This summer, my student leaders and I are reading and discussing Help! I'm a Student Leader by Doug Fields.
The week before our summer mission trip, we discussed Ch. 3 of this book, entitled “Student Leaders Deepen Their Faith.” As part of our...
One of my favorite pieces to play on the piano is Nocturne in C-sharp Minor by Frederic Chopin. One of the things I love about this piece is it's use of rubato, a technique in which certain notes are arbitrarily lengthened while others are...
When students lead discussions, sometimes they will exceed your expectations and sometimes, despite all your prayers and coaching, they will bomb.
The good news, however, is that regardless of how well a discussion goes, with proper processing,...
When I tell people that students sometimes teach and lead discussions in my ministry, I often hear something like, “Must be nice. What did you do with all your time off that week?”
What people don't often realize is how much work it is to equip...
I recently used appreciative inquiry to evaluate and reflect on our year of ministry with my student leaders. Among other things, I asked student leaders, “What are the most valuable aspects of our high school ministry?” and “How has our high...
In his blog post, Give Every Teen a Voice on More than Dodgeball, Chris Wesley said, “I have mixed feelings when it comes to student leadership groups within your student ministry. While it’s important to create leaders, to group them risks...
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...