All month long, we have been focusing on the function and significance of small groups for the development of your students and as a way to track their engagement within your ministry.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Small groups, life groups, or discipleship groups are not just good ...
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Engagement. It’s everyone’s new metric word after 2020. Forget growth, numbers, and attendance. Your new measurement for how well things are going in your ministry is engagement. Healthy student ministry must become engaging. But what does that mean, and how do we measure it? Let’s take our ...
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It’s summertime and baseball state tournaments are wrapping up, so I thought we would keep fast and neat down the center this week with a trio of baseball analogies for parent ministry. Here are three things that parents in and near your student ministry need from you this summer.  1. A ...
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There is a serious deficit in many of our youth ministries. Yes, I’m serious. Yes, it’s significant. It  And oh, it’s theological... but it is not whatever theological issue you just thought of... Our youth ministries are seriously lacking in FUN! Now, wait, I said fun and you immediately ...
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How do you get your student ministry to the next level?  John Maxwell famously has 5-levels of influential leadership and aspirational leaders should seek to grow their capacity all the way to level 5. Well, I would like to offer I think there are three levels of student ministry leadership ...
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There’s only one problem with dissent: a lot of people don’t want to hear it.  All week long we are focusing our attention on what it means to be a dissenting voice for your team, and a discerning team with a powerful voice. It’s not an easy conversation, but a necessary practice for the ...
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It’s senior season and next month you should be celebrating your graduating seniors. But how? Last year was a mad-dash of just trying to come up with something, anything that we could do in light of being on lockdown. This year let’s take what we innovated last year, couple it with what we have ...
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It’s been a year. This month marks a year of revisiting everything that we knew about gathering in groups, working outside the home, and doing student ministry. It’s been hard.  And it often feels impossible to celebrate in really difficult seasons, but in some ways that makes it even ...
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"Is that the bad guy?" I love reading adventure stories with my boys who are five and three. We usually try to read at least two or three chapters on most school nights (after dance parties, Super Mario UNO, and Catan Jr.). During a recent reading session, my oldest got really excited to predict ...
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What would you do to capture someone’s attention for 15 seconds?  Talk?  Sing?  Shout?  Dance?  TikTok is the massively popular response to this age-old sales question, and Gen Z is showing up with answers.  If you are totally unsure what TikTok is, ...
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