You are here: Home / Archives for change

Helping the next leader succeed

July 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

One week from today is the last small group meeting I have with my current group. The group of 8th graders I met 2 short years ago have grown tremendously (both in height and in their walks with the Lord), and it is going to be really sad to see them go. As sad as that will be, it’s also a really exciting time for them. They will be moving into a brand new season of their lives, and I can’t wait to hear the stories from them and their new leaders.

Part of this new season is making sure their new leaders are set up for as much success as possible. We’re doing two things to make this happen.

The first thing we’re doing is meeting with them ahead of time to give them a rundown of our guys. We won’t be talking about our guys’ deepest, darkest secrets, but we want to let their new leaders know how to connect with them best. Each of our students have a different way of communicating best, and it will give their high school leaders a huge advantage to know what that looks like ahead of time.

The other thing is that we’re going to introduce the guys to their new leaders at our last meeting. This will be a kind of “passing the torch” in a way–giving the new leaders our blessing and letting the boys know who they are. Already this should create the beginning of a connection.

Since we’ve invested so much time into our students, we want to do everything we can to set up their next leaders for success. These small steps will make a huge difference.

Question: How do you set up your leaders for a successful transition?

Filed Under: Small Groups, Youth Ministry Tagged With: , , , ,

Getting ourselves ready for new students

June 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Steven: Something we’ve been talking about lately is the subject of change. Both Matt and I have a lot of change happening in our lives right now, one of those changes being our junior high and high school small groups. This year, Matt will be getting a brand new group of 9th graders (most of them I had as junior highers), and I will be getting a group of 7th graders. Both of these groups are new to our ministries, and there are a few things we can do to prepare for them. Here’s what I’ve been doing and will be doing in the next few weeks:

  • Pray for God to place the right students in my group. I know that the group I have now must have been handpicked by God because of how they’ve related to my co-leader and me, so I want to do everything I can to let God work.
  • Think through some of what we want to teach them. 7th graders usually come in to our ministry having a lot of Bible knowledge, but not much in the practical side of things. Our junior high ministry supplies curriculum, but I always want to be thinking about how to serve my students best as well.
  • Prepare myself spiritually. I know it’s old school, but I love the illustration of a glass that fills up with water. If I dig into God’s Word and spend a ton of time this summer preparing myself spiritually, I know that my cup will overflow into the students I’ll be getting in the fall.

Matt: Next year I have a group of incoming freshmen guys. Freshmen! Yikes! What a difference from the group of high school seniors I currently have. I’ve joked about getting a group of freshmen but actually I’m pretty excited about it for a few reasons.

First I know the junior high leaders that most of them had, and they had two really Godly men who set excellent examples for them. Second, I think freshman year is such an important year in teens–especially guys. It’s when they really start to take on the who they are going to be and I’m excited to be a part of that.

I’ve already started praying for them and for the group. I don’t really know any of them but I do know that God picked these guys for my group and I want to do all I can to help them on their spiritual journey. I’m also excited to see the spiritual growth in each of them. I have some lesson plans in mind and I’m excited about where God is going to lead this new group.

It also dawned on me that as I’m getting these new students, in their minds they are getting a new leader. I want to do all that I can to be an excellent example to them as well as leading and teaching them.

Filed Under: Small Groups, Spriritual Life, Youth Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Dealing with change in our lives

June 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I don’t think I know anyone who likes change in their lives. Even positive change means that there is something new and we always seem to have a fear of the unknown. I know for me change means a very negative thing. Most of the change that occurred in my life was the result of something bad that happened so when I realize that change is on the horizon I go through a whole range of emotions. For students, change can be a very scary thing indeed.

