What are you praying for? What kind of prayers are you hearing your young people pray? Are they praying at all? A lot can be learned from paying attention to the prayers of young people. Prayers reveal our personal theology. William Dyrness suggests:
Prayer indicates not what people say they believe but what they actually do believe – and believe in such a way as to act on it toward God.
Do the young people in your youth group pray daring, faith-filled prayers? Do they pray courageously or timidly? What kinds of things do they ask God to do? It’s possible that their prayers are telling you about their true beliefs and also much about the God you are presenting them with.
It was my last night as Youth Pastor of ONE youth (Auburn Salvos) – my emotions were running wild!
I clearly remember a feeling of ‘it’s going to be OK’… Firstly cause I knew God was and still is the ultimate leader of any ministry but also because God had been building up the next Youth Pastor long before I even saw it.
Kelly Edmunds (now lead Youth Pastor at ONE Youth) joined the youth team about a year before I moved… 2 thing’s stuck out to me when I first met with Kelly – her willingness to learn and her willingness to serve… This is so key in any leader!!
I never knew all that time ago that I would be leaving Auburn and that Kelly would be my successor. Not knowing or even considering when that change would come I simply did life with Kelly… included her in leadership discussions, valued her opinion and trusted her with some responsibility. Kelly continued to rise above every challenge and it became more and more clear that God had a significant calling to youth ministry on her life.
In ‘passing on the baton’ – these 3 things proved so important:
1. Trust when it hurts:
Kelly is a high capacity leader. Handing on ministry (even if they are a phenomenal leader) is going to hurt, you are going to miss it. All I could do was simply trust God, trust God, trust God! Simple… but not always easy. I held on to this promise in Isaiah 55:8-9 which says: “My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” I needed to trust in a plan far greater than myself!
2. Speak up your successor:
When leaving Auburn I made an extra intentional effort to speak positive words about Kelly, publicly – one on one – on the microphone… any chance I could get to simply just brag about how blessed the young people are for having Kelly. I would speak out her strengths and all that they would bring to the next season. I spoke out the stuff that I wasn’t so good at and how Kelly will better in that area. (This was pretty easy stuff!) ;)
3. Release and rejoice:
When it comes to ‘handing on the baton’, rejoice, be glad in it, celebrate, thank God for the honour of serving him. One thing I found helpful in passing on leadership to Kelly was writing out all my hopes, dreams, visions and heart for the future of ONE youth ministry and in a significant part of our Sunday service handing those on to her.
Kelly and I to this day are still best of friends, I always made it clear that I was available to answer any questions she may have had / always support her in prayer.
It’s a real blessing looking back on things now, seeing how God worked in the unseen.
You’ve just pulled off the largest event your youth ministry has ever held and you are EXHAUSTED!
The weeks leading up to the event were insane – early mornings and late nights, cramming to get everything done. And that’s before the event even got going!
You’re excited about the good stuff that happened through the event. But the last thing you feel like doing is sitting in a room for 3 hours going over all the finer details.
Here are 5 reasons to do it anyway! :)
1. You won’t remember much in 11 months’ time
In 11 months (or next time you do a similar event) you’re very unlikely to remember that the transition time between dinner and the dress up night was too short, or that it would have been good to include a ‘photo release’ part on the permission forms.
To get the best out of your debrief, do it within 7 days of the event.
It can be so frustrating to be half way through the same event a year later and realise that you’re re-learning lessons you could have applied from last time!
2. Get different perspectives!
No matter how involved you feel you were, you won’t have seen everything that happened at the event. You’ll have blind spots.
Often in a debrief you will hear about issues or hear fantastic stories that you were completely unaware of!
3. People will be more tolerant of the screw ups
• Did the volunteer bus driver get stuffed around because your travel arrangements were inefficient?
• Did the volunteer cooks face unnecessary stress because you didn’t find out about allergies?
• Did the campsite get complaints from neighbours about noise after hours – because you didn’t have adequate nightime supervision?
These things happen.
Those who bore the brunt of the ’screw ups’ are likely to be a lot more forgiving (and a lot more willing to help again next time) if they can see that you’ve put stuff in place to avoid the same thing being repeated in the future.
4. Do something positive with frustrations
It can be really disappointing for the leadership team (and for you!) when something you tried to pull off at your event didn’t work.
In a debrief meeting you can look together at ‘what went wrong?’ and get super positive and constructive about how to do it better next time!
It is such an encouraging process – working together to convert a ‘failure’ into a ‘goldmine of wisdom’!
5. It’s good for the team
Your debrief isn’t only about extracting lessons. It’s also about giving your team a chance to celebrate and unpack the experience together.
