I am a meteorologist and a former youth leader at church…I have a lot to say on both subjects…and then some
Coming from a youth ministry background (almost 10 years as a volunteer in some form or another), it is easy for me to say that this post if off base. However, as I thought about it, what is the main complaint in youth ministry, or from youth pastors? Parental/adult involvement in the ministry of the youth/kids. I agree that maybe even my focus on the kids shouldn’t the be primary focus, but discipling the adults to do the youth ministry.
A first reason to focus on adults is that parents have the primary responsibility to disciple their kids. Sure, it’s rare for parents to do that. We’ll teach them to hunt, fish, cook, drive, and other things of life. But do we teach them them to pray? To read and understand the bible? To share their faith with others? To interpret their lives and encounters with the world in terms of the Kingdom of God? Usually not. At least in many UM churches, many of the adults are too spiritually introverted to feel “comfortable” doing these things. Better leave these really important things to the professionals, i.e., the Sunday School teachers and church staff.
I come from a United Methodist background, but in my experience outside of the UM, I see the same thing. Usually, the successfully run youth ministries have a lot of adult help and a lot of parental support.
Read the whole thing here.—>Bandits No More » Success in ministry.
Leave your comments below.
Cross posted on Big Ticket Festival Ministers’ Connection.
Someone directed me to the Facebook page to stop Michael Vick from getting into the NFL. I joined. Then another friend chastised me for it. I reconsidered. Deleted the post and un-joined. Then this article came out. Here’s what really got me about this article.
Who knows if Vick will get on the straight and narrow and become a powerful testimony of God’s grace, as Dungy hopes. The question for us is, do we hope so?
I guess that is the question. If we call ourselves Christians, do we extend grace to those who don’t deserve it?
Read the whole article.
Tony Dungy, Michael Vick, and the Grace of God – Real World Parents.
I usually read this stuff through XXXChurch.com, but I ran into this through another blog site. This secular view of the trends is what we have been saying has been happening. This is a secular site so I’ll give a warning for some of the language in the article.
HOW INTERNET PORN IS CHANGING TEEN SEX: DETAILS Article on men.style.com.
Youth Specialties has a web site that is meant to help parents of teenagers called Real World Parents. As a step parent of a couple of teens and a couple of young adults, I try to read up on these things. I also look into this, so that I can pass along information to other parents, since I am also a leader in our churches youth ministry. I think this article can be used by not only parents, youth leaders alike.
763 « The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus.
I found this amusing yet so true. Why do you go to church? Why do you worship God?
More and more Mary and I run into the hopeless teen, that don’t look hopeless on the outside, but are hurting on the inside. Anecdottaly, we have been seeing this as a trend, but now we have numbers.
I finally got a chance to see the new Re:Think church video that the UMC is putting out. It is great. As one blogger I read said, “I think Mr. Wesley would be proud.“
I was listening to the Net @ Night podcast with Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane (standing in for Amber MacArthur) the other night. Somehow the subject they started talking about was a portion of the Conan O’Brien show from earlier in the week. This was an interesting, because Scot McKnight, a theologian and blogger that I regularly read just got done with a series about the book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Both of these hit on the unique subject that with everything we have, people are more miserable. I see this with the youth group kids and the some people in church. Listening to the podcast Money Life with Chuck Bentley, he has been hammering the fact that we have put ourselves into debt to buy things that end up making us miserable. So we keep trying to earn money to buy our happiness, only to be unfulfilled. I won’t go into details, but there are people that I am close to that they haven’t figured that out yet. In fact, they once told me that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I think that in the coming years, that America will realize that we need to change…
I subscribe to and read a lot of ministry blogs, especially youth ministry. I found this while reading this morning. Here’s the lead in:
I agree whole heartedly, most of the pain in the church is compounded with the poor way in which discouragement is handled. Doug Ranck points out a good process to deal with it when it comes knocking at your door.
Here’s the link.
Cross posted at Big Ticket Festival Ministers’ Connection.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of blogs, and keep up with things on some of the bigger social media sites. I love to learn, especially when it comes to ministry and specifically, youth ministry.
So recently, I was listening to the Fuller Youth Institute podcast with Kara Powell. She was interviewing Leroy Barber on Sabbath Rest for urban youth workers.
During the interview, there was an interesting interchange about senior pastors expectations for youth pastors. One youth pastor talked to his senior pastor and told him that they probably wouldn’t see fruit for 5 years. His senior pastor accepted that. That seems to me, not to be the norm. While sitting in a youth worker seminar at a Youth Specialties convention, Len Evans brought out a interesting statistic (at least I think this is where I got it from the convention was in 2002) that youth pastors time expectancy at a job is, on average 3 years.
We are called by God, whether we have a degree or not, to walk slowly beside the ones we minister and realize that once the salvation has started that is a long process of healing and reorienting their life toward the path that God would have them take.
I look at this website, the Facebook group, the MySpace page, and Twitter account as a way to facilitate that process. We are all here to walk next to each other whether in paid ministry or in volunteer ministry and help each with the path that God has appointed us to and help spread the Light of His Word.
Cross posted at Big Ticket Festival Ministers Connection