How do you deal with change? Here’s what I do when I start feeling the fear of change, this would be great to share with students to help them go through a time of change:

  • Pray and pray a lot. Ask God to guide you through the entire process. When I start getting scared and worried I just stop and remember that I’m not alone, God is right here with me.
  • My personality is such that I need to process things. This might take me a couple of days. During this time however I have to be careful that I weigh out all the issues, both positive and negative and not just the negative, which is easy to do. I’m also a “list-maker”, I’ll sit down and list out everything I’m processing and try to figure out how to deal with the negative and accentuate the positive. It’s not always easy but it helps to write it all down.
  • Talk to someone! We all need to have someone we can talk frankly with about our fears. Sometimes we just need someone to help point out positive things to change that we might not see on our own. I also ask that person to pray for me as well.
  • Remember that sometimes God will close one door to open a greater door for us. It’s hard to realize it when we are dealing with the fear of change but we need to remember that God knows what is best for us.
  • Think outside the box. Change means something is going to be different; this is a time to think about how things will be because of the change and how to make it better, not a time to remember the past, get stuck there and not move on.
  • Change often equals growth and growth is good. God looks for ways to stretch and grow our faith and often that is done during times of change in our lives.

I’d love to hear your ways to dealing with change. You can comment here.

Filed Under: Encouragement, Spriritual Life Tagged With: , , , ,

Small Group Overnighter

November 22, 2011 by 1 Comment

Last weekend our High School Ministry at Saddleback Church hosted a “Small Group Overnighter”. The event was held at a hotel near Disneyland. After a short program with all the groups in attendance, and a prayer to send us off into the night, the groups were free to just hang out, go eat and spend some quality time together. It was a great opportunity and a chance to bond your student small group closer to each other. 

One of the things my guys had asked was if we could do a really deep Bible study session that night. Okay, I thought. If you want a really deep Bible study session, you’ll get one. I have a huge advantage in that Steven has been adopted by my group and was going with us that night and since he is a Biblical and Theological Studies major at Biola University, I took full advantage of that and asked him to help me put together a lesson for the night. We chose the topic, “What it means to be a disciple”.

Steven’s lesson was off the charts and the participation that night was amazing, the guys in my group are at a very deep spiritual level, and the participation level that night was incredible. And as pleased as I was that night, and made sure to take time to thank God that night for this small group, the big payoff for me came the next day when I got the following text from one of the guys:

            “Hey, so I’m pretty sure I came out of that retreat last night a different person.”

It was a reminder to me of a few things:

  • This is God’s group, and he is working and growing this group in ways I still can’t comprehend.
  • If you open yourself up, God will use you as a leader.
  • There are students in your group that you can reach, but you might need to find other ways to get to them. Once you do, it’s a life changing event.
  • Teaching about God’s love, grace, forgiveness and salvation is the most important thing we can pass on to the next generation.
  • Find the leaders in your student small group and work on developing them.
  • Pray. Pray. Pray. Pray for your group by name, for each thing you know is going on in their life. This student who sent me that text has asked me before to pray for God to help him “come out of his shell”. It happened at this overnighter and God has helped change him. I can’t wait to see where this student goes from here.

 

 

Filed Under: Small Groups, Spriritual Life Tagged With: , , , , ,

Summer Camp!

June 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 

It’s that time of year again…time for summer camp! Okay, well in a month it will be but I’m already excited. Last year Sadddleback Church’s high school ministry camp was amazing. My group had some pretty significant breakthroughs, and all of them came back with a closer relationship to God. I came home physically and mentally exhausted but it was probably one of the best weeks of my life.

Camp is a month away so I’ve already begun doing some things.  First off, I’m praying a lot about camp. Praying that students who might not have accepted Christ into their lives will make the decision at camp to do so. I’m praying that those who have not been baptized  will make the decision to take the plunge, literally. I’m praying that those students who are coming to camp with a lot on their mind, and some hurts, habits and hang ups will find a week of fun and a time to talk about their problems and start the healing process.  I’m praying that God will use me at camp this year in ways that I can’t even imagine yet. I’m also talking to students who haven’t decided yet about going to camp and encouraging them to go.

Last year when I got home from camp I remember sitting down in my living room and reflecting on the past week. I was amazed at how God had worked in so many students and felt fortunate that I was able to be a part of that. And then it dawned on me, God had changed me in that week too! He made me appreciate the conversations I had with students that I didn’t know that well, but they knew me. God also placed some hurting students in front of me and I was able to talk with and pray with a lot of students. I don’t care how big your church is, they don’t have enough staff to effectively deal with all the students at camp, volunteers are a huge asset to any student ministry.

