Archive for the ‘Beyond Youth Group Games’ Category

I’ve been spending time lately meeting with a youth pastor that works not to far from where I live. We’ve been talking about purpose and aligning all the “stuff” of youth ministry around a guiding purpose.

She’s still trying to figure out what the “big purpose” is that her group is called to run after. But she has been a lot more purposeful in planning each of their youth meetings, setting a goal for each night instead of just doing “what we always do.”

Last week she told me about a youth group activity she came up with to help reinforce the lesson from their Bible study. It was a simple idea, but I thought it was the best activity ever!

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest post from Ashley Brooks.

For many young people, music is a central aspect of life, whether they play it or just love listening. Luckily, there are numerous opportunities for teens to listen to the music they love, hang out with their friends all while staying true to their Christian faith.

Here are five great festivals parents can feel OK letting their kids attend and where youth groups will feel welcome. Read the rest of this entry »

How does a mature Christian student look/act/smell? This is one of those questions that has been tossed around for ages. There are a lot of opinions out there. Wouldn’t it help if we had a solid answer?

Barna says that church leaders today struggle to define spiritual maturity. I wouldn’t doubt that. Spiritual maturity is a fuzzy concept, hard to specifically define and quantify. (Maybe it was never meant to be defined or quantified, just pursued…?)

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of talk about relationships in youth ministry today, and I’m glad to see it.

Program-driven youth ministry (youth groups that rely on sermons and events to change teens’ lives) aren’t working. Relationship-focused youth ministries (youth groups that focus a majority of their energy on developing meaningful God-centered relationships with students) are our only hope.

But relational ministry has become a buzz word.

Everyone nods their head and agrees enthusiastically when you talk about relational ministry. You might even be nodding your head right now. But is it truly the driving force behind our ministries? What is that motivation deep down inside us that might be pulling us away from what we know is best?

How do we know if we are really committed to relationships in our youth ministry?

Here are a few questions to ponder that can help uncover our deeper motivations:

• What do you spend a majority of your time on?
• If someone asked about your youth ministry, what is the first thing you would tell them?
• Would you truly be content or satisfied at the end of the day if fewer teens came every week, but you saw deeper spiritual growth happening in the few students that did stay?
• Are you willing to give up anything and everything about your ministry—even the weekly meeting—if you found a model that made a deeper impact on your students?

We should  constantly reevaluate ourselves if we truly want to be focused on relationships. Numbers aren’t bad, but they can be meaningless.

Notice I didn’t say “we need to reevaluate our programs.” What we really need is to constantly examine and reexamine where we are spending our precious time and if we are spending our time on what we know will have the greatest impact.

Special note to leaders of larger groups (or leaders that want their group to grow): “Relational ministry” can’t always mean that you have a relationship with every student. Effective youth leaders have found ways to reproduce themselves in student and adult leaders (just look at Moses) while still emphasizing relationships all the way down the “leadership chain.”

Lex has got to be one of the coolest student ministry leaders I know. If I could trade all my youth ministry skills for someone else’s, I would trade with Lex.

Talking about entertainment in youth ministry, she recently commented that she has to constantly remind herself, “I’m not running a Chuck E Cheese… I’m not running a Chuck E Cheese….”

Why?

Because youth pastors are “so constantly bombarded with entertainment-based images and stories that even though we may KNOW it’s not the best way to go, it’s hard to maintain that conviction.”

Why do we want to give into that tendency to entertain first and disciple second? (Which can easily turn into entertain often and disciple rarely.) Is it possible that there’s something deeper going on inside us as leaders?

There is a rational reason to try to draw kids in with some excitement. Once we get them in the door we can throw them a curve ball–Jesus! Religion! Bet you never saw that coming! The ol’ bait ‘n’ switch, right?

What if there is an insecurity inside us about the size of our youth group? Is it possible that we’re afraid of what will happen if we stop entertaining? Will we feel like failures if our youth groups stop growing, or even shrink, because we played fewer games and spent more time talking about deep, rich spiritual truths?

