Archives For Practical stuff

Presenting my first book: Beyond Small Talk

November 12, 2012 — 18 Comments

Beyond Small Talk - DownloadI am very proud and honored to announce the publication of my very first book: Beyond Small Talk: Connecting with Teenagers through Conversations that Matter. It’s published by Simply Youth Ministry, in the Everyday Youth Ministry series.

We talk a lot with teens as youth workers and youth leaders, but it’s not always easy to have conversations that go beyond small talk. But if we want to make a difference in the lives of our students, it’s imperative that we do get teenagers to talk to us, to open up to us. In this book I share my ‘secrets’ for getting students to talk to you. There’s loads of practical advice on listening, building trust, asking the right questions, responding the right way and also on what not to say.

The book is available in both physical and digital format and costs respectively $8.99 and $7.99.

My hope and prayer is that this book will help you and your team to move beyond small talk in your conversations with students and that you will succeed in getting teenagers to truly open up to you. I’d love to hear what you think of Beyond Small Talk!

In Book reviews, Practical stuff , ,
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Guest post: Are your students ‘doers’ or just ‘hearers’?

October 24, 2012 — 2 Comments

One of the most effective ways to make sure your students are grasping your point, is to have them apply the information you are teaching through community service.  Not only is this biblical, but it will address the different learning styles of your students -  more will understand your message through doing rather than hearing only.

Many of us learned James 1:22 in the King James Version:

“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” 

If you want to increase the chance your students will master the material you are presenting, help them apply the lesson to their lives.  God will bless the work of your students when they take action and obey his command to serve others.  Look for ministries – in your community or around the world – that will allow you to give your students the opportunity to apply your lessons and to obey God’s command to serve others.

Serving abroad is also a great way to become a doer of the Word and not just a hearer…

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In Discipleship, Practical stuff
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Guest post: It’s Time to Take ‘School’ Out of Sunday School

October 17, 2012 — 2 Comments

Teenagers aren’t usually thrilled about school. I know, it’s not exactly breaking news. But then why do so many ministries make themselves feel a little too much like a school? What’s the cost of that?

You don’t want students to associate your ministry with something they don’t like, so it’s time to lose the scholastic vernacular.

Researchers have proven what we already know, that the vocabulary we use can significantly alter a person’s perception of their experience. You wouldn’t refer to your program as an hour of “boring but ultimately beneficial worship.” You also wouldn’t say that following God is good for you, “just like steamed broccoli!” But unfortunately, those same kinds of negative associations attach themselves to a bunch of scholastic terms that we throw around in youth ministry, usually without even thinking about it.

You don’t want your students to associate youth ministry with something they don’t like, so stop using school words.

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In Leadership, Practical stuff
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5 things not to post on social media as a Christian leader

October 4, 2012 — 11 Comments

I love social media. I’m a big Twitter fan and an avid Facebook user and through those, I’m connected with many youth leaders and church leaders from around the world. And sometimes I see updates that trouble me, that make me wonder or that make me sad.

People don’t always realize that others actually read what they post on social media. That means that you have to be careful what you post, because you could end up hurting yourself, your reputation or even others. Here are 5 things you should not post on social media:

1. Cryptic negative updates

“Had a tough meeting tonight, don’t understand why people would say things like that.”

“Another conflict. You’d think people would behave differently in a church.”

“I’ve really had it with this. Another one of these and I quit.”

I see updates like this regularly. Now I understand the need to say something about difficult things that happen in your life. It’s a way of sharing what’s going on in your life. But what do others think when they read this? And more to the point: what would people think who were actually in this meeting you tweeted about? How much do you want to bet that every single one is going to wonder if he or she said something wrong?

Writing cryptic updates like this only raises questions, for people involved and for random followers and friends who read this. If you want to share, reach out to good friends and share your troubles with them. If you want to ask people to pray for you, keep it more neutral and don’t mention specific situations. Just write “Please pray for wisdom and patience for me” or something like that.

