Carrying on with our (unintentional) theme of communication this week, I’ve been thinking recently about something that has happened in my junior high small group.

We have 9 guys in our group that are going to be ready at the end of the school year to move on into high school. We know that most (if not all) of them will stay together into a high school small group. Until last week, we hadn’t really empowered our students to rely on each other for stuff that they deal with on a daily basis. They come to us with stuff, which is great, but if we let them move on and they aren’t communicating with each other, things will fall apart. They need to build a level of accountability and trust with their small group brothers.

To encourage this, last week I got them thinking about unity. I explained that God calls us over and over again in the Bible to be unified. There is some unity in our group as it is now, but they still have a long way to go. I had them think about some things they can do between now and the end of the year to encourage unity within the group. They came up with some good suggestions, but the most important one was that they needed to bring themselves together to get through their issues as a team, not just with us as leaders.

Next week we’re going to push hard for accountability partners in the group, further building on this idea of unity and relying on each other for backup.

Question: How do you encourage unity and communication within your youth group? Let’s start the discussion here!