Successfully casting a vision for your organization is a crucial part of leadership.
You have to know how vision works in the life of the leader, and you have to know how to communicate it to the people around you.
But what’s the point? What’s the payoff?
I believe there are at least four resulting benefits when a vision is cast successfully.
One of the more disturbing trends I’ve seen in my experience in youth ministry is the perceived lack of need for church. This is something that seems to be an ever-growing problem.
I hear it all the time:
This really bothers me, for several reasons. But let me state it succinctly: You need the church. And the church needs you.
Over the weekend, I took several of our teens to the Winter Retreat at Rock Garden Christian Camp.
This was a weekend that a few other area youth ministers and I have been planning since back in September.
In my opinion, it was a huge success!
We took a bit of a different approach this year rather than how we had been doing it. We brought in a different type of speaker, not your normal local guy, and used a band we’d never worked with before for the worship. Again, it was hugely successful.
We asked John Luzadder to speak to our teens. John is a former youth minister who now works with CIY, overseeing Wilderness, a youth minister’s retreat that I attend every fall.
I was a bit unsure just how all our teens would relate to John. John deals more with youth leaders in his current position, and while he was in the youth ministry trenches in the past, I wasn’t sure how our students would take to him.
He knocked it out of the park!
Our theme for the weekend was “@God: More Than A Facebook Friend“. Over the course of the weekend, we examined each aspect of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and then wrapped it up with a “What does this mean to me?” session.
On top of the excellent preaching John brought about God, here are a few of the things I took away from the weekend:
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.
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.
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).
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!
I will not miss attending Wilderness every year for a number of reasons. Here are four of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.