Every year many of your students face a very important challenge; the SAT and ACT Admissions Test.

These tests are both designed to test a student’s knowledge to ensure they will succeed in college. One’s test score also directly affects a student’s scholarship offers from the colleges they are accepted to. Sufficient to say, a quality score on the ACT or SAT is on the forefront for most juniors and seniors in your youth group.

However, more than just the students in your youth group; the SAT and ACT is important for every student at your local high schools. That is why it is essential to take advantage of these tests and help students get a better score. There are plenty of ways to go about this, but my suggestion is to offer a free ACT/SAT Prep Class for students in your area.

Its a bold idea, but would it be that hard? Simply hire someone or see if there is someone in your church that could teach a SAT/ACT Prep class. Many students would take advantage of this class and it would be a great opportunity for interacting and meeting students who don’t normally attend school.

Help student’s succeed and show them that you care about their future by offering a SAT/ACT Prep Class.

Chase Miller is a High School student from Orange County, CA. He loves to surf, tweets occasionally and would love to guest post on your blog!!

Weekend Teaching Series: Do Something (series finale, week 2 of 2)
Sermon in a Sentence: This week’s theme was compassion – we wrote letters to the children of fallen soldiers and learned about what we could do to help with the growing HIV/AIDS crisis worldwide and in our own backyard.
Service Length: 69 minutes

Understandable Message: This weekend we had 2 different guest speakers help walk our students through the second and final week of the Do Something series. First up was the chaplain from Children of Fallen Soldiers (see their website here) who talked about how we could all make a difference in the life of a child who had lost their parent in the military. He talked students through writing a letter of encouragement to a child during the service – we gave them 5 minutes or so to write down a few thoughts and a message that his organization would deliver to the children. Up in spot number two was Gil Odendaal from our missions team here at the church. He talked about Jesus being moved with compassion and the state of HIV/AIDS in the world today. In the end he led students in a prayer for those affected and infected with AIDS, and had handouts with opportunities to serve locally and make a difference.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: This week’s service was very interactive and while we didn’t do any games or funny videos we had plenty of students serving in many different ways.

Music Playlist: (forgot to write them down this week, sorry!)

Favorite Moment: It was a really fun weekend – inspiring and moving for sure. I think my favorite part was when the chaplain said that a parent whose spouse had been killed during the way would often read the letters of hope and encouragement to their children like a bedtime story. He talked about the heroes of our country being these amazing men and women – super powerful stuff.

Up next: Thanksgiving 1-off (Jessica Torres speaking)

Genius! I loved this blog post from Paul Martin about making retreats more effective. One of his ideas there is ripe for stealing and claiming as your own (I do that all the time – doh!). Check this one out below, and head there for the rest:

5. Bonus, bonus – Also, I set up a video camera in a private room to let each person check in, a la The Real World, so that they can talk about their experience in private. When each of our students graduate, they get a video edited down of each of these “check ins” so they can see the growth they had over the years.

Love, love, love that.

JG

Was talking to some younger youth workers this past week and they had a great question – when do you take vacation from your church/youth ministry? Is there a particular time of the year or month that is easiest, best or most needed personally? Vote in this week’s poll and explain your answers in the comments.

For me, I love August – the calm before the “back to school” storm. And recently I’ve started to really embrace Christmas season as well. That one is still busy at the church, but there’s plenty of time to be stolen/taken off there to give you a break from the day to day of youth group. Thoughts?

JG

My wife just pulled out the Griffin family Thanksgiving table cloth – each year we grab Sharpies and write our prayers and thanksgivings on the gravy-stained memory masterpiece. I can’t wait to see what the kids write down over the years and how it will grow up with them. My wife is crying right now at the table reflecting on the past 12 months. Priceless. Steal this idea now.

JG

OUTRAGEOUS!

IRRESPONSIBLE!

NEGLECTFUL!

I’m currently on holidays… and I have a problem.

Like me, you have probably heard a lot about appropriate boundaries and taking sufficient annual leave. Each year, in our January staff meeting, we all lock in our holidays for the next 12 months. The problem, which I assume I am not alone in confronting, is the timing of my current holidays.

At the moment, in Australia, we are in the middle of a school term. Is it reasonable for a youth pastor to take time off during school term? (To be clear, I usually take time off when kids are also on vacation.) Is it reasonable for a church to “strongly suggest” that you cannot take a week off at another time?

