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Faith like an oak tree–not a mushroom

October 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Matt: As student ministry leaders we play an important role in helping students to develop their faith. A couple of things I’ve learned over the years are that when that faith grows at too rapid of a  pace, it’s more subject to burn out and die. By the same token, if it grows too slow then it’s easier for students not to take some important steps in their faith and continue growing, it’s easy to backslide into old ways and habits.

I look at faith as growing like a mushroom or growing like an oak tree. If it grows like a mushroom, which only takes a couple of days to grow, it will usually have a short life span, it will be really flashy for a short time and then it goes away, and usually the student goes away from your youth group and you wonder what happened. Their faith should grow like an oak tree which can literally take 200 years to grow. It grows and grows and you constantly see the growth and change in that student. Here are some things to remember:

  • Saying a complete yes to Jesus, means saying no to a lot of things, we need to help guide students in this area. We need to help them see the big picture and not focus on the immediate temporary gratification that sin brings.
  • Help your students find ways to stretch and grow their faith, such as serve projects, finding opportunities for them to reach out to their friends and invite them to church, or a fun event your church is putting on.
  • Be available to them when they are in a weak moment, let them know you’re there to turn to for help.

Steven: This idea of a flashy, fast-growing faith and a slower, more grounded faith isn’t anything new. Jesus actually talked about this exact same thing in Matthew 13:

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” (Matthew 13:3-8)

There are a lot of things we can take away from this parable, but here are some things about growing students:

  • Don’t rush it. It’s tempting to do a huge push for getting students to start a relationship with Jesus and then drop the ball. I have definitely been an offender of this rule.
  • Always follow up. This is one of the greatest things you can do to keep your students growing steadily, but it also takes the most time. If you’re committed to students’ growth, you need to check in with them consistently.
  • Build them up to go against what the world says and does. We don’t want our students’ faith to be “choked” by the thorns. Build them up to know that Christians are to be counter-cultural.

This faith-buildings is super important, but we have to get the timing right. Not too fast like a mushroom–slow, steady and secure like an oak tree.

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What do you expect of your students

September 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I found this great little gem of a post by Kyle Sullivan, Student Pastor at Community Baptist Church in Oklahoma. It sets some great guidelines to use for setting expectation levels.

You can find a tease of the article below, the rest can be found here. 

So we all have expectations. Whether they are good or bad, we have them.
I feel this is the same for student ministry and the students that each of us have coming to our ministries. And churches all over will have stage time given to talking about getting involved and what the expectation is for a member of the church, however I think we sometimes fail the students by not placing expectations on them for the ministry they attend. I feel if we neglect expectations in our students, then our ministries will suffer and we, as the student pastors, could easily get burned out.

Expectations Pushes Personal Growth

I think back to when I was in student ministry and my student pastor gave me areas of our ministry to own and take control of even before I was saved because he saw leadership qualities in me. Student pastors and leaders need to be on the lookout for those students that can grow with a little push from us as a mentor and pastor. When students start to grow, they serve more. So start them out small and see what happens. Some of your best student leaders can sometimes be the least likely because they are just needing a push in the right direction.

Expectations Excel Spiritual Maturity

We all want our students to become sold out followers of Christ. I have not ever talked to or read something from a student pastor or leader in ministry that would say anything different. So we need to give our students expectations of what we would want to see them do in the disciplines of the faith to see their faith grow. I have seen this play out in students that have stepped up to help lead a Sunday morning small group discussion because they were asked and then months later the same student is leading a Bible study on their own with their friends not from church at school. It all started with putting an expectation on them to grow spiritually.

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Summer Student Ministry: Grow Those Relationships

May 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We’ve written about keeping in contact with students over the summer because we feel that’s a time when some students fall off the radar and we lose them from our ministry. Let’s face it, just because the school year ends does not mean that problems and issues for students end. It’s also a great opportunity for some one-on-one time with students. Check out this awesome post from Andy Blanks at YouthMinistry360.com on how to take advantage of summer. We have a tease below, head on over here for the rest.

Summer. It’s a different animal for so many youth workers, isn’t it?