I’ll admit that the thought definitely crosses my mind.

A few years ago I was the youth pastor for a small church in a small town in East Texas. This group was a rough, rough crowd. Most of the teens came from broken homes and very painful backgrounds. Several of the guys probably could have beaten me up if they wanted to.

When I first started, I knew I would have to learn a lot to relate with the group. So I spent as much time as I could on their “turf,” in the back allies and sitting on broken park benches, just chilling. When they came into the youth room, I wanted to make sure they had a good time so they’d at least come back, right?

I tried every game I knew and every “ice-breaker” activity in the book. Nothing worked, and some stopped showing up. Man, were they a tough crowd.

At that point I figured I had nothing else to lose. I didn’t have any money for Playstations, so I just started to dive deep.

We talked about God, love, life, pain, suffering, peace and purpose. At first, I was the only one talking, but slowly they joined the discussion. We talked about hard issues. It wasn’t easy.

A couple of times, one of the older kids–we’ll call him Dave–got mad and started cussing me out right there in front of the whole group. At first, it was because I wouldn’t let him run his mouth the whole meeting and distract everyone, but it eventually came out that he was mad about what I said about God. Dave could not sit there and let someone talk about a God that is so loving because he had gone through so much pain in his own life.

I stood for the Truth, as best as I could, as loving as I could, by God’s grace. Then I’d go home and think I’d never see him again, and that the others would leave too because of what happened.

But it was those yelling matches, strangely enough, that started to grow the group. Dave started inviting his friends. I think it was because he finally found someone that cared for him enough to dig through the dirt with him and to show him some of God’s answers.

He wasn’t just inviting friends to come to youth group for a good time. Soon, he was the one telling everyone to be quiet and to focus so we could talk about God.

If you really want to disciple your students, you have to go deep. And if you really want to bring in more new students, you have to go deep. Flashy “bait ‘n switch” games will bring a few more in the door, but if you don’t continue to keep them entertained, you’ll probably loose them.

So remember, “I’m Not Running a Chuck E Cheese….”

I caught this quote from a Time article from 2006 called In Touch with Jesus:

“Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early ’90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all.”

I was chatting with a new friend about my post on the slippery slope of entertainment, and he mentioned a similair article from a few years ago that asks some very similair questions:

Entertained to Death: The Case Against Entertainment in Youth Ministry by Ken Moser

Ken makes a strong case and points out 7 reasons we shouldn’t use entertainment to reach non-Christians:

• It’s Deceptive.
• It Hides the Real Source.
• It Hides Christian Community.
• It Distorts the Call.
• It’s Hard to Keep Up.
• It Takes Resources.
• It Produces a False Dichotomy.

These can be some very hard ideas to take in. Does he go too far or is he right on? How do we really apply this? Take a look at the article and come back here to post your thoughts.

Read original post: Entertainment at our youth group meetings

Every youth pastor knows the importance of relationships.

You won’t see a young person’s life radically changed just by listening to the best sermons. For every solid teen in a youth group, somehow, somewhere, there are committed believers pouring their guts out for that student. For the solid teens that come from Christian homes, that’s often the parents.

But what about the families that aren’t led by parents that love the Lord and disciple their kids?

I believe that family is one of the biggest “gaps” that we as youth ministers are called to fill. God created the family structure so that parents can pass their faith to the next generation. In light of so many families that aren’t doing this, or who aren’t even believers, He has allowed youth leaders to fill that gap by ministering to students.

Problems come when we try to replace the “gap” of strong relationships with programs. Students do not need programs. Students need you.

A fascinating study (abstract here, bottom of page) of youth pastors in the midwest discovered an interesting pattern. These youth pastors firmliy believed in the importance of personal relationships with students, and they also stated that the format of their youth meetings basically weren’t working.

Yet they still spent 80% of their time preparing for those “so-so” meetings, all the while wishing they had more time for relationships.