I’m genuinely torn about the issue. I have known/worked for churches where this isn’t an issue and known others where it has caused major fallout. Trouble is, I can make an argument for both sides. If you plan ahead, let everyone know and adequately resource others, is there a problem? If you use this time to evaluate the ministries reliance on your personality and utilise this time as a chance to train up others, are your holidays reasonable? Additionally, if you have a jam packed “holiday window between terms” through camps/mission trips and forward planning, is it fair to go six months (or more) without time off? Alternately, there are plenty of “down times” in youth ministry due to the layout of the school year. Should it be your responsibility to arrange that your holidays fall in this time frame?

If other jobs, retail particularly, can dictate time frames where their employees cannot take leave (usually November to mid-January), why should those within the church be immune to this reality?

I would love to know how youth ministers and churches have dealt with this issue.

Graham Baldock is a Youth Pastor from Sydney, Australia and has a youth ministry blog worth checking out at grahambaldock.blogspot.com

A while back I was in Costco Warehouse store [read: Sam's Club] for lunch and to stare at the display of magical flat screens that call my name when I walk in. Josh … you NEED a 75″ 3D cinema display…

After drooling over for the TVs for a while I like to head toward the food area, largely because of the incredible amounts of free samples they give out. They allow you to get a taste, see if you like it or the product speaks to you, and encourage you to buy it and then heat it up for dinner. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – either way it is a good experience and one that I began to think about over the next few days that translates to our youth ministry philosophy.

Youth Group is the sample
The purpose of our large group meetings is to expose students to the Gospel of Jesus and encourage them to see  a step they could take in their spiritual life. The message is neither shallow nor deep – it is a sample of the whole counsel of God designed to push them forward i their relationship with Christ whether they are a devoted follower or even hearing about Jesus for the very first time.

Small Group is where pick up the package and inspect it
The large group is designed to give students a taste of what Jesus is all about. Small groups are the next step where students begin to experience Christian community and are surrounded by changed lives and an adult mentor. Small groups are the place for questions, doubts, fears and decisions.

Individual Life is taking it to the checkout and making it your own
Our desire that a student sampled who Jesus is in a safe, relevant way during our weekend services. We’ve challenged them to inspect their faith and examine their lives in community and study the scriptures together. Now we want them to own their faith, that they would grow on their own and express their faith well into adulthood with Jesus. They serve on mission trips, follow Christ’s example in baptism and have a walk with Jesus that is their own.

Costco wants you to sample, inspect and own. We want our students to expose, experience and express.

JG

The Landing is a program that meets every Friday night to help students who are dealing with hurts, hangups and destructive habits. I asked Dennis Beckner, the director of The Landing here at Saddleback (and youth ministry blogger), to talk through some of the frequently asked questions about the program to help hurting students in case it would be helpful to you if you use the resource kit/program or not.

Is there a parental release form for The Landing?
There is a parental release form in the curriculum kit. We, however, do not use it at Saddleback Church. The biggest reason is some students would actually get in trouble or have to reveal information to their parents if their parents knew they attended.

How much counseling training do your volunteer leaders have?
Our volunteers are not professional counselors. They are only operating in a layman capacity. We do not pretend to offer professional counseling through this program. Students also voluntarily participate at no cost.

Have you had any troublemakers or issues where you needed security at The Landing?
Another layer of security we have is our security team. Security team sounds like a big church thing. Of course a big church like Saddleback would have that. While our security team is great, they are mostly volunteer police veterans who act as consultants when we need a little guidance or help. They’ve helped us report some problems to the authorities when mandated reporting issues come up. They’re a great safety net.

How do you train your youth leaders to help care for hurting students? You can download a free 74-page document that outlines our training, application, and several resources we’ve created since before we got started until last August when we had our Celebrate Recovery Summit. You’ll find that and a wealth of other resources by going to my blog where I’m giving away a ton of free stuff. You’ll see several freebies, nuggets of wisdom and guest posts on the topic.

What was your main focus during your early trainings?
1. Here’s what Celebrate Recovery is. Here’s our vision for students in recovery. Here’s what volunteering will look like.
2. Mandated reporting. We had a police officer come in and explain California’s laws on who is a mandated reporter, what must be reported and how to report it. The police officer happened to be one of our High School ministry volunteers. He shared not only the law, but the heart behind why a youth worker would want to report for ethical reasons as well as legal reasons.
3. Relational ministry. We discussed the youth ministry angle, what to expect when working with students and how to be a relational leader. We also walked through the first night which happend 3 days after this meeting and gave out leader T-shirts.

For more information on The Landing and see if it might be a good fit for your ministry context, hit up the link right here.

JG

I am not sure how we didn’t figure this out sooner, but after a few years of following up with new students to our ministry we never really had any sort of overwhelming response to what seemed like pretty intentional follow-up. We would call students, asked if they enjoyed coming to our group, asked if they had come with someone and always very cordially ended those conversations with something to the effect of “we hope to see you Thursday.” Nothing exciting, a simple phrase, which was true, that we did hope to see them out at youth.

