Archive for March, 2009

Being in a small youth group has some great advantages for some students. So many teenagers get lost in the crowd in a mega-church. The individual attention and the family feeling of a small church can make a difference. However, small youth groups have some unique challenges. One of those challenges is that teenagers need interaction with other teenagers. How do you help youth find connection with other students when you only have a few youth in the youth group?

Every situation will be different, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Create times to get together with the youth groups from other small churches. The students from other churches may be just as hungry for interaction with other students as your youth are. Call three or four other small churches and plan some social interaction with a short time of Bible study. Offer to host the event the first time, then encourage the youth leader from another church to host the next one. Do simple things like pizza, bowling, or laser tag. Look for ways to get the students mixing with other students.

2. Take your youth to a Wednesday night youth worship time at a larger church. Check with the youth minister first, but you will probably find him or her very open to you bringing your kids . . . every week, once a month, or once in a while. Try to do this often enough to allow your kids to build relationships with some of the youth from a larger church. Spend some time getting a coke with your students afterward to talk about the message. That will help you keep the experience rich for your students.

3. Take advantage of camps and conferences that allow your students to interact with other students. Events held in your community can be especially good because they allow your students to connect with students they already know from school.

4. Look for opportunities to get your friends to invite their friends . . . even it if it just a burger before a football game on Friday night. Don’t try to “sheep steal.” Encourage kids from other churches to feel at home at your events, but encourage them to stay plugged into their own church. God may lead a family to your church from another church, but sheep stealing shouldn’t be the way we try to grow our churches.

Lesson 10: See People For Who They CAN BE.

I heard a youth speaker say something like this once and it made a big impression on me. Jesus did this. He didn’t see a short, corrupt tax collector in Zacchaeus. He didn’t even see a wee little man. Jesus saw a man hungry for a Savior. Zacchaeus was so passionate about seeing Jesus that he climbed a tree. When Jesus was thirsty and hot, he didn’t see a woman, of a different race who had slept with quite a few men, he saw a person of value worthy of discussing the deepest meaning of life.

In the 1980s, the Contemporary Christian song “Innocent Eyes” was written. It talked about seeing people without judgment or prejudice. God calls us to see potential and possibilities. That’s what he sees in us.

We need to see students for who they can become. Do you see a lazy, overweight guy? Do you see a rebellious gothic girl with dark eyeliner, spiked hair, and black clothes? Coaches look for athletic talent, but I love those players who surprise everybody with their dedication and effort. When God looks at the students we touch, he sees children he loves. He sees the inside not just the outside.

The Old Testament tells us that “Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” Look to the heart!

Zach Skipper has spent over 12 years working with students. He has served as a youth minister, speaker, and bible study teacher. He is currently leading Bigtime Ministries while part-time coaching at one of the country’s leading Junior Highs in Birmingham, AL. To find out more about Zach’s ministry, contact him at www.bigtimeministries.com.

Teenagers today are stressed. There are a lot of reasons why, but I found an interesting study conducted by Theresa O’Keefe. She tried to find the things that were unique stressors for American teenagers. Her conclusions?

1. The poly-vocal nature of the contemporary world. I think that is professor speak for “teenagers hear a lot of different voices. America doesn’t really have a value system any more. Lots of people are telling teenagers what is important and . . . surprise, surprise . . . we don’t all agree.

2. The over-scheduled lives of children and families. This is no surprise to anyone. Families live with harried schedules. Some kids want to do everything. It may be crazy, but we let them.

3. The isolation felt by adolescents, parents, and families overall. Teenagers can feel pretty alone. The surprise here may be that their parents can feel the same way. Isolation can lead kids to depression and to self-destructive behavior.

4. The marketplace’s effort to target children and adolescents. Seems like everyone has something to sell teenagers. Good news for marketers. Even in this bad economy, teenagers have a lot of disposable income. The schemes of our market is to promise kids fulfillment through stuff, something it can never deliver.

So, what do we do? Provide kids a place to be loved, accepted, listened to. Teach them the simple truths of Scripture and encourage them to not take the demand of the world for more, more, more too seriously. Help kids to see what is really important and begin to sort through the noise. Help kids to understand how much they are loved by God.

Despite the stressors, however, dysfunctional behavior in adolescents does not appear to be inevitable as Hall suggested. For example, Tami Videon studied the effects of divorce on adolescents. She found that the parent-adolescent relationship before a divorce greatly moderated how well the adolescent adjusted during divorce. While the dissolution of their families places great stress on adolescents, those adolescents who have and maintain a strong relationship with their parents appear to adjust to the new family configuration fairly well.

