The Power of a Job Description

by Jacob Fasig If you recruit volunteers to just show up, then you can’t be mad when everyone leaves the church when the event is over, leaving you to clean and tidy up after the tornado of activity that just flew through the building. The mind-blowing notion: if volunteers have no idea what they are […]

Expect-ations

by Jacob Fasig One of the most important core values in youth ministry is about expectations. In fact the youth ministry in which you serve will only be as deep, as committed, and as faithful as your expectations. If your expectations are only that people show up, that’s as far as they will go. If […]

Guidance: Spiritual Disciplines for Youthworkers

Editor’s Note: This is the tenth in a 12-part series on spiritual disciplines for youth workers, based on Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. by Kelly Soifer Whenever I am interviewing potential volunteers for youth ministry, I tell them a story from my early years as a way to illustrate how their decision-making processes affect their […]

Theological Blueprints for Youth Ministry Remodeling

Making change in youth ministry is easy, but making effective change that’s theologically grounded and practically effective is difficult. In the course Advanced Studies in Youth, Church and Culture, the Center for Youth Ministry Training’s (CYMT) graduate residents use cultural analysis and theological reflection to imagine revisions and changes to their youth ministries. As they […]

Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 1

by Andrew Zirschky Editor’s Note: Read Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 2 and  Part 3 here. It should be no surprise that many youth workers believe that social media hold the key to better connections and more effective ministry with young people. After all, the average American teenager owns 3.5 digital […]

Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 2

by Andrew Zirschky Editor’s Note: Read Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 1 and  Part 3 here. Teenagers don’t want technology, they want what technology promises:  Meaningful access to real people and relationships. This was our conclusion in Part 1 of this series as we surveyed the findings of recent ethnographic research […]

Strong: A Youth Minister’s Guide to Leading from Your Strengths

by Stephen Ingram Most youth ministers struggle for a number of reasons. We struggle because we are over committed, we work unorthodox hours, and we have difficulty finding consistent rhythm. We struggle because of lack of training, lack of time, and lack of support. We struggle because we care too much and often feel that […]

Confession: Spiritual Disciplines for Youthworkers

Editor’s Note: This is the eleventh in a 12-part series on spiritual disciplines for youth workers, based on Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. by Kelly Soifer I came to Christ at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school. That first year of faith was a whirlwind…I was blown away by the New Testament […]

Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 3

by Andrew Zirschky Editor’s Note: Read Teens and Social Technology: Searching for Intimacy – Part 1 and  Part 2 here. In a faceless face-to-face world, young people are turning to technology to search for relationships that are meaningful and intimate. This was among our conclusions from part 1 of our look at teens and social […]

Becoming Christian-ish: Research in a Nutshell

“We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that it is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition… It is not so much that U.S. Christianity is being secularized. Rather, more subtly, Christianity is either degenerating […]

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