Far Away By Lacrea
Help raise awareness and money for relief work in Haiti. Buy this single on iTunes here or buy the video here.
Category: student ministry
3 Keys to a Good Disciple Now Weekend (Part: 3)
The Follow Up
Ok. Here is perhaps the most important part of the whole Disciple Now weekend, Follow Up! It begins as soon as the students head home after the morning service. There are generally three major areas that I like to follow-up with as quickly as possible (to help keep the events of the weekend fresh).
1. Leaders
I typically enjoy having lunch with all of my leaders or scheduling another time to meet with them. I like to discuss the event while it is still fresh in their minds. Each leader gets an opportunity to discuss challenges the weekend posed for them, opportunities for further ministry (as they see it), and an evaluation of the whole weekend. I treasure this time as it provides for me a great opportunity to coach my leaders through processing the event as well as provides me with another perspective on leading our students.
2. Host Homes
I usually try to follow-up with host homes casually on an individual basis in the week after the Disciple Now weekend. I also like to give out a brief survey on things that went well and things that we can improve before the next Disciple Now weekend. Though they did not make it to my big 3 list for a successful Dnow weekend, host homes are crucial. Getting key insight from adults who have just spent a weekend in their home with your students is never a bad idea.
3. Students
After having an opportunity to gather as much information as possible after the event from leaders and host homes it is important to use that information to engage students. Sometimes this comes in passing information on to LIFE group leaders (the real everyday hero’s in student ministry) in discussing how to better minister to individual students. Sometimes this provides great opportunity to follow-up with a student who was asking questions at Disciple Now weekend. Other times the information is applied to working on group dynamics. As a Student Pastor or Student Ministry Leader you will be uniquely equipped to figure out the best strategy to take the information you have gathered and shepherd students. The goal is to help move students along in process of becoming fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. Not just to hold a successful event. Events are just tools that we can use along the way to develop disciples.
3 Keys to a Good Disciple Now Weekend (Part: 2)
The Leader
The second key to planning a great Disciple Now weekend is the leaders. Once the theme is figured out, it is time to figure out who will be leading your small group bible studies in the homes. I used to get college students from the local Christian University or BCM (Baptist Campus Ministries) group to help me out on this one. However, as I have had opportunity to be a youth pastor in one church for an extended period of time, I have enjoyed having kids who have come through the program start leading small groups once they have hit college. Its great for the younger students to see a student who has come all the way through the student ministry and its good for the leaders to be able to give something back to the group they came from. On top of that, I get to test the kids who have been under my teaching and provide them with further opportunities for growth and experience.
Wherever you get your leaders, the key is that they exhibit a growing relationship with God. At the end of the day you want someone who will reinforce what it looks like to grow and mature in a relationship with God. I like the idea of college students because it gives your students a good role model for their next steps on the journey.
Even though I generally know my leaders before they come lead the Disciple Now weekend. I generally like to sit down with them a month or two before the weekend and brief them on the Theme, the idea of what kids will be in their group, and the material they will be teaching through. I also like to catch up and find out how things are progressing at school and what God is teaching them.
//
//
3 Keys to a Good Disciple Now Weekend (Part: 1)
Ok are you ready? I am about to share the three keys for an awesome Disciple Now weekend. This might surprise some of you, but I am not about to say, “The Band, The Speaker, and the T-shirts,” though those may be important in their own right. There are 3 other things that I have seen bring about more lasting change than any band, speaker, or T-shirt has ever done. In my estimation, if you can get these 3 right you can make up for a bad band or t-shirt (its really hard to make up for a bad speaker so we’ll make him the unofficial 4th key to a good D-Now Weekend).
1. The Theme (go large view over small view)
When designing a D-Now Weekend I like to start with the theme. Generally speaking there are a lot of good and average themes out there (and I’ve done some of them). You have your run of the mill, “back to the basics,” “true love waits,” etc, etc… truth be told these are not bad themes. They just lack the substance I am looking for. If I’m going to invest the man hours that it takes to pull of a great disciple now weekend I want a theme that my students see practically 8 months down the road. (meaning they remember the theme as well as the event, and more importantly apply it to life.)
So what does that look like? Take the “True Love Waits” theme and think about it. Is that really the big issue? What do you want to teach your kids? “Don’t have sex until you are married? Waiting for Sex is good? Purity is better than impurity?” Nothing overtly wrong with those statements, but what if you had the chance to cover the whole “don’t have Sex until you are married” theme put it in a positive light (give the kids something to strive for… rather than something to strive against) and at the same time lead your kids toward maturity in Christ?