Theresa O’Keefe, “The Same but Different: The Culture in Which Our Adolescents Live,” Journal of Youth and Theology 7, no. 2 (2008) 42.

Lesson Nine: Tell YOUR STORIES, Not Someone else’s.

I love stories! I love to hear and remember real personal stories that speakers and pastors tell. I can’t stand those generic preacher stories. They are like e-mail forwards; they make me want to delete them without hearing them.

Kids love stories even more. Students I have known love to hear my real life stories. Our lives are pretty exciting. It is a gift to be able to capture the best and most interesting moments and then relate the events with excitement and humor.

There is a gift of storytelling to be sure, but everyone has stories and real life examples of lessons they have learned. Apply what you are teaching by using true to life examples that you have seen or taken part in. People will listen. Students will be hanging on your every word.

Zach Skipper has spent over 12 years working with students. He has served as a youth minister, speaker, and bible study teacher. He is currently leading Bigtime Ministries while part-time coaching at one of the country’s leading Junior Highs in Birmingham, AL. To find out more about Zach’s ministry, contact him at www.bigtimeministries.com.

When I was in high school, the church I attended wanted the youth to be involved in worship. Getting involved usually meant putting on a choir robe and singing songs that meant a lot to older people but to which I had no real connection. Sermons were long and theological. When I said they were boring, what I really meant was, I didn’t get them. I remember several of us timing one of the deacons in his long closing prayer. (I think his longest was about 4 minutes.)

Some churches have given up trying to engage youth in corporate worship with adults. They develop a model some have called the one-eared Mickey Mouse, where the smaller circle of the youth group barely touches the larger circle of the church. When youth have their own worship, the experience can be tailored directly to them. That is hard to do in a small church, but I think the practice is a bad idea anyway. I think students need to be involved in worship with adults and children. They need to connect with people who are older than they are . . . and younger than they are.

However, we shouldn’t just expect youth to worship in an experience that has no connection to them. Imagine a group of deaf people coming into our worship service week to week. We would make some attempt to translate the service to them. I once sat in a Ukrainian worship service; a Ukrainian student sat near me and quietly explained in English what was happening. I think teenagers need someone to translate the worship experiences of most small churches into things they can connect with and understand.

As youth leaders, we may not be involved in worship planning. But we can be culture translators. It happens in two ways. First, we listen to students . . . what they think is boring, irrelevant, and unintelligible . . . and help worship planners to think about what they do with teenagers (and other groups in the church) in mind. Second, we translate for our students what is so meaningful about the worship experiences for our students. (I used to sit in the back of the room during “business meetings” and explain to the students around me what was happening. I was amazed at what they didn’t understand.)

Helping teenagers connect with worship services in small churches may not be as difficult as it seems. I was in a church Sunday that played mostly old hymns. However, the congregation sang with a guitar. The youth in the room were completely engaged.

Listen! They do!

It may seem like students aren’t listening to us. I often have been proven wrong on that. Students will recite verbatim something I said in a bible study or some story I told. Sometimes I don’t remember what I said . . . but they do.

I’m afraid sometimes they do a better job of listening than we do. More than anything, students want us to listen to them. Listening to people shows how much we care about them and what they have to say. But good listeners are hard to find. It’s not natural. Our tendency is to give a token listen for a few seconds. We usually use the time to formulate our next thought. Then we vomit our thoughts on the nearest set of ears.

The Bible teaches us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Listening requires us to put aside ourselves long enough to consider someone else. What is she thinking? What is he saying? What is she feeling? Stephen Covey had a popular book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits he suggested was “seek first to understand, then be understood.” Oddly enough, understanding helps you to be understood.

Teenagers have something to say. We should listen.

Zach Skipper has spent over 12 years working with students. He has served as a youth minister, speaker, and bible study teacher. He is currently leading Bigtime Ministries while part-time coaching at one of the country’s leading Junior Highs in Birmingham, AL. To find out more about Zach’s ministry, contact him at www.bigtimeministries.com.

In his recent book, Youth Ministry 3.0, Mark Oestreicher calls for a dramatic shift in youth ministry. He says youth leaders have emphasized events and activities–our youth ministry program–in a hope to reach youth for Christ. However, that just doesn’t seem to be working any more (if it really ever did). Marko suggests we need to adjust our approach to youth ministry to be more personal. He suggests we may need to do less activity so that we can invest more in relational ministry with students.