If you’re a student ministry volunteer but you haven’t yet volunteered to be a camp leader, I have some advice.  DO IT! God will use you to make a difference in a student’s life if you do. Whatever church you volunteer for is probably having trouble finding enough volunteers SO GO FOR IT!

Filed Under: Encouragement, Spriritual Life, Summer Camp, Youth Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Change Through Discomfort

April 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Matt: I admit it; I am a creature of habit. I like things to stay the same. As Steven says, “Matt is not the biggest proponent of change”. I also know that as a Student Ministry Leader, discomfort is one of the ways that God will stretch and grow me in many areas. I need to look at discomfort as a tool to make me a better leader, not as something to shy away from.

Sometimes in student ministry things can get just plain messy. I have 17 guys in my high school small group. It seems like at any given time at least one of them is going through some kind of issue in his life. Some are small problems, but some have been some pretty major issues. I do my best to explain how God will never waste a hurt, and how he uses situations to help grow you. I explain how during bad times we have two choices.  We can worry or we can worship.

Discomfort grows me as a leader. It helps me to remember that I don’t have the answers to everything, but I know someone who does. Discomfort makes me want to turn to God for help, to realize that I can’t do this by myself. I need to count on God and the people he has placed in my life. One area I always need work on is timing. I want to fix my students problems, but I forget that its God’s timetable not mine, I’m just the instrument that God is using, but the timing is all up to Him.

Discomfort strengthens my faith. I need to recognize that often times the discomfort in my life is spiritual warfare going on. Satan HATES when we start bringing more and more students to Christ. The more effective we get, the more Satan turns up the heat. That’s when I rely on my faith to get me through hard times. I think of the apostle Paul, in prison, but yet teaching about Christ, and relying on Him for strength.

Discomfort makes me grow. It makes me get out of my spiritual rut. It makes me seek out God even more, it forces me to go deeper in His word in my Bible reading and my quiet times with God. My mother use to say that God made rainy days to help us appreciate the sunny days. For the most part, my life is filled with sunny days, but I forget to be thankful for all that I have in my life; instead I dwell on what’s going wrong. The rainy days in life help me appreciate all the sunny days that God has given me. I want to pass that on to my students.

Steven: I like to take my students out for dinner every week. It’s a great time for me and my co-leader to connect with students one on one, and often times they seem to be completely different people when we get them away from the rest of the group. I think this is when the best ministry happens. Last week we took a guy out who tends to be one of our more…vocal…students. In our thinking, he tends to get louder and more disruptive whenever we’re talking about something serious or a struggle that someone has in their life, so maybe he’s just trying to avoid talking about things like that. When we took him out to dinner we got on the topic of struggles and we told him that this time was a perfect opportunity for him to speak freely without the other 12 guys in the group hearing what he had to say. At first he was very reluctant to go deep and he stuck to the shallow “struggles,” but we tried something that he probably isn’t used to – being uncomfortable.

By not allowing him to escape the conversation through jokes or changing the subject, we forced him to look deeper into his own mind and feelings and really think about the things that were bothering him. He knows these things deep down, but I’ve found that when someone is struggling with something very serious, they bury it so deep that it takes a while to dig back out. In this kid’s case, it was a very emotional family issue that he has been struggling with for years, so it took a while for us to get it out of him. If we had just let it slide and allowed him to change the subject, I know we wouldn’t have gotten down to the root of the issue, but because we got him to step out of his comfort zone, it got real.

When I look back on my own life, I realize that the best moments for my spiritual growth happened when I allowed that discomfort to set in. When I rededicated my life to Christ and I chose to live a different way, it made me uncomfortable at first. Why would I want to change my life when I’m so comfortable with it right now? When I chose to start volunteering with junior high ministry, I was uncomfortable. One of my best friends had to talk me into doing it, but I was still apprehensive about spending all this time with junior highers that, quite frankly, drove me crazy. Looking back, I’m so glad that my friend made me uncomfortable in that time because it changed my life. The bottom line is this: We love the comfortability of the status quo, but if you want to see real change, there has to be some discomfort.

Are you allowing discomfort to change you, or do you shy away from it?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,