My question to you is this: Is there something you are doing in ministry, or in your life, that you aren’t getting the results you aimed for? How much time does that take each week? Can that time be better spent on other activities, such as building relationships, that you know have a better chance of growing fruit?

Programs are not inherently bad–in fact, they’re necessary! So please consider these questions prayerfully as they may not be for all of you, but I do believe this is one thing some of us need to hear.

My prayer is that the Lord would use these ideas to drive us to prayer and help us work more dilligently and effectively for Him.

Apparently there’s a “greater” debate out there between whether today’s teens are the smartest or the dummest generation America has ever seen.

I’m not going to lie: There are a lot of things to worry about. To put it plainly, this is the most ADD generation we’ve probably ever seen. Attention spans range from 3-5 seconds, and if they’re not entertained, they’ll leave you in an instant.

How should that affect our youth group meetings? Many times we scramble to keep teens’ attention and draw them into the message or Bible lesson with games and other entertainment. But let me warn you: Entertainment is a slippery slope.

When you entertain a young person, they only want more. One video game, TV show, movie, or iPod is never enough. It’s always about the next one, the latest and greatest, what’s hot and what’s new.

The same happens in youth group. Make them laugh this week and they will ask for more next week. When we use “entertainment” to draw them in, to some degree, that’s what they’ve come to expect. Then they fall into their usual cycle: That was fun, but what’s next? I want something better!

The truth is that we just can’t keep up. We’re competing against MTV, Apple and Hollywood. So many teens leave youth group because it’s just not cool anymore and there’s more fun to have other places. We tried to keep them entertained didn’t take them deeper.

Entertainment cannot be our foundation. It must be something more: The forgiveness and peace of the Lord, and the excitement, passion and purpose that comes only from Him. Now that’s something the world can never compete with! When a young person truly catches on, they’ll never leave. (Dear Lord, help us! Work in our students’ hearts!)

Entertainment is a great seasoning, but it’s nothing without meat. This can be the greatest generation in history to make a stand for Christ, and we’re in the perfect position to help them get there.

Earlier this week we talked about why students come to youth group meetings. It’s time for the hard stuff: Why they DON’T come.

The younger kids
Some older students, especially the less mature, are really turned off by the younger kids at youth group–the 6th, 7th and 8th graders. Have you noticed that it’s harder to keep juniors and seniors involved? This might be a part of the problem. Consider special programs or even seperate meetings for your juniors and seniors, since their needs are very different than the young students and they are as anxious as ever to move up in life.

The games
This again applies mostly to the older students. They see many of the common youth group games as childish. They can be fun sometimes, but it can also make them feel like babysitters and that they’ve “grown out” of youth group. Another great reason to meet with juniors and seniors seperately.

The sermon
This one applies to all age groups. Let’s dive into the average student’s daily life: They wake up, go to school, and tolerate boring class after boring class so that they can hang out with friends inbetween. Most of them have the incredible talent of looking awake enough to not catch the teacher’s attention while completely zoning out anything that’s said.

Some youth pastors fall into the trap of following the same pattern: Give students games or hangout time with friends to bait them into coming, then force them to sit through a “me talk you listen” lesson that they’re already good at zoning out. Do you ever ask students, “What did you learn at last week’s meeting? How were you able to apply it this week?” These can be some very revealing questions.

You can use giveaways, magic tricks, even pyrotechnics to try to get students to pay attention to a sermon, but we need to make fundamental changes if we are going to reach this 3-second-attention-span generation.

First, a sermon cannot be one-way, I-talk-you-listen. Students need to be involved in the discussion throug questions, discussions, and even teaching small portions of the lesson.

Second, we must realize that a sermon is only one half of the discipleship process. The other half is one-on-one relatinoships between leaders and students, and we need to work hard to build these–otherwise they simply will not happen.

There are a lot of other things that can push students away from your youth group–like relevancy, bad rumors, scheduling, extra-curricular activities, and much more. What are the most common for your group? Respond in the comments below.