Posts Tagged ‘Youth Group Meetings’

A new Barna study found that the spike in church attendance most churches expect this holiday season won’t necessarily be coming from brand new visitors.

According to Barna, 27% of regular church attenders plan to attend more services this holiday season, but only 4% of those that usually do not attend plan to come. “In past decades there was an assumption that the holidays were a time when outsiders might explore church life,” adds George Barna, Christian-pollster-extraordinare. “These days, however, churches and other religious institutions are not seen as safe or value-adding places by most outsiders. They see little reason to attend seasonal events, especially since those events often highlight their outsider status.”

Just another sign that we need to get out of the church and into the neighborhood to share our faith and reach our communities. It’s another good reason to carefully coach students in sharing their faith one-on-one , because less and less people are coming to church (or youth group) to hear it from the preacher.

Picture this: You’re given 30 students from different youth groups, a co-leader, and 2 days to prepare them for a month-long mission trip halfway around the world.

This is the scenario I face every time I serve as a Team Leader for Global Expeditions. Fortunately, Teen Mania (the umbrella ministry) does an incredible job preparing me as a team leader and partnering with us to prepare our teams as they train on their campus in East Texas.

I wanted to share a few highlights of what Teen Mania does, because I believe these are some of the best strategies for training students to understand and practice evangelism.

Teaching
It starts with teaching to make sure students understand the basics of our fallen nature and Christ’s forgiveness. This is a pretty common topic, so I’m going to spend my time now elsewhere.

A simple and relevant narrative
We make sure each student knows and understands a clear and concise narrative that puts the salvation message into a memorable and clear container. This gives students something very tangible to latch onto and rehearse.

Your testimony
A great tool in creating that narrative is your own personal testimony. Have your students write out their testimony and include three distinct parts: the person you were before you met God, when you gave your life to Christ and how it happened, and the person you are now. Ideally, you want to review these individually with each student to help them grab a hold of their own story and use it as they share their faith.

Practice
Practice will be akward and uncomfortable, but it is incredibly important. Students must not just learn about salvation and evangelism, but become comfortable sharing them. Start by putting students into pairs and let them role play (it’s best to demonstrate the process by having one pair get in front of the group and go through it from beginning to end so everyone can see what you’re talking about).

Give them a simple scenario–such as, “you are with a good friend and religion just happened to come up”–have them choose one person to be the unsaved friend, and tell them to use the narrative they just learned. It’s probably going to take some nudging, poking, proding and bugging to get them focused and talking, but it is worth the effort. Do whatever it takes.

After they finish the first time, have the person roleplaying the unsaved friend share feedback. Then switch roles and do it again. And again. And again. Then again next week.

Next, break up into small groups and do the same exercise. Use different scenarios–be creative. Ask the group questions, like, What did the person sharing their faith do well? How could they improve? Did they seem like it was natural or they were forcing it or reading a script? Did they ask questions and try to understand the other person, or did they just “preach”? How can they make sharing their faith more conversational and natural?

Coach
I cannot emphasize enough how important this last part is. Coach your students! Walk around and listen to the conversations that are happening. Be genuinly interested in their concerns and questions. Do not be quick to judge or correct. Instead, compliment frequently and give ideas for improvement sparingly. Help your students take baby steps towards improving.

Consistant practice and coaching works and will make a huge difference in your student’s ability to share their faith. After spending a month with my team, I’ve seen even the most shy students sharing their faith fluently and leading people to the Lord. This is not a one-time effort–it may be something you do for several weeks or once a month. But if you put in the time and energy it takes, it will begin to make a significant impact in how often and how effectively your students share their faith with their peers.

I’d love to hear your feedback as you try using this strategy with your own group.

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.

Tim Schmoyer has abandoned youth group outreach events. He lists some good reasons, too. Is it not better to equip students to evangelize one-on-one? When is the last time you saw an outreach event reach a significant number of unchurched teens? Is it different for every church/community.

Have you ever asked the question, why do my students come to youth group?

There are two answers, and they’re not always the same: The answer students give if you ask them directly (conscious or perceived motivations), or what really motivates them (true motivations).

To figure out what really attracts students to meetings, you have to watch them. What’s the first thing they do when they come in? What do they spend the most of their time doing? What do they seem to enjoy the most, and the least? Here are the five biggeset motivations that I’ve seen:

Friends
This one is obvious. The number one motivator bringing students to youth group is their friends. This is true across the board, so it’s important to provide them with opportunities to hang out before and after meetings.

Games and the high-energy excitement
A lot of youth groups use games in various ways, from sparingly to all-the-time. This can attract and keep a lot of young students engaged (6th, 7th and 8th grade primarily). The older they get, however, games have less and less pull–and can even push away juniors and seniors that don’t want to associate with “kid stuff.” Be careful to not rely on games too much!

The youth pastor and other adult leaders
Strong personal relationships with students really keeps them coming back. Younger students are quicker to just look up to the youth pastor whether they know you well or not. The older students get, the more opportunities you have to build serious relationships with them, and the more important these relationships become.

The opposite sex
Students still come to youth group to flirt. Sometimes its inappropriate, but more mature students have also developed very classy flirting techniques to impress the opposite sex without crossing any lines of indecency. Sometimes this can be healthy and fun, but it can also lead to heartbreak and hurtful disputes.

Spiritual solid food (1 Cor. 3:1-3)
Sometimes it seems like nobody is there to learn about the Lord, but a select few in every youth group–your raving fans and spiritual giants–come to youth group sincerely hungry for truth and discipleship. If you let them down by playing too many games, you may loose your greatest chance to develop student leaders. Jesus’ taught the multitudes, but He pulled His disciples aside to show them deeper truths (see Matthew 13). We must be careful to give our dedicated and mature students opportunities to go deeper–and that starts by leading them there with our own lives.

What do you think about these five motivations? Did I leave any out?