There are a lot of you reading this that are looking forward to Summer because it’s a break! You’ll pretty much shut down the programmed aspect of your youth ministry. Save for a Summer Camp here or a Mission Trip there, you’re looking at a few months of no youth group. (Which evokes mixed emotions, for sure.) Others of you will more or less keep programming the same during the Summer months. (But the dynamics are different. With students and leaders traveling more often, and with a more laid back schedule, you’ll watch attendance be spotty at best.) Still, there’s a third group that will land somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. You’ll have some sort of programmed activities, and you’ll definitely hit the Camp and Missions scene.

Whatever Summer looks like for you, there’s one aspect that we all have in common: Summer is the perfect time to grow relationships with individual students.

To some this will seem like an obvious statement. But to others, the first response might be to disagree. If your tendency is to see Summer as a time to “check out,” let me challenge you to see Summer as fertile ground for strengthening your relationships with students. For those of you who would say that building relationships in the Summer is actually more challenging, I would agree in one regard: it takes a different kind of effort on your part. You’ll have to be more intentional about seeking out students. But I believe it’s worth it . . .

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Follow the (New) Leader – Part 4

March 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This is the fourth post in a series that we’ve been following a rookie high school small group leader, our friend John Nelissen. This time we check in on him and find out some highlights and what kind of growth he’s experienced. In case you missed the first 3 “Follow the (New) Leader” posts, head over there to see John’s progress.

How have you seen yourself grow since the last time we talked?

I have learned so much from my Life Group Young Men. I really feel that I have become a better father and communicator to my own kids just by listening to my life group kids.

Has your attitude toward students changed since you started?

Absolutely. I have more respect for the youth that attend our Church Services. I also have more patience.

What kind of change have you noticed in your students?

They are opening up more and are more accepting of each other’s different personalities. It is really cool watching them mature and grow in the Lord.

Do you feel more comfortable and equipped to handle situations from your students since you started?

The time I have spent in Life Group so far has made it easier me to handle things in my everyday life as well as my group kids.

What has been the best memory made this year?

Our paintballing trip has been the most memorable. All the boys want to do that again. Wooooo-Hooooo.

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Taking the temperature of your small group

February 27, 2012 by 2 Comments

Matt: I think it’s important from time to time to take the temperature and pulse of your student ministry small group. You need to take some time before a group meeting and ask yourself if there are students in your group that maybe need more attention than others or a student who has a special need that the rest in the group do not have. Ask yourself who is participating each week and who is just sitting back while others do the talking. Ask them how their quiet time is going. Ask questions that can’t be answered with a yes or no. If you get a one word answer be sure and ask follow-up questions. Make sure you’re checking in with parents to see if they have any issues that are of a concern to them that you don’t know about.

Text or call your students during the week. If your students are like mine, texting is the way to go. Let them know you’re there for them, and if they reach out to you, by all means reach back! When I have a student going through a tough time I make sure that I contact him in some way every single day. If I don’t hear back from him, I keep at it until I do. One more thing that is important in checking the health of your small group…who is showing up every week and who is just hit and miss. If you have a student that is missing a lot of meetings, get to the bottom of it. I have one student who misses every other week because his eagle scout meeting is also on the same night as our small group night. The week I don’t see him I make sure and contact him and let him know what we are talking about that week so when he comes back the following week he is not lost or feels left out.

Steven: It’s one thing to have great discussions with your group, teach great lessons and form great relationships. Those things are really the heart of any great group, but they’re useless if they’re not tailored to fit your group. You can write and teach the best lesson in the world, but if your group doesn’t connect with it or aren’t in a place where they need to hear it, they’ll get nothing from it.

That’s where evaluating the spiritual direction of your group comes in.

Until you know where your group is spiritually and what they need help in, there will be no growth. Ultimately our goal as youth workers is to grow students closer to God and equip them to do so on their own. When we are able to evaluate which areas they’re weakest in, it gives us a huge advantage in meeting that goal.

One of the things I’ve used to evaluate the health of my small groups is a simple “where are you?” form. I’ll hand one out to each of my guys during a small group meeting and give them some time to fill it out. (Side note: Give them time to do it there in front of you, rather than take it home and bring it back next week. That way you’re ensured to get responses back!) It will ask basic questions like:

  • How would you describe your relationship with God? Have you been baptized?
  • What are some areas you’ve been struggling in?
  • How can we as leaders help you better?
  • What are some discussions you think we need to have as a group?