As Christian leaders, we should be careful in what we post on social media because we could end up hurting out reputation or others. (photo: Kexino)

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In Leadership, Practical stuff ,
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The single most effective way of inviting students for events

September 26, 2012 — 5 Comments

With all the buzz on how important social media are in communicating with students and everyone telling you to text reminders for events, it’s easy to overlook the single most effective ways of inviting students: personally. No social media campaign, no text messaging, no flyer, reminder or announcement can ever trump a personal invitation.

Every Sunday after church, my husband and I would look for our small group members and invite them for whatever was happening that day or that week. It would go like this:

We have small group tonight, are you coming?

There’s a youth service tonight, we’ll go together, are you coming with us?

We’ll have dinner at our place Friday, you’re coming too aren’t you?

Did you hear they’re doing a girls evening on sex this week, I’ll be there, are you coming with me?

The single most effective way to invite students to an event, like a youth service, is by doing it personally.

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In Practical stuff, Small groups ,
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What’s in a name?

September 25, 2012 — 3 Comments

Names matter. From the Bible we know that a lot of names have special meanings or prophetic consequences. That may not be the case for the students in our youth group (though I certainly believe in the power of either positive or negative nick names!), but their names matter nonetheless. It does something to you when people know your name.

When we lived in the US a while back, we attended a community church for the first time. When we walked in, we were immediately spotted by one of the ushers, a wonderful vibrant woman named Lucy. She talked to us for a bit, was delighted that we were from Europe and explained a little bit about the church. And she asked for our names.

The second time we were there, Lucy saw us come in. From across the room she greeted us with an enthusiastic “Hi Roger, hi Rachel, so glad to see you!” She had remembered our names. It was a small thing, but it meant a lot to us and it was one of the things that made us come back and ultimately commit to that church.

Names matter. When we call someone by their name, it communicates a lot of things. It says I know who you are. It says you are important enough to me to remember your name. It says I see you, I know you are here. It says I remember you, you’ve been here before and I noticed.

As youth leaders we should do everything we can to remember the names of our students. For some of us, that will be more of a challenge than for others, I know that. I can’t complain: I’ve got a really good, almost photographic memory and I’m good with names. But I have to make an effort to remember new names as well. I know there are people who simply state they’re really bad with names and use that as a reason for not even trying anymore. That’s just lazy. You may not have a natural knack for remembering names, but you can sure try , right?

If you have a bigger youth group, remembering all the names can take some effort. But names matter and you should really try.

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In Pastoral care, Personal growth, Practical stuff ,
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Help your students develop friendships

June 27, 2012 — Leave a comment

Last week, Adam McLane shared a very personal and touching post about his senior year of high school and how much it meant to him to have a sanctuary, a safe place. It made me think about my own not too easy high school years and what helped me not only survive, but in a way thrive: my friends.

Adam impressed on youth workers the importance of helping your students find a sanctuary. I’d add my two cents: help them find friends, help them develop deep friendships.

I had the best friends ever in high school. They were the nerds, the dorks, the outcasts. They were too fat, too thin, too smart, too Christian or too much of something else that didn’t make them fit in with the popular kids. So we found each other and we became friends.

My friends were the one reason I got through high school relatively unscarred. I was bullied for being too fat and for being an outspoken Christian and just for being me I guess. Things at home weren’t exactly peachy either with my dad being unemployed and my sister giving a whole new definition to puberty rebellion.

But these friends, they were there for me. We didn’t even talk all that much about stuff. To be honest I was happy most of the time to not talk about it and escape it all for a while. They were just there and we had fun, hung out. One of the guys introduced me to Star Wars and just for that, I’ll be forever grateful :)

Especially in this social networking day and age, developing ‘real’ friendships isn’t a natural skill anymore. It’s also not something a lot of parents give practical advice on, they often don’t make it beyond ‘you just have to make an effort to make new friends’. So you need to help your students develop good friendships.