In your debrief you could:
Acknowledge all of their work. Thank them (buy them a gift and give them a nice card)
Give them a chance to name all the good stuff – telling stories, etc
Create space for people to encourage each other
Let them have a voice into the future of this thing they gave so much to
According to the picture above and Facebook it seems as though everyone around me at the moment is either pregnant or has recently given birth… It’s a pretty exciting time!!
As the leading expert on the team when it comes to baby stuff, it’s a simple fact that it takes roughly 9 months for a baby to form before it is born.
I kind of feel that in these past 9 months I have been some-what like a baby developing… growing and learning.
Living in Central & North QLD has re-shaped me, given me a space to move away from all that I had known to a place where everything was new and unknown.
Over my next 9 blogs I’m going to share the lessons I learnt in my 9 months serving in the Central & North QLD Division.
The first of these lessons was that it was and is absolutely pivotal to grip tight to a:
teachable spirit.
The past 9 months I saw a heap of new expressions of people loving on young people, heaps of expressions of young people finding freedom…. I saw God’s Kingdom beautifully advancing!
If I were to come in (not experienced living in the country) thinking I had all the answers and that I had it all together I would have been in for a rude shock! Every context is different.
One thing God said to me when taking this step of faith just over a year ago now was, trust me and watch me, learn everything you can – listen to people, learn from people – your time won’t be long but I am going to do a new work in you.
This is the mindset I try to live with every day now – watching God at work – learning everything I can in every situation – knowing that others around me have valuable things to teach me and simply allowing God to do a new work in me everyday.
Remember your first day at your job, at uni, in your volunteer role??
We have a new guy on the team. In fact it’s his first day today (welcome Matt!) and I am reminded of how critical that first day can be. Here’s a few things to think of whenever you welcome a new person to your youth team whether paid or volunteer:
Will this person need desk space to do their job? If so, make sure their desk is ready for them and not buried under 2 yrs of stuff to be filed.
Do you need to provide a computer? If so, make sure it is set up and working. It’s also important that someone who moved to Tibet isn’t still logged in and the admin password lost.
Do they know where to go upon arrival and is someone there to meet them?
Will there be people around all day to assist with any questions? Don’t have a newcomer start on a day you have booked everyone out in meetings.
Are all the staff / volunteer team expecting the new guy? You don’t want them faced with some confused person challenging ‘who are you?’ as they call for security :)
A great leader will make sure that day one is the kind of day that leaves a new team member feeling super confident and pumped for day two!
I saw this clip at a recent youth event and loved the amount of theology packed into such a short time frame. I would really struggle to pack the gospel story into 4 minutes so I might let this guy do the job for me.
A few weeks ago I asked a kid if he’s been wagging school lately and he was like “you’re an idiot and I don’t know what you’re talking about”. I explained what wagging was and he looked at me like I was a born pre-1990 and was like “yeah it’s called jigging”. whatever.
Anyway, the point of the story is that heaps of young people in my community have a habit of not going to school. This is not good BUT the point of “jigging” is that instead of going to school you do something else that is also awesome, and maybe even more awesome and I think there is some merit in that for us.
As an integral part of your church it’s probable that you rarely leave. You never miss a Friday night at youth, or a Sunday morning at church or if you do it’s because you died or something. The loyalty and commitment you’re displaying is admirable but there’s a good chance you’ve got youth ministry blinkers on, that is, your whole experience of youth ministry is limited to what you grew up with and what you’re now doing.
If your perception of youth ministry is only as big as your church then you’re going to miss some of the best ideas, creativity, inspiration and motivation because that’s the stuff you can tap into when you jig.
Here’s the get up – a couple of times a year, book into your calendar a Friday night where you can go see how a different church’s youth ministry runs.
Here are some of the benefits:
– Fresh ideas: songs, games, sermons, cordial flavour
– Encouragement: you’ll see things that remind you of how well things work at your church
– Increased perameters: a bigger picture of what youth ministry could look like
I’ve been doing this for years and thoroughly endorse it, it’s helped keep me motivated and fresh for my own ministry.
Maybe leaders in your youth ministry are in seriously short supply meaning you can’t afford to jig, in which case just get everyone to jig…to a different church’s youth ministry :)
The results showed that a role model/youth pastor had the most significant impact by far – with more people voting for this option than all of the other options put together!
Encouragement for any of us who sometimes question the value of the investment we are making in to young lives!!
THIS MONTH’S POLL
This month, we’re looking at accountability. Do you have an accountability partner? What does that relationship look like?
That’s a question we’re asking ourselves all the time, so we started a blog to collect our thoughts and hopefully include you in the conversation too.
We – Claire, Nate, Shandri and Matt – work together at The Salvation Army’s Territorial Headquarters in Sydney, Australia, and are responsible for supporting and resourcing Salvation Army youth ministries throughout NSW, QLD and ACT.
