7 Principles for Young Adult Ministry

Some churches do very well at integrating young adults into the life of their church through the main services and gatherings. Other churches don’t. They may do better at providing a separate gathering for young adults. Others may choose to take more of a campus based approach, while others take a more decentralized approach, spreading […]

Building a Young Adult Ministry 2 – A Church within a Church

Two and a half years ago we shifted our young adult ministry strategy to one more like church planting, a “church within a church.” After using a more “integrative approach” for 8 years, I realized that we just weren’t reaching our potential. I did a little local research and found that there are over 5000 young adults […]

Building a Young Adult Ministry 1 – The Integrative Approach

For the the first 8 years of my ministry as the youth and young adults pastor in our congregation of about 1400 total active people, we focused primarily on congregational integration by getting college students to our Sunday worship services. They enjoyed our contemporary worship, the preaching […]

Building a Kids Ministry Team 4 – Recruiting

Building a great team is vital to building a great ministry with kids. This post is part of a series of posts exploring tangible ways to build a great children’s ministry team. The last three posts were about key roles you’ll need on your team, the various teams you’ll need in your ministry, and the ratios by which you can determine how many leaders you need. […]

Building a Kids Ministry Team 3 – Ratios

Building a great team is vital to building a great ministry with kids. This post is part of a series of posts exploring tangible ways to build a great children’s ministry team. The last two posts were about key roles you’ll need on your team and various teams you’ll need in your ministry. This post is about determining how many people you really need in those roles. […]

Building a Kids Ministry Team 2 – Teams

Building a great team is vital to building a great ministry with kids. This post is part of a series of posts exploring tangible ways to build a great children’s ministry team. The last post was about key roles you’ll need on your team. This post is about additional teams that are helpful to have within your larger ministry. Some teams are vital to your ministry with kids. […]

Building a Kids Ministry Team 1 – Key Roles

Building a great team is vital to building a great ministry with kids. Over these next few posts  you’ll explore tangible ways to change the way you think about recruiting and building a great children’s ministry team. Our model is primarily large group – small group. So the key roles we need are below. If you’re in a small church, you’ll be combining these roles. […]

The Do’s and Don’ts of NextGen Ministry

I was a youth pastor for 20 years before our church adopted a NextGen model and I became the NextGen Pastor. The transition has been challenging but totally worth it! Here, I’d like to dive in a little deeper and get more specific about some do’s and don’ts that I’ve learned in my own journey into NextGen Ministry.

The NextGen or Family Pastor

A NextGen Pastor (or Pastor/Director of Next Generation Ministries) is also sometimes referred to as a Family Pastor (or Pastor/Director of Family Ministries). Most NextGen Pastors oversee multiple staff and multiple age groups, some of which can include college and young adults. A Family Pastor […]

When Teens Are Gay

© pekkic at Fotofolia.com    We have teens and young adults in our church who are gay, bisexual, and transgender. At one point not tooRead More

Defining the Wins

It can be really hard to tell if you’re #winning as a small group leader. Showing up week after week to lead sometimes seemingly meaningless discussions onlyRead More

The NextGen Way

  NextGen and Family ministry models are a rising trend in the world of ministry to children, youth, and families. We’ve recently made this shift ourselves. Previously,Read More

When a Kid is Suicidal

If you’re in youth ministry, you will inevitably encounter a teen who is at least somewhat suicidal. It’s a scary thing that must be taken seriously.Read More

The #1 Pastoral Skill

The #1 skill that a pastor should master is RECRUITING.* You might say that the #1 skill that a pastor (or any other ministry leader) should master is preaching. A pastorRead More

Mission Trips

The Problem: How I Did Missions Then For years, I took students on annual mission trips. Some were domestic (in the U.S.) and some were internationalRead More

Automating with Ableton

With Ableton Live and your Mac’s built in Audio Midi Setup you can automate your projection with Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter the lyrics you project on the screen, the videos you trigger, and lighting …

Let it Grow

I can’t help it…I’m humming the now famous song “Let it Go” performed by Idina Mensel, the voice of Elsa in Disney’s Frozen. We’ve seenRead More

Sticky Faith: 4+1

Another thing we’re trying to develop is a better approach to helping our seniors transition to college. We now ask all our 12th grade smallRead More

Focusing our Meetings

The more recent conversation in our Student Life Leadership Team has been about defining our roles (last post) and focusing our meetings (this post). NowRead More

Infrastructure

I’ve heard it said that a ministry without infrastructure is like a body without a skeleton…it’s just a 6 inch puddle of skin, fat andRead More

Pastoral Whiplash

Plan for my youth sermon. Then trouble shoot the sound system. Then meet with a volunteer to recruit them to be a team leader. ThenRead More

Sharing the Gospel

I try to share the gospel as often as I can. Sometimes it’s with individual students. Sometimes it’s on a special bring-a-friend-to-hear-the-gospel night. Sometimes it’sRead More

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