What we didn’t realize until this year, that the wording of that was fairly non-committal for us, and for them. In response to this we have removed several commonly used statements that we often used when speaking to students on the phone, or in person. They include:

• Hope to see you at youth group!
• We would love to see you at youth!
• You should come out this week!
• It would be great if you could make it out this week!

The Facebook generation has pushed us into non-committal “maybe” type people and all those phrases can potentially elicit a maybe and since we didn’t expect an answer they could forget it all together. So we have changed how we speak to students and have replaced those statements with one simple question that we use before hanging up the phone or saying goodbye:

“Will you be at youth this week?”

It’s a question and not a statement and it opens doors for us to be better leaders. Firstly it requires and answer and thus commitment. If the answer is yes, of course we are delighted and look forward to seeing them. But if the answer is no, or a maybe, it allows for us to dig in and find out why? It is through these follow up questions where we can find out what is really going on. It could be school work, tests, family challenges or any number of things, and knowing the reasons allows us to be able to offer prayer to our students and support them even when they can’t attend.

Statements don’t often elicit honest answers, but questions can. I am not sure if the students have even noticed the change, but as leaders the change had had significant implications in our attendance and retention of new students. We follow up weekly with all guests to the program and simply ask if they are going to come this week. That invitation says a lot to a student and being asked to come back is a powerful statement.

This shift is minor, but the results have been significant. Try making “The Ask” when communicating with students; you might be surprised by the results.

Geoff Stewart is the Pastor of Jr & Sr High School for Journey Student Ministries at Peace Portal Alliance Church and regularly contributes GUEST POSTS to MTDB. Be sure to check out his Twitter stream for awesome ministry goodness. Want to get in on the fun and write up a guest post yourself? See how right here.

Danger:  Trusting everything a student tells you.  I know most dads want to think the very best about their student.  So, for example, if (insert your student’s name) says that they are reading their Bible, most dads take that for face value.  When what the student really may be saying is that they are spending one minute looking at the Bible so that they can tell their dad they are reading their Bible.

Solution:  Actually engage your student in conversation.  Talk with them.  Ask questions.  Probe the statement they are making.  In every arena.  Not just Bible reading, but talk with about school, and other activities.  Take time to go have Starbucks, cast a line, or go for a drive time and really talk to them.  They need it.  You need it!  This is a form of spiritual protection…knowing about your student.

Danger:  Spiritual health is just another aspect of our busy life.  Corporate worship, Christian fellowship, and Christian accountability are just other items on our long list of things that we do.  In fact, we typically do those things when we don’t have anything else to do (homework, sports practices/games, family trips, attending sporting events, etc…).  Students are taught through this behavior that spiritual health is something that we are ultimately concerned with when we have nothing else to do.

Solution:  Make spiritual health a priority for your family and its members.  Don’t miss corporate worship.  Don’t allow your students to make excuses for missing church (i.e. no one else is going, I have too much homework, I have a game, etc..)  There are certainly occasions when families miss church (which should be rare).  The idea is to promote the importance of Christian fellowship and accountability.  When you are forced to be out of town as a family, find a church to attend on Sunday mornings.  Communicate to your students that they cannot be involved in extracurricular activities that draw you as a family away from church by playing/performing on Sundays.  This reinforces the fact that our spiritual health is the ultimate priority in your family.  This too is spiritual protection!

Danger:  Tell them what they should be doing, but don’t model it in your own life.  They need to see it in you!  When is the last time your students saw you tell yourself “No” to something?  Yes, you tell them no to things (which by the way is, in many cases, the right thing to do), but they never see you telling yourself “no” for the sake of the gospel and glory of the Lord.  In my opinion, this is the greatest exposure to spiritual danger for students.  A hypocrite.  If there is one thing that a student can recognize and see instantly it’s a hypocrite. Satan can use that to either push them totally away from the faith or damage their faith significantly.

Solution:  Students need genuineness.  They need to see you talk a big game and live a big game for Christ.  They need you to be open and honest with them.  They need to know areas in which you struggle and when you mess up (you will!) they need you to man up to your mistakes, ask the Lord and your family for forgiveness, and commit to doing better for the glory of God.  Too many dads either don’t allow their students to see who they really are (which makes them hypocrites in the eyes of their students) or they simply aren’t really who they say they are (which is the definition of a hypocrite).

Tony Richmond is the High School Pastor at First Baptist Church Keller in Keller, Texas.