How do you do that? You take it a step deeper. God didn’t just make you a sexual being he made you to be a man or be a woman. The questions now isn’t, “will you wait?” But what kind of man or woman will you be? The challenge changes from waiting to being. As a pastor I am not so much interested in behavior modification as I am in leading students into a growing relationship with Jesus. While “If you love them, you will wait” is not a bad theme, it is a small goal compared to God made you for a purpose as a man or a woman.
The bigger theme we went for in DNow last year and several years ago was “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” The point was to help kids understand who they were in God’s eyes even down to their gender, realize how men and women compliment one anther, challenge our guys to be men, free our girls to be women, and help them to know how to encourage one anther in ways they will receive it. While true love waits was part of it, it wasn’t all of it.
So now months later I can ask our young men to filter a thought our an action and do it along the terms of biblical manhood. It doesn’t mean they all drank the cool-aide and are running around using the lingo, but it does mean we have introduced a filter to a world view that will help them evaluate their actions according to what kind of man or woman they are becoming. This year we are going to do it all over again with the theme of Servant Leadership.
I realize that this idea Biblical Manhood and Womanhood may be new to many of you, so I have included a link to a previous post throughout this article.
//
//
5 Keys for Developing Long Term Strategy in Student Ministry
I’ve been asked to speak a few times on the topic of Student Ministry and here lately have had a few great conversations with fellow youth pastors about Student Ministry. The following is a short version of my notes I have used on occasion. The bold sections are a revision of my thoughts.
The culture is changing rapidly and it provides us an excellent opportunity to examine how we should change our approach to student ministry. But there is one thing you need to know, even before the culture began pick up the pace Student Ministry was failing. The statistical data on Student Ministry is not pretty. We have a 75-85 % failure rate depending on whose statistics you read. To get a picture of how huge that number is…for every 4 kids actively involved in student ministry one makes it to church as an adult. Much can be said about why, how, and who obtained the various statistics but what I would like to do is use the current buzz around student ministry to help us evaluate our methods and begin exploring what success looks like in student ministry.
Create Long-term Goals
We need to create long-term goals for student ministry. Too often success in Student Ministry is measured in short term numbers. Nothing is wrong with using numbers to measure success. but are we using the right numbers? One sales job I had required you to wait 60 days before you collect your pay check. The reason was simple. People bring things back and you don’t get paid on what gets returned. (I’m not staying that kids lose their salvation, its just that sometimes they don’t really make genuine commitments. I’ve had students “get saved” at a concert because the invitation was offered in conjunction with a free bracelet from the evangelist. The were responding to a free bracelet offer and got counted as trusting in Christ. What is really sad is that i don’t think the evangelist was trying to cause this kind of confusion. He preached a sincere gospel message.)
Be Able to Measure
One of the key problems in this assessment is that most tangible numbers for student ministry are short term (decisions and attendance) and therefore get the most focus. Most long term goals in student ministry are intangible or we just haven’t developed a measuring stick and therefore in many ministries get little or no focus. The questions we should be asking about student ministry isn’t, “how many?”, but “what do students who graduate from our group look like?” Our focus needs to shift from entertainment with a christian vibe to discipleship (By discipleship I mean teaching our kids to know and put into practice the word of God in their lives… Not just know how to hotly debate side issues of doctrine. Jesus tells us in the great commission that part of disciple making is “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” ) One of our measurements at a church I served was having students who are able to teach or disciple others.
Know where you are
Once you have determined the measuring stick, figure out where you are. Get an honest assessment of how close or far away from the goal you are. You may need to enlist the help of outsiders to give you an honest evaluation of your group. If you are new to your position, ask a leader or youth worker who has been around if they know where the students are in relation to your goal of (bible reading, scripture memory, acts of service, leadership, discipleship, etc…) Ask yourself questions. Ask your students questions (Something as simple as a survey would work for “how often do you read your bible”)
Develop the playbook
If you set long term goals then you won’t achieve them overnight. In fact, depending on your students, announcing your long term goal may backfire on you. Sometimes it is better to establish short term goals that will help you get closer to your long term goal. For example, having students assist in teaching children at a backyard bible club is less intimidating that to disciple a peer. The next step would be to have a student teach at a backyard Bible club. Then maybe it is a student Sunday where students team up and teach adult classes, lead music, and preach. Then maybe its calling on the older students to teach younger students in the course of a disciple now weekend. Each one of these is a strategic step towards a larger goal of having students who are able to teach. (Hint: celebrating each step along the way will help students develop the confidence and trust in God to take the next big step)
Stick around for the Results
Unless you build from the ground up or start with just a small handful of students it will take time to see strategy come to fruition. If you develop a 4 year strategy and leave after two years you were only halfway through the plan. That is kind of like quitting the game at half-time. I know that sometimes circumstances are beyond your control or God calls you to go somewhere. But where possible see it through. Discipleship is a lifelong commitment.
The Hill House 