Saturday, May 10, 2008

Confrontation in Youth Ministry Part 2

Confrontation in Youth Ministry is always intentional. I think about the teenagers in my youth ministry and wonder if they have been confronted about things in their life in the last month. I wonder if anyone has talked to them about things instead of talking to others about them. I have a great bunch of teens in our youth ministry, but many of them are also human and do human things. Here are some questions for us to think about:
  • Are we called by God to confront?
  • When you hear the word to confront, do you instantly think judgement over love? If you think of judgement, you probably aren't confronting very much. If you think love, you are probably confronting and have seen a lot of life changes when you confront.
  • When you confront, have you seen changes in the lives of your students?
  • Is there a teen you need to confront right now about their actions or lifestyle.

Confrontation will never usually just happen. When we as youth workers see our students or volunteers that need some help, we need to believe that God wants us to help them. We need to confront. When is the last time someone confronted you as a Youth Worker?

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Grand Theft Auto--500 million in sales during first week

The first-week sales of Grand Theft Auto, a game hailed as a brutal and satirical masterpiece equal to films like The Godfather, beat the $400 million scored by last year's Halo 3 from Microsoft.

I'm going to ask the men in our ministry about this tonight and see what they think about their generation playing this and what they think when they play it.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Confrontation in Youth Ministry--Caring

Caring is what teenagers sense in us when we talk to them, look at them, talk about other people around them, and generally the way we live our lives. If your students were asked if they could choose 3 people to take to an island where they knew they would face tough obstacles and would look at these 3 people for support and care, would your name come up? I think for some of my students, the answer would be yes, but for many more if would be no. That is something I need to continue to work on.

If you want to be able to confront effectively, the person you talk to must know you care. They will know that if you care about them when they first enter the youth room, when you see them in the parking lot, and wherever else in the city. They will know you care about things by the way you treat your spouse, the way you talk about your elders/pastor, etc.

Caring about a student leads to that student opening up to you. Caring about a student leads to you confronting them when you see them diverting from the path of truth. Caring about a student is always intentional and that is what we will discuss next time.

Here is a question you could ask your students: When is the last time you felt a leader didn't care about you? What did they do that made you feel that way? Have I ever made you feel that way?

Let's be about caring!

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Meetings in Youth Ministry


As a Youth Worker, would you rather work or go to a meeting? Or is being in a meeting work? Would your student rather sit in your "meeting" or work with you doing something? What is more beneficial to them? To me? To the Kingdom?

Confrontation is always spelled Caring

Confrontation is always spelled Caring

As a part time YP, I don’t have the luxury of spending lots of time with students so I need to make the most of every minute I have. Over the years, I have had several opps to confront individuals. Over the next few days I am going to share my experience and hopefully, it will spur some other ideas on what you have done. If confrontation is always spelled caring, I thought it would be appropriate to make Caring an acrostic so here is what we will cover over the next 6 posts:

C—Caring
A—Always Intentional
R—Rarely Inflammatory
I—Insightful
N—Never Naive
G—Genuine Follow-up

I will cover Caring in Confrontation tomorrow.