Yesterday I shared the generalities of how I go about evaluating and planning for the youth ministry that I have been tasked to lead. Today though I’d like to share a little of what we are actually going to be doing different this coming school year as compared to the past.
The youth ministry that I lead had programming that looked pretty much the same for about the past four years. Here’s a glimpse of what our programming looked like (minus our particular names):
- Sunday Mornings – The crowd or “front door” event. Believe it or not the time when our students were bringing the most friends was on Sunday morning! This was geared toward being a more evangelistic program with built in time for adluts leaders to build relationships with students.
- Wednesday Nights – This was our small group program for students who wanted to take a next step in their life of following Jesus. The small groups met at the church, in our youth center.
- Saturday Nights – Because of being limited in the number of adult leaders that we had and the fact that the church is located 1 block from from a middle school, we had a big evangelistic event every couple of weeks for jr. high students. This was a little less of a front door event, more of a front porch event and it drew a lot of students.
Over the course of a few years though, the culture changed.
After going through part one of the process that I laid out yesterday, we decided that we would rather spend our resources (energy, time, money…) in relaunching the youth ministry instead of in retraining people to live with our model. So, over the course of this summer we are working through the plans of starting over from scratch. I told my team that everything was up for grabs, no ministry program was sacred. This is what we came up with after working through part two of what I shared yesterday:
- Clarified vision of what we want our students to “look like” – our discipleship process
- Love God
- Connected with other believers
- Contributing to the kingdom
For us, this is a simple and memorable way of sharing what the youth ministry is about. It’s even easier for people in my church to connect with because my church’s initials are LCC.
We then set the programming agenda based on the three steps or checkpoints from our discipleship process. Because of the process, we knew that our programming had to look a like this:
- An evangelistic platform where students could be encouraged to trust Jesus, love God, and take the next step of connecting with other believers.
- A small group setting where students could not only dive deeper into the Bible but connect with and encourage each other in their life with Jesus.
- A system to connect students with serving the communities (friends, school, church, town, world…) that they live in.
Once we knew what our program elements would be, we took a look back at part one of the evaluation process from yesterday. We talked about when students were bringing friends, when relationship building was happening, and a host of other issues. What came out is that this fall we will be relaunching the youth ministry with…
- a Tuesday night evangelistic program for both jr. high & sr. high (although they have a staggered start & end time)
- Sunday morning small groups for jr. high
- Sunday morning small group & mid-week small group for sr. high (they pick one)
- a system for tracking & encouraging student’s contributing to the kingdom
- We are also working closely with all of the other ministry teams (kids, women, men, sports, audio/visual, IT, etc.) in the church to help students get connected in some way with them so our teenagers have multiple voices speaking into their lives.
Now, I certainly wouldn’t recommend making changes like this every year but going through that evaluation and planning process is important because, if we are honest with ourselves, there will be times when things need to have a more drastic change.
I’m spending my summer getting ready to relaunch a youth ministry when the new school year hits. What are you doing to get ready for the new school year?
[Photo by: 416style]
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Chris Szulwach is a youth pastor in Liverpool, NY. Chris has 11 years experience as a volunteer, para-church staff, and as a pastor.
Blog - CoffeeWithChris.com
Twitter - http://twitter.com/CoffeeWithChris
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Chris, great thoughts. In the ministry I lead we basically went through the same process and came up with something similar…just in less nights out of the week. Based on a 4 week month we are looking at have 1 evangelistic outreach a month and the other 3 weeks are small group based. Student can still feel free to bring friends, but the focus is digging into God's Word and building the relationships. This is going to be happening in our sr. high program. I'm excited to see what happens and would love to hear how the fall starts out for you.
Thanks Nick! I'm sure I'll be sharing how things go for us once we get into the fall. It'll probably be over at my blog though: http://coffeewithchris.com (once I get back to blogging over there)
You've got some great ideas here Chris. Have you ever read Mark DeVries' "Sustainable Youth Ministry"? He's the only one who has listed all the planning pieces you need to give major infrastructure change…. Great resource.
I agree, you're on a good track. Honestly, you could read the bulk of it in two hours. As you keep laying out these big changes, I'd really recommend it. The biggest suggestion I could give you is to get major buy-in from key leaders in the church. As you establish these "stakeholders" you'll have a better chance of realizing many of your goals over the long term. It's worth the effort.
loving your ideas chris