I couldn’t agree more. And, for the small church, this emphasis is not just a good adjustment to our culture. It is really at the core of what a small church is . . . family.

In most youth ministry conference over the last ten years or so, conference leaders have asked youth leaders to invest more and more energy in planning and implementing lots of programs. Believe me, I have led many of those well-intentioned conferences. However, I have come to believe that your students need less planned activity . . . and more of you.

Being a youth leader is not really about planning activities. Being a youth leader is about discipling youth. I don’t mean to imply that there is something wrong with developing a youth ministry program. Youth need opportunities to dig into Scripture. They need opportunities to invest in the lives of other people . . . to have ministry demonstrated and to practice it. They need opportunities to build relationships with each other. However, if your investment in your youth ministry program means you don’t have time to spend time with students–to see how their Algebra test went or find out how they are working through a problem they shared with you or invite them to talk about their new commitment to prayer–you are planning too much.

Perhaps the most important skill a youth leader can learn is how to be present with teenagers. Jesus was an amazing teacher. He did great things. But, I somehow believe the greatest impact he had on the lives of his disciples was his presence.

BUILD UP or Shut Up.

You are in a position to do more than influence students; you can help construct–to build up–young men and women. Don’t give in to the occasional temptation to destruct . . . to tear down. Berating a student because of poor behavior or a bad attitude is easy to do. The challenge is to let the student know how he has erred, and equip him and encourage him to make better choices.

One of my lifelong friends recently asked me to help him knock out his old bathroom so that he could remodel it. We were ripping and tearing, swinging hammers and crow bars to take out the old room. Destruction is fun for the destructors. But, when he went to put in the new room, he called his friend who was a professional handy-man to do the construction. Anybody can destroy, only the skilled can build up.

Work on your youth ministry construction skills. It is true: sometimes we need to use the sledgehammers of corrective words. However, if you are not going to speak the restorative words to build the student up, you should not saying anything. Youth leaders, teachers, coaches, ministers, and parents have been placed in the lives of students to help them mature into healthy and constructive adults. Choose your words wisely and let’s get to building!

Zach Skipper has spent over 12 years working with students. He has served as a youth minister, speaker, and bible study teacher. He is currently leading Bigtime Ministries while part-time coaching at one of the country’s leading Junior Highs in Birmingham, AL. To find out more about Zach’s ministry, contact him at www.bigtimeministries.com.

Summer Camp can make a big difference for students. However, for a volunteer or part-time youth leader in a small church, planning a week at youth camp can be a big headache. So, how do you put the pieces together? Where do you go? How do you know what the right experience is for your students?

Let’s address the headaches one at a time:

1. Do I choose a youth camp that someone else is putting on or do I arrange something for our kids myself? For most small church youth leader, this is an easy choice. The myriad of details involved in planning a youth camp experience for your students can wear out full-time youth leaders. While you will have to work on some issues (like rooming lists, permission forms, and transportation), a camp offered by LifeWay, Student Life, Big Stuff, or Inlighted Ministries will take care of most of the details of the actual running of camp. Your students will generally get to participate in youth-targeted praise and worship music and be taught by exellent youth communicators at any of these camps. On the other hand, there is an intimacy in your students getting away with each other. If you have a few adults willing to invest the time in planning a camp experience for your kids, it might be worth the extra effort.

2. How do you find the right camp? Some camps are more geered to sharing the message of Christ with kids. Some are more targeted at discipleship. Some camps, such as M-Fuge (LifeWay), World Changers (North American Mission Board of the SBC), or Work Camps (Group), focus on getting kids involved in ministry. Other camps such as Jay Strack’s Student Leadership University or Super Summer are targeted at developing kids for leadership. Think about where your students are and what challenge they most need. If your church has a tradition of going to the same camp every year, don’t be too quick to change that. Sometimes those traditions can be important glue for youth ministry and can really make a big difference in kids’ lives.

3. How do I find the time to plan? Even if you feel like the Lone-Ranger, get yourself a Tonto. Find someone who will take care of the plans for camp. If you decide to do camp on your own rather than attending someone else’s camp, you may need a whole group of Tontos. Sometimes a mom who would never show up and lead in youth ministry will be happy to do all the organizational work for you. Give her the job and get out of the way.

