Category Archives: Youth Ministry

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7 Steps To Defining A Purpose And Vision For Youth Ministry

This post is part of the Foundations Of Youth Ministry series.  Check out the rest of the series!

Defining a purpose and vision for youth ministry isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

Defining A Purpose And Vision For Youth Ministry

In fact, the process is extremely easy; and it’s lamentable that so many ministries operate without one. Ministry is so much more effective when a clear purpose and vision is defined.

Before you begin the process, make sure you understand the difference between purpose, mission and vision.

Here are seven steps to help you define your ministry’s purpose and vision.

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Four Reasons Why I Won’t Miss CIY Wilderness

Every year, I attend a youth minister’s retreat in Colorado Springs. I won’t miss it for anything. It’s called Wilderness, and is hosted by CIY (Christ In Youth).

Christ In Youth

CIY is a youth ministry organization that impacts youth like few others can. Their purpose is to “change youth, change the world.”

I’ve attended several CIY conferences over the years, for Junior High and High School students.

But they also offer a retreat designed specifically for youth ministry professionals and volunteers. It’s called Wilderness. And it’s incredible!

CIY Wilderness

I will not miss attending Wilderness every year for a number of reasons. Here are four of them.

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How God Gets Your Attention: Things We Can Learn On A Summer Mission Trip

We are about to wrap up our trip to American Indian Christian Mission, our mission trip for this summer. If you haven’t read my first post about this trip, you can see it here.

It’s been a really great trip. There are 24 people from our church on this trip, mostly teens. And they’ve been stellar on this mission trip.

I’ve watched teens step up do things they’re not comfortable doing.

Mason and an Apache boy

Each morning, we work around the mission campus, painting, cleaning, fixing fence, clearing brush. Later in the afternoon, we head out to Canyon Day for a tent revival, where we are responsible for the children’s activities. We are doing it VBS style.

Each night, we’ve seen 40-50 Apache kids of all ages come and join us. And our teens have reached out and developed some great relationships.

They’ve also stretched themselves in directions they’ve never imagined. I’ve watched some of our teens teach lessons, lead worship, assist kids with crafts and playing games with them. I’ve seen teens fall in love with Apache kids, knowing that they may never see them again, at least this side of heaven.

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Mission 2011 – Summer Mission Trip To American Indian Christian Mission

For the last several months, I’ve been planning and putting together a youth mission trip for our church. We are on that trip right now. As I have the opportunity, I will post updates on our trip here , so that you can follow along.

AICM - Mission 2011

We left last Friday morning and started our trip to American Indian Christian Mission, in Show Low, Arizona. AICM works primarily with the White Mountain Apache and the Navaho tribes in north eastern Arizona.

There are 24 in our group. We are getting quite a bit done.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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8 Reasons Why I Love Summer Church Camp

Summer is here, and with it come a busy schedule of church camp!

Church camp is one of my favorite aspects of youth ministry.  It’s busy.  It’s exhausting.  It’s long.  But it’s extremely effective and incredible fun.

Rock Garden Christian Camp

One of the drawbacks to spending so much of my summer at camp is that it takes me away from my wife and kids.  That means that Heather is at home with all five kids, on her own for a while.  But she and I both realized the importance of camp and the boost it can be to youth ministry.  So it’s a sacrifice we are both willing to make.  On the plus side, our camp is only seven miles from our home, so they can come down and hang out every day if they wanted to.

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The Difference Between Purpose, Vision, and Mission

This post is part of the Foundations Of Youth Ministry series.  Check out the rest of the series!

I believe that it is crucial to define exactly what youth ministry is all about.  When we establish some parameters, it can move us on dramatically toward realizing success for the Kingdom and the Church.  It can give us direction.

Compass and Binoculars

As I struggled to define my ministry early in my career, I had a rough time.  I was taught what to do in my youth ministry classes, but there was very little discussion on the why or the how to do it.

It took me several years to figure out some of those things.  After many ministry experiences, some good and some not so good, I developed a concise philosophy of ministry.  I sat down and wrote out the reasons why I do youth ministry the way I do it.  I detailed what I thought were key ingredients in my ministry, and dug in deep to discover why they were so important. Finally, I had a definitive statement that described why I did things they way I did, but I was still missing a very important piece of the puzzle.  Why was I doing ministry at all?

So I decided I needed to figure that out.  And that was tougher than I thought it would be.  Do I need a Purpose Statement?  Or a Mission Statement?  Or a Vision Statement?

I found out that the answer is yes.

On the one hand, I need to be more broad.  A philosophy of ministry helps me see the details and specifics of my ministry, while I need to develop the big picture.  But on the other hand, I need to get very specific, and determine what ministry, my ministry, looks like.

Many people talk about mission, and vision, and purpose.  But not many people understand what these things are.  These three words get thrown around a lot and are used interchangeably by a lot of people.  But there are some key differences.

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Foundations Of Youth Ministry

I’ve been in youth ministry for over twenty years now.  And in the world of youth ministry, that is a long time.

Foundations of Youth Ministry

Over the course of two decades, I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve learned a lot of things that they never taught me in my youth ministry courses in college.  I’ve had to establish a lot of things to help me out.  Things like a solid vision for my ministry, a strategy for implementing that vision, the answers to the questions, what, why, and how.

I’m not suggesting that I’ve figured it all out.  I am saying that I’ve put together some tools, and tweaked them over the years.  They seem to work for me in the ministries I’ve been a part of.  Maybe they’ll work for you; or at least give you some ideas on how to develop your own.

This post will serve as a landing page for the entire series as I write them.  I’m looking forward to this series, and I hope you are too.

I will continue to add ideas here as I think of them, and write articles covering each of these topics.  If there is something you’d like to see covered, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments!