I participated in mission trips as a kid and then worked for a mission trip organization in college. Both ends of the spectrum had a profound impact on my faith. Neither equipped me to plan a trip from start to finish.

My first year in ministry, I...

What do you want to be when you grow up?

As a kid, it seemed like someone was always asking me this question.

For a long time, my answer was teacher... Until it was architect and then later, writer.

Never once was it engineer, which is what my...

Let's do a quick word association.

If I said the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, what would you say?

Perhaps you would say words like mainline, traditional, denomination, bishops, synods, liturgical, baptism, Paul, or grace. These are...

The idea of Rachel Held Evans' book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, is simple. For a year, Rachel took the Bible literally, focusing on one specific command (targeted at women) each month. It's not an entirely new idea. A.J. Jacobs did it in The...

In her address to the Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama said, “We are playing a long-game here." Though the First Lady was, of course, talking about the long-term political agenda of the Democratic party, I believe she...

In our culture, everyone wants to be great.

Students do. Their parents do. And if we're honest, we do too.

For this reason alone, Steven Furtick's new book, Greater, will gain an audience. After all, how awesome would it be if our faith in Jesus...

A year ago, I visited Kiziba Refugee Camp in western Rwanda.

This camp is home to more than 20,000 refugees from the Congo, where an on-going civil war has resulted in the death of more than 3 million people. It is a conflict rarely talked about...

About a month or two after returning from a summer mission trip, I typically hear mission trip participants say these things:

"I don't feel God here like I did there."

"I'm forgetting things."

"It's starting to fade."

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A member of my church council recently asked me, “What do you feel is the key to our church keeping you as our youth worker?”

To me, this is an interesting question, one I believe is often overlooked in favor of it's close relative, “When and why...

While on vacation, I saw this sign, an advertisement attempting to lure passerby's into a shop because of it's “cool stuff”. Each time I passed this shop, I was struck by how much this shop's advertisement mirrors the way we so often do youth...

On a recent mission trip, I interacted with adult leaders from across the country.

One was permanently attached to her phone. She called her office every 10 minutes to see if a crisis had developed she alone could solve—from 800 miles away....

The most important element of a mission trip is not worship, fun or service. Instead, the most important part of a mission trip is processing or debriefing your day with your team in order to help students wrestle with what they see, hear and do....

These days, there are few leadership roles I'm not willing to give students.

This is a significant change from my early days in youth ministry, when there were few leadership roles I was willing to give students. In those days, my student leaders...

For about a year, I've been captivated by an image that for whatever reason, I have not been able to forget.

The image comes from the final day I spent serving at an Easter Seals camp for special needs kids and adults. For three days prior, I...

As the election approaches, I continue to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus politically. Walk into an evangelical church and many people will suggest this means voting republican. Walk into a mainline church and you'll hear the opposite:...

As I said in this post, I love Jesus and the church.

As a youth worker who loves Jesus and the church, I believe that one of the most important things I can instill in my students is a love for the church. To do this, I encourage my students to...

I am, without a doubt, a church geek.

As a kid, church felt like my second home. As a tween, I remember being upset when I was asked to serve on the worship committee rather than the staff-parish committee. As a college student, I loved to go...

One of my favorite questions to ask people at the end of the school year is, “As you think about this year of ministry, what are you particularly thankful for?”

This year, I used this question with both my students and my colleagues. In the...

At my first youth ministry job interview, I was asked, "How do you plan on fundraising the thousands of dollars required for our summer mission trip?" As a 21 year old, I'm sure I looked like a deer caught in the headlights as I fumbled to answer...

Recently, I heard a well-known Christian speaker give a sermon called, “What happens when the dream dies?”

The funny thing is I heard this speaker give the exact same sermon five years ago.

At that time, I remember sitting in the convention...