Things Youth Pastors Should Stop Wasting Their Time On: Naming Youth Ministries
My high school youth ministry is called FLY, which stands for Faith Lutheran Youth. It's a name I inherited and truthfully, it's not one I love... Especially since I'm surrounded by much cooler sounding youth ministries:
The Edge.
212.
Fusion.
Velocity.
The Zone.
Elevate.
I'll admit it: Sometimes, I suffer from youth group name envy.
As a result, I've often considered changing the name of my youth ministry, something lots of youth workers do after starting a position at a new church in order to better reflect who they are, what their ministry's purpose is, and give teens a cool name they can utter in school without embarrassment.
I've even gone so far as to brainstorm new youth ministry names. I've spent hours coming up with creative, catchy, meaningful names that cleverly relate to Scripture.
Once, early on in my ministry at my church, I even went so far as to present these awesome names to my student leaders.
They looked at me like I was nuts.
“Why would we want to change the name of FLY?” they questioned in unison.
“Because it's an awful acronym,” I thought to myself.
Instead, I said, “Wouldn't it be great to have a cooler name? Wouldn't it be awesome if our name had meaning? Wouldn't it be great if our name was better known? Don't you want to be able to talk about our youth ministry with your friends?”
