? I know a youth pastor who would take his seniors to a couple of different churches during their summer after high school. He would have them learn everything they could about the new church on one visit and ask how to get plugged in. I love this idea because the youth pastor would go with them and help coach them through it! What a great idea to help students look for a new church since most of our seniors might be moving on to their next chapter in a new city and not know how to find a new community of believers!

How would you help launch seniors into the next season?

Want some help with having seniors tell their stories? Check out this resource!

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27 Nov 2023

Take Some Time Off to Plan Your Youth Ministry

By |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!

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