After beginning my new role as the Minister of Youth and Family at my congregation last summer, I immediately examined the vision for the ministry I’d inherited. While I didn’t find it particularly compelling, I knew the best thing I could do was...
With Halloween on a Wednesday, many youth workers have wrestled with whether or not to hold youth group. Of course, this isn’t the only time we face this dilemma. We also wrestle with this in instances of bad weather, over winter break, and during...
If there’s a seasonality to hiring in the church world, it’s now. Churches work hard during the spring and summer months to ensure that they have a full staff in place before the program year begins in the fall.
A common part of the interview...
As a young youth worker, once I figured out that I shouldn’t be writing my own curriculum, I’d spend hours pouring over existing curriculum, trying to figure out what to teach the teens entrusted to my care.
I had no idea what I was looking for in...
The event’s due date passed and my numbers were bleak.
Worse, I simply hadn’t heard from the majority of people in my youth ministry.
Were they not interested?
Did they have plans?
Had they simply forgotten to turn in the forms?
That night, I...
As a youth pastor, as much as you might like to be the one who’s in charge of your church, you’re not. Whether it’s another person in the youth ministry or an associate or senior / lead pastor, you’ve got a boss who directly supervises you.
One of...
A few days after returning exhausted from a week-long mission trip, I woke up to the worst kind of e-mail, a nastygram from a parent chewing me out for a comment made on the mission trip.
Upon reading it, my first thought was “Seriously? I spent a...
My congregation is led by a team of lay-leaders called our Congregational Council, a group similar in function to a board of elders. When I was first hired nearly nine years ago, I was asked to write a monthly report to keep the council informed...
As the Church Council President adjourned our congregation’s annual meeting, the high school teens swarmed me.
“How can it just end like that?”
“We still have questions about the budget!”
They quickly rattled them off, rapid firing one after...
I took most of the week off between Christmas and New Years, as did most of my colleagues. During that time, my family vacationed in San Antonio. We explored, rested, and had fun. We shut our laptops and distanced ourselves from our jobs.
When I...