Once I get those back, I’m able to compare them and see a trend in where the group is. Sometimes they’re all over the board and we need to cater to individuals’ needs on a one-on-one basis, but other times there are definite trends that can be addressed in a group setting to draw our students closer to God and each other.

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You Can’t Feed Students If You’re Not Getting Fed

February 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

One of the amazing things I have noticed about teenagers is how perceptive they are, when they want to be. I make this point because I think as a leader of a high school small group, I can’t preach to them about doing the right thing if I’m not doing it myself, they see right through you. I don’t want to get preachy here but you can’t teach and lead students about living Godly, biblical lives if you’re not doing it yourself.  When we decided to be involved in student ministry, either as a paid worker or a volunteer, we all made a committment to live our lives as examples to students and not just go by the “do as I say, not as I do” rule.

I could give many examples of living your life in a way that’s a great example to to students but one that really comes to mind is in your own daily Bible study. Teens know when you’re faking it. We can’t tell them how important a quiet time and daily Bible study is if we are not getting fed by the Word ourselves every day. Getting in the Word keeps you connected to God, it helps you stay true to your morals and values, it helps you with problems that come up in your life and also when students come to you with a problem. 

It’s like someone who has never run a marathon deciding that tomorrow they are going to run a marathon. You might make it for the first mile or so, if your lucky, but you’re going to fall out of the race pretty fast compared to those who are committed to running. Same thing applies here. If I’m getting fed from the Bible on a regular basis, its easy for me to turn to the Bible in times of need and also to refer students there. The Bible is God’s love letter to us and for lack of a better term, it’s an “owner’s manual” for life. The more you know the Bible, the more you’re able to use it in life applications.

Question:  Are you getting in the Word on a regular basis?

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

Bible Reading vs. Bible Resources

January 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Our church (Saddleback Church) is about to embark on a series called “40 Days in the Word”. It’s a six week series that will teach ABOUT the Bible and how to read to Bible, how to love the word, learn the word and live the word.  This will be a church-wide campaign that will include our student ministries as well. Before our High School Ministry begins the six-week series I want to spend some time with my small group guys and show them how the Bible was not meant to just increase our knowledge of God, but to change our lives. I want to show them how to be a “living Bible” for their friends who are not believers.

One thing I think we as leaders tend to do is use the Bible to teach on the latest hot issue. If we want to teach a lesson on the evils of pornography, we find Bible verses that deal with that issue. We seem to have gotten away from just taking a chapter or book in the Bible and unpacking what it means to us. I love that when a student is going through a tough time or dealing with a particular issue I can use the Bible to point him to specific scripture that will help him with what he is going through at the moment. But I also want students to know how to use the Bible for a daily quiet time and how to read through books in the Bible and unpack what the scripture is saying. I want them to know that the Bible is not one book, but 66 books wrapped up in one.

I’d love to hear how your favorite ways of teaching Bible reading techniques to your students. You can comment here.

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Unpacking Scripture

December 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

One of the phrases I use with my high school small group guys is “unpacking scripture”. It dawned on me this week that most of them probably didn’t know what that term means. Tonight we had decided to do a Bible study on Romans chapter 8. I used this as an example for “unpacking scripture”, to show them what God is telling us in the verses in the Bible. We only “unpacked” verses 1-16 and we spend an hour and a half discussing what they mean. We spent half an hour alone on Romans 8:1, “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus”.  – NLT

We talked about what condemnation meant, how God wants to change us, not punish us. It was an awesome experience for me to show them how to do it, and then just sit back and watch them do it on their own. I’m guessing for most of them they won’t look at Romans chapter 8 in the same way again.

The hard part for me was not doing all the talking. Once they got the hang of “unpacking scripture”, I just sat back and let them run with it. Most of the time being a good leader means you lead and then sit back and let your students run with the ball. If you’re doing more than 50% of the talking then your students are not participating enough and probably aren’t getting as much out of a lesson as they could if they were doing more of the talking. I have a few guys who can be quiet at times; I wait for the right opportunity to call on them for an answer to something without making them feel like I’m putting them on the spot. I recommend you try a lesson on “unpacking scripture” with your student small group. Once students know how to unpack scripture, it makes Bible reading and quiet times a lot more productive.

 

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What Does Being a Man (or Woman) of God Mean to You?

