Two years ago my family and I picked up and moved to a new city and a new church. It’s been a crazy good couple of years for us, and we’ve loved every second of it! However, the transition didn’t come without it’s challenges. Over the past couple of years, I have discovered three must haves…
Most of us have seen hot youth ministries or churches suddenly crash. Why does that happen? Business guru Verne Harnish has researched the same phenomenon in the business world. He noticed that rapidly rising companies often kill themselves at the same time they are growing like crazy. In fact, it’s because they are growing like…
I remember when I first started out in youth ministry. It was all about the numbers. I felt successful when I could brag about the amount of kids I had showing up on a Sunday night. This gave me a false sense of validation and patted my growing ego. I soon found out though, that my…
One weekday noon I found myself eating lunch with about a dozen or so men who were on the sidelines as far as church involvement was concerned. At one time, all had been heavily involved in a leadership capacity in their church. Some belonged to my former church — others belonged to churches where I…
We don’t hate church meetings as much as we say we do. We just hate lousy church meetings. At least that’s the contention of Patrick Lencioni, author of “Death By Meeting.” When a fellow youth pastor recommended Lencioni’s book, I assumed the author was handing out tips on how to have shorter meetings and to…
Take heart, don’t lose heart. Have you ever found yourself discouraged in ministry? If you’ve been serving in ministry for more than eleven days, I’m going to guess that your answer is “yes”! I hit an all-time low several years ago. The church was growing, and we had just opened a new facility, but volunteers…
I was recently meeting with a ministry director who had been through a bit of a tough year. From an outsider’s perspective, his ministry was going well. Kids were involved and growing in their faith. Volunteers were showing up, engaged and leading with excitement. Yet something was a bit off. This director was leading several…
What do growing youth ministries have in common? What makes them so healthy? What causes them to grow while others don’t? I’ve never met a youth worker who didn’t want their youth ministry to grow. That would be like finding a 5 year old that doesn’t like cookies! It would be weird. However, even though…