Category: Youth Ministry

Before we send students off to college or into the working world, hopefully we will have taught them not just things in the Bible but some key ideas about the Bible.  It’s not the sexiest stuff to teach but incredibly valuable as they seek to give a reason for the hope they have within them. …

Years ago attending Willow Creek’s Student Ministry Leadership Conference, Bo Boshers explained how on their team they used the phrase “do your job” to encourage one another to be dedicated and work hard.  The massive temptation in youth ministry is to slack off and not be as efficient as we could be and that is…

Growing up it was suggested to me that there was no better time in history to live than now.  All the advances of science, medicine, and technology were making our quality of life better than any generation before us in history… Or so I was told.  The conventional wisdom was conveyed that man had progressed…

Once again I notice something in the media that just is shocking as it relates to the next generation.  What is your groups attitudes toward marriage?  Have you taught on marriage and defined it via scripture?  Most youth pastors would not even thing that was relevant a few years ago.  Now with the subject of…

In offering some alternatives to the state of american youth ministry, I think it might be most helpful to get very basic so that we can focus on what is important. Several years ago, in trying to simplify the teaching I was doing on youth ministry in a few different places, I boiled it down…

Fourth, we created a consumer mentality amongst a generation that did not expect to be challenged at church in ways similar to what they face at school or on sports teams. The frightening truth is that youth ministry books and training events were teaching us to do the exact methods that have failed us. The…

Third, we lost sight of the Great Commission, deciding instead to make converts of many and disciples of few. We concluded that strong biblical teaching and helping students embrace a robust theology was boring (or only relevant to the exceptionally keen) and proverbially shot ourselves in the foot. The great commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is our…

Last post I addressed the idea that perhaps the shift from parachurch to church based youth ministries led to an exaggerated form of segregated youth ministry – meaning we focused so much on the needs of youth that we treated them as a distinctly other group and neglected to include them in the life of…

In writing for The Gospel Coalition Blog the first in a series of articles written by several authors, I had the task given to me of providing some sort of historical overview of youth ministry as it specifically related to the series.  So, I focused on a short bit of history from which I see…