Friendships are important for students, not just to get through school, but also to get through life. That’s why they need our help in developing good friendships.

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In Pastoral care, Practical stuff , , ,
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Using resources for youth ministry? Ask these 3 questions first

June 8, 2012 — 1 Comment

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every single time you need an idea for a game, a topic for a youth sermon, a creative small group study etc. You can find many resources with a simple click of your mouse because there’s tons of good stuff on the Internet. Just see what Pinterest has done for accumulating great ideas to use in youth ministry! You probably also have a lot of resources from your own youth ministry or a previous youth ministry you could recycle.

But recycling your own resources or those of others should be done with careful consideration. What works in someone else’s youth ministry and circumstances may not work in yours. Also, there are lots of ideas floating around the cyberspace that are just plain dumb, despite them maybe being popular. So before you use or recycle any resources, ask yourself these three questions to see if you should use them in your youth ministry:

Is it really a good idea?

Some games may look spectacular, but are an almost guarantee for someone getting hurt. Or they result in awkward boys-girls encounters. Or they are ethically wrong (personally, I really have a problem with wasting food in games for instance when I know people in my town are going to bed hungry).And it’s not just games, there’s lots of plain dumb stuff out there for youth ministry in general.

Before using an idea, take a few minutes too look at it from different sides to see if there are no hidden dangers, risks, etc. When in doubt, ask someone else for their opinion. This is one of those famous cases where two pair of eyes see more than one!

Before using any resources for your youth ministry or even recycle your own ideas, ask yourself if you should really use it.

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In Leadership, Practical stuff ,
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Using films in youth ministry (#yws12 part 1)

May 22, 2012 — 5 Comments

[This is the start of a blog series in which I try to dig deeper on some of the topics that came up in the Youth Work Summit, an awesome and inspiring British conference for Christian youth workers I visited last weekend]

Young people watch films, whether we approve of them or not and these films show something of the world we live in. They tell the modern equivalent of a story and as we all know, stories rule in this postmodern world. In youth ministry, we’ve often used specific scenes and clips from movies to communicate a certain theological truth. But that’s (I quote) ‘insufficient and dishonest’ and besides, doesn’t mean showing a clip that we endorse the whole movie? Instead of cherry picking certain scenes, we should engage with films as a whole and discuss the good, the bad and the ugly in them. Because when we look close enough, movies are a thin place where we can encounter the divine in sometimes unexpected ways.

This is, in a nutshell, the message that Steven Mitchell and Mark Williamson gave in their talk on Kingdom Films at the Youth Work Summit. They’ve set up an entire website called Reel Faith on the topic of finding faith in films. In their talk, they also showed how the Kingdom shows up in five unexpected movies: The Muppets, Breaking Dawn, Thor, Bridesmaids and Saw 3D: The final chapter. You can find the transcript of their talk here.

The Muppets was one of the five films in which Steven Mitchell and Mark Williamson saw Kingdom themes being explored.

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In Practical stuff, Small groups ,
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How to create support for your ideas and plans

May 14, 2012 — Leave a comment

You can have the best ideas ever and create strategic plans for your youth ministry ‘till you’re blue in the face, but unless others will support you, you’ll never get anywhere. It’s very important to have vision, but it’s equally important to have people support your vision. So how do you do that? How do you create support for your ideas and plans? It’s all about the three R’s:

Research

Reputation

Relations

Research your plans

The first thing that’s important is that your plans for your youth ministry are well researched and well developed. You need to know what you’re talking about and be able to back it up with numbers, statistics and facts. Many plans are grand in scope, but very sketchy on the details and no one will support those. People need to see your vision is  grounded in reality.

If you have a plan for instance to reach unchurched youth by opening a youth café, support it with a realistic budget, solid prognoses for attendees, requirements for the room/building needed, etc. The more detailed your plan, the easier people will support you.

How do you get people to support your ideas and plans and basically cheer you on? It's all about the three R's: research, reputation and relations.

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In Leadership, Practical stuff , , , ,
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