December 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

One of my high school small group students is turning 18 this week and I received an invitation from his family to come over for breakfast on the morning of his birthday. The invite said, that they have picked guys in my student’s life who they feel are a “man of God” and wanted us to come and celebrate his birthday but also be prepared to talk for a few minutes about what being a man of God means to me. I think this is an amazing idea, and I felt honored to be included with the others who were invited.

This is what I’m going to talk about. To me being a man of God means:

  • You say what you mean and mean what you say. You can’t just talk about God and your walk with Him and not live your life as an example.
  • Your word means everything. This is something I learned from my Dad. My Dad was from the generation where he could borrow money from a bank based on his word and a handshake. I want that same reputation.
  • You don’t just love God, you serve him. You’re actively involved in a ministry
  • Others first and then yourself. My mother used to say this to us all the time when I was a kid. It wasn’t until I became a Christian that I truly realized what this phrase meant.
  • Prayer. Yep, I admit that I can’t even begin to do this alone, and I go to God throughout the day in prayer asking for His help.
  • I realize that I make mistakes, but I don’t let them get me down.  I pick myself up, dust myself off, ask for forgiveness and move on.
  • Don’t take yourself too seriously. Laugh at yourself and realize that God has a sense of humor.

As I was writing this it dawned on me that these are the same traits that also make a good student ministry leader. I think we get into student ministry to serve and help students and at the same time, without us even being aware of it, God grows us along the way.

What does being a man (or woman) of God mean to you?

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Retro Friday // The Bottom Line

November 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

This is a post we did for volunteeryouthministry.com last year. This post marked our sixth month anniversary writing blogs and we took a minute to sum up what we had written about in the past. I remember thinking at the time that this was getting to the end of what we had to write about. I had no idea the plans God had for us and for our own website! Thanks again to Dennis Beckner for giving us our start! The original blog can be found here.

Phil. 4:13 – I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.

This week marks the six month anniversary that we have been writing this blog. The time passed quickly to be honest, but when I look back there has been a lot we have learned in these past six months. We’d like to share a few of those lessons with you.

1. Student ministry takes three things: a heart for students, a willingness to be an example and a lot of prayer! There were times when I thought we would run out of things to write about, but I don’t think that is ever going to happen. God continues to place us in situations where we are learning and growing and we pass those on to you.

2. Pain is real. We both have had to deal with some messy situations with some of our students this year. Their pain is our pain, and it kills me when I think of some of the stuff that my small group guys have gone through. But I keep Phil. 4:13 in mind, and use it when I talk with students. I try to point out the lessons that God teaches us with each pain and trouble that we go through.

3. We grow as our students grow. I think I have grown more spiritually in the past year than I have at any time in my life. We learn as we teach, we grow closer to God as we show our students how awesome their life can be when they grow closer to God. When we love on our students, we realize how much God loves us.

4. We get blessed just as much if not more than our students. I call this the “dirty little secret” in student ministry. All of us choose student ministry because we have a heart for students and we want to help them, we want them to have a blessed life, and we want them to grow closer to God and find salvation in their lives. Truth is, God blesses us as we do that.

5. Keep growing, keep learning. Leaders are learners, when you stop learning you stop leading. I want to be able to answer the tough questions for my students. Learning more about the Bible and about God draws me closer to Him. My quiet time each day is vital to having a close relationship with God. There have been times when I have read a bible passage and that very day a student would come to me with a problem that would relate to scripture I just read. I call those times, “a total God thing”. God knew the situation I was going to be in, and he gave me the ammo to fight the battle before I even got on the battlefield.

6. When things get tough, you’re doing something right. The enemy loves to kick us down a peg when we start doing good things for God. If you experience spiritual warfare, you know you’re either getting close to a breakthrough, or the enemy doesn’t like where you’re going. The hardest, most discouraging times in youth ministry are times when I know I’m doing great things.

7. Our time isn’t our time. Even with all the time we put into this game we call “youth ministry,” we have to remember that we’re not living on our time. Just like everything else, God has given us the time we have and we need to keep in mind that things will happen on His schedule. We might want something really badly, but if it’s not the right time, it’s not going to happen.

Here’s the bottom line in student ministry...how many students will be in heaven one day because you took the time to volunteer your time and pass on what you have learned from generation to generation?

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