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Sustainable Youth and Children’s Ministry

In the world of youth and children’s ministry, there are a handful of constant factors that thrive over the long haul.  This seminar introduces participants to those factors and offers a strategic design for instilling these foundational patterns into the fabric of any ministry, regardless of its model. This workshop is delivered in four parts.

  • The Anatomy of Stuckness
  • From Stuck to Sustainable
  • Working Together: Building Teams that Win
  • You Are Here: Assessing Your Own Ministry

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The Emotionally Healthy Youth Worker

The good news is that more and more young people in our churches are now led by adults equipped with programmatic expertise, magnetic charisma, and a growing level of theological sophistication. The dangerous news is that far too many youth workers lack the self-awareness to recognize their blind spots and identify their favorite “games.” Even less of us know how to live with emotionally healthy rhythms or relationships. This session offers participants the opportunity to reframe and reconsider their own practice of ministry, beginning first with the faithful stewardship of self or considering the person of youth ministry before the craft of youth ministry.

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Building Sustainable Teams

The rise and fall of every youth ministry hinges on the leadership team on the field. This session integrates the sometimes isolated tasks of hiring staff, recruiting leaders, and galvanizing parental and congregational support. Participants learn “hernia-free” principles for stewarding the gifts, tending the souls, and choreographing the wide variety of leaders in their ministries.

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Family-Based Youth Ministry

Over the past twenty + years, “family-based youth ministry” has become a highly popular but seldom understood (and sometimes even maligned) term, often creating more confusion than solutions for youth leaders.  This seminar identifies the peculiar crisis facing youth ministry in this millennium as well as offering a clear picture of the key components of youth ministries most likely to develop life-long disciples of Christ.

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Indispensable Youth Worker

Youth ministry is one of the most rewarding professions in the world. But it also can be exhausting, overwhelming, captivating, tedious, energizing, demanding, draining, and stressful. This seminar will help you avoid being blindsided and overwhelmed by situations that a well-prepared youth worker could handle with ease. Don’t become a statistic—another person who leaves youth ministry prematurely, burned out from ministry and the church altogether. Workshop topics include:
• Initiating change without killing your ministry
• Staying out of trouble
• Helping people embrace the ministry’s vision
• Learning to love your job again

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Time Travel for People in Ministry: Rhythmic Weeks, Frogs, Monkeys, and Balconies

The mystery of time travel for stressed out, overburdened people in ministry may not be so much of a mystery. This seminar offers a few curiously named rules of the road that almost any person in long-haul ministry eventually must learn. This seminar is sure to revolutionize the way you look at your work.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Shower: Cultivating Your Inner Steve Jobs

“Once-in-a-lifetime ideas” come along about every 10 days. This workshop examines the difference between those ideas that stay dormant for a lifetime and those ideas that catalyze transformation in leaders, their students and the worlds they impact.
There are two parts to this workshop:
• Session 1 — Creative Chaos: Making the Most of Interruptions, Disappointments, & Failures
• Session 2 — Creative Soul Tending: Authentic Ministry Out of Who We Are

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Creative Engagement: Nimble Teaching Strategies for Engaging the Chronically Underwhelmed

Most teachers are not looking for more content for the lectures, but what they are looking for is a way to keep their students engaged (and awake) so that at least some of the content sticks! This seminar will equip participants with 100+ ways to spice up their weekly Sunday school and/or mid week classes to maximize the “stickiness potential” of their teaching.

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Student Leadership

Most churches know intuitively that having youth involved in leadership is essential. However, few are able to sustain a thriving student leadership ministry. This session introduces creative initiatives found in churches with exceptional student leaders and offers processes for contextualizing those practices in individual churches.

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“We Are Family” Retreat

This retreat is designed to bring together the multiple generations of your church family through three to four fast-paced, interactive sessions that weave a web of relationships across the generations in your congregation. These sessions work best with those over 9 years old.

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Generation to Generation – Planting Oak Trees

Investing in the next generation is not an assignment only for people who were hired for the job or even just for people who have “gifts with kids.” Investing in the next generation is a responsibility that belongs to the whole congregation. Dt. 6 is not a command to parents only. It is a command that belongs to all of God’s people for God’s children.

God never intended parents to have to do the raising of Godly children alone. But our culture has created that expectation by isolating kids from adults and by isolating parents from other Godly adults denying them the opportunity to walk with each other and with their kids. Kids always do better when they are surrounded (Hebrews 12:1-2) by Godly adults. But a great cloud of witnesses will not be there for kids unless we deliberately gather them.

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Parenting Teenagers

This seminar will help parents and volunteers understand the growth and change that youth experience at this stage of life. Participants will be given tools that will help them communicate with teens and lead them into a closer relationship with Christ. The influence of 21st century American culture as well as the impact of social media will be addressed. These realities reaffirm that the church must work in a cooperative relationship with parents. Adults will leave having learned how to hold up their end of the relationship with a teen — whether as a parent or a youth volunteer.

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Parenting Seminar – Stacking the Stands

During the season of life when most youth have a strong need to pull away from parents, we can actually stack the deck in their favor. Drawing on the imagery of an athletic event where the crowd can influence the outcome of the game, “Stacking the Stands” provides parents and youth workers an opportunity to learn the incomparable leveraging power of weaving a web of life giving, intergenerational relationships for teenagers. Parents will walk away from this seminar knowing they are not alone equipped with one of the most powerful tools for parenting.

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Marriage Weekend: Building A Marriage That Lasts

Nothing that is built to last happens by accident. Your marriage is no different. Building a great marriage that lasts involves laying a solid foundation, squaring the corners when framing, and ensuring that central beams can bear the load. Whether you are still pouring wet cement in the early years of marriage, or in desperate need of a renovation due to a devastating fire (or somewhere in between), this weekend will encourage both husbands and wives to revisit their blueprints, update their tool belt, and get to work. Together we will survey critical issues including: conflict resolution, in law relationships, sex and romance, health challenges, and financial decisions. Building a marriage that lasts does take effort, but the partnership should be what makes it fun!

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