If you look at the teaching schedule for the last month of my high school ministry's program year, you'll see the following topics listed: War, gay marriage, and the question, “Who's a child of God?”
What each of these topics have in common is...
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Almost a decade ago, I was flipping through a youth worker magazine and came across an ad for a Welcome Pack. Unlike most ads, this one wasn't selling something. Instead, it was trying to convince youth workers to have their students complete a ...
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As you know, my very favorite kinds of books are those that leave me in tears one moment and cause me to laugh aloud the next. Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed by Glennon Doyle Melton is definitely one of those books.
In this...
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I'm 32 and childless.
Though this has not always been the case, right now, that's an incredibly painful thing for me to say.
My husband and I have been married for 10 years. We got married young and knew we didn't want kids right away. But after...
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Three years ago, as part of a graduate school class I was taking, I conducted a thorough assessment of my high school ministry. Among other things, this assessment revealed that in the three years prior to it, only 22% of my congregation's...
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This week's review is of Masterpiece: The Art of Discipling Youth by Paul Martin
What the book's about: As it's name suggests, this is a book about the faith formation of youth. Specifically, it's about discipling teens. What makes this book...
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When I started my current youth ministry position nearly five years ago, my office was overflowing with old youth group t-shirts. I inherited hundreds of old shirts from a decade's worth of special events.
I felt as though I couldn't get rid of...
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My husband and I were on our way home from a brief trip to a local state park on Monday when we stopped for lunch and heard the news about the bombings at the Boston marathon.
Immediately, my heart sunk. As I watched the images from Boston flit...
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Next to fiction, memoir is my favorite kind of book. My love for memoir attracted me to Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, a book she calls the “happiest story in the world with the saddest ending”.
Indeed, it...
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Whenever I mention my youth ministry's rummage sale to people, they usually ask in disbelief, "You're really doing that again?"
To be sure, rummage sales are a ton of work; but as a youth worker, I love how they encourage people to purge in a...
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