4. How do I get students to sign up? Start early. Talk to parents. If you can get a fun video of the camp, play it for the students. Talk to parents and students about what difference you think the camp experience will make for students. If you have kids who have gone before, get them on-stage talking about what they got out of camp during worship time. Set a deadline. Have a phone blitz the week before the deadline and call every student that has any connection with the youth ministry.

5. How do we pay for camp? This can be tricky in a small church. Here’s what I usually have tried to do, but you may need to vary this for your context. Budget for the cost of transportation and to pay the way of adult leaders. Schedule a couple of fun-raisers to reduce the amount each student will have to pay. Talk to adults that I know can help with scholarships for students who can’t afford the trip and let parents know that scholarships are available and how to get one.

6. How do I get adults to go? This can be a problem in the small church as well. You need to take at least one adult of the same sex for every one to five students. In other words, if you have ten students, six boys and four girls, you need at least two men and one woman. Don’t be afraid of taking too many adults, especially if you have adults that are willing to work and play alongside the teenagers. Parents are usually your best option for adults. Sometimes the church pastor may be willing to spend the week with students. That can be a great experience for the pastor and the students. College students? That depends. The camp you are going to may want adults that are 25 or older. Also, your church insurance policy may mean you need adults over 25 to drive your students. You certainly want to make sure that college students are spiritually and socially mature if you use them as counselors. Make sure your adults know exactly what you want them to do as sponsors.

7. How do I find the time to take a week and go to camp? Working in a week of camp when you already have work and family responsibilities can be tough. It is possible you may not be able to go. While it is best if the youth leader is at camp, consider asking one or two adults with more flexible schedule to take the kids. You can even send your students to camp with another church, although it would be best to send an adult with your students who can take responsibility for them. If you can go for part of the week, that would be better than not being there at all. Check with ministries that provide camps; some ministries, such as Student Life, offer some camps that straddle a weekend. For example, they start on Friday and end of Tuesday. Sometimes getting off three work-days instead of five can be a big plus.

8. When do I start planning summer camp? The truth is, in a small church, you can put camp together in a few months. However, you may find that families have already made plans and schedules are set. Also, the dates you would like to go to camp may be full. If you are planning for this summer, don’t give up; you can make it work. But next year, I’d recommend something like this: Choose a camp the August before and get it on the calendar. In January, start talking up summer camp. Set a deadline in March or April for registration (though I always tried to keep a few places open so we could invite other kids to go later) and require a deposit. Require all money to be in by May 1. If you are doing your own camp and have some flexibility in lodging and transportation, you can continue to enlist students as late as you would like. However, most of you will need some time to plan for the number of kids you are taking.

9. What if I only have two or three kids who want to go? Go! It may be tough to justify the time and money for one or two kids, but you may impact their lives in ways you never could at home. I remember doing a mission trip once with three students and four adults. The kids were surprised when I didn’t cancel, but it turned out to be an amazing experience for all of us. The investment in those few students paid big dividends. They became the biggest cheerleaders in our church for future mission endeavors.

10. What do I do while the kids are at camp? Build relationships. Avoid weighing yourself down with too many responsibilities. Laugh with them. Listen to them. Pray with them. Be with them.

Here are some links to ministries that offer summer youth camps. These are only a few of the hundreds of options you will find through your denomination or through other ministries online.

Big Stuff Camps

Centifuge Camps

Group Work Camps

Student Leadership University

Student Life Camps

World Changers Mission Camps

GO the EXTRA MILE With Them, It’ll Make Them Smile.

When I started in student ministry, I learned quickly that being in their world payed dividends. The church is a great place, but most active students spend around 50 hours each week at school in class, in sports practices, and at games.

There are hundreds of students at school. The local school is the best fishing spot for a fisher of men. I keep wondering why the church isn’t sending members who love teenagers to sit in the stands at soccer games, band concerts, and cheerleading competition.

I started working with youth when I was at college. When I wasn’t in class, I was out at the games to support the students of our church at their baseball and soccer games. Now, as the leader of an independent discipleship ministry with students called Bigtime Ministries I continue to make that kind of ministry our passion. At the core of our beliefs is that student ministry primarily happens when ministers spend time where youth are . . . and that is most often on a school campus. Being there when students show up at church is important, but going the extra mile means showing up at their schools.

Zach Skipper has spent over 12 years working with students. He has served as a youth minister, speaker, and bible study teacher. He is currently leading Bigtime Ministries while part-time coaching at one of the country’s leading Junior Highs in Birmingham, AL. To find out more about Zach’s ministry, contact him at www.bigtimeministries.com.