More Than Dodgeball | Youth Ministry Blog by Josh Griffin

Geoff StewartMore Posts How Is Your Heart This Week?

I had such an incredible time at SYMC connecting with so many youth workers passionate about sharing Christ with the next generation. Of the countless people I connected with in Louisville there was one that stood out. He was a young ministry volunteer who was really excited about exploring the idea of going into vocational ministry one day and he was lucky enough to be brought to SYMC by the Pastor of the youth ministry he volunteered in. He was full of energy and a sense of calling to minister to High Schoolers and his gifting was obvious. I loved hearing his heart for students .

His Pastor on the other hand was another story… I asked if he was enjoying the conference and the he began to share is displeasure with many aspects of the conference especially how tired he was of some of the people teaching at it. He seemed so jaded and bitter toward many of aspects of Youth Ministry and the conference he had spent a lot of money to attend.

I had to ask myself, how does someone get to this place? Could my love and sense of calling turn into bitter resentment, could my desire to learn from educated experts turn into resentment by not being asked be one of them? Or worse, would my hard heart and frustrations become engrained in my ministry colleagues, volunteers and students and potentially taint their ministry experience?

It’s a really scary thought, so it begs the question. Where is your heart at this week?

Can I ask that together we guard are hearts from being hardened towards one another, to value the input that each of us can bring to the table from the unique contexts each of us are called to. We need to encourage one another and affirm what we see God doing through one another but also to honor those that have given their lives to equipping us as youth leaders. To honor those leaders who care deeply to equip leaders, not to make much of themselves but to make much of the Christ.

Take time this week to encourage someone on your team, a few of your students, your pastor, your mentor or maybe someone who has no idea the impact they have had on your life or ministry. We are all working to build the same Kingdom.

GS

Add Comment March 18, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Professional Development in Youth Ministry

I am a man that loves to further my education. I know that I do not know it all and have weaknesses and have found that education in some form or another has enabled me to improve on those weaknesses as well as further my strengths. Yet, many would say that they do not need it or simply do not have the time. Unfortunately, with stagnation can come “pond scum” and getting stuck in ruts that can make our faith bland or seemingly fake. We need to keep ourselves on our toes and challenging ourselves.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. – Henry Ford

This week I will be headed to Youth for Christ’s Regional Conference for the central states. While here, I will be able to hang out with like-minded people who have a unique perspective on youth ministry and Christian faith. In this time, I hope that I will be refreshed, renewed, and learn a few things.

Continued Reading
I don’t know about you, but my stack of “need-to-read” list of books is immense and I’m constantly reading something. Currently, I have three different books I am going through at one time: The Millennials: Connecting to America’s Largest Generation by Thom Rainer and Jess Rainer, The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson, and Connect: Real Relationships in a World of Isolation by Jonathan McKee. Keep reading to be inspired, encouraged, and learning for your own faith and your ministry.

Professional Classes
I am in my first year at Denver Seminary and loving every minute of it. Honestly, in the last twenty-one years of my life, I have not been in class for one year. This education is not for everyone, but the teachers and professors that challenge your thinking and community of learners to grow with is inspiring and spurs on creativity and passion. If you have not been in a classroom as a student for years, it might be scary. But do not let that scare you and prevent you for at least looking into this adventure.

Professional Conferences
Conferences are a great idea for those that can only commit a week to their professional development. It provides the community and courses for those that are willing to take the four to seven days and invest in the events. As I shared before, I will be going to Youth for Christ’s Regional Conference along with our biennial national conference’s MidWinter in February 2012. Two great conferences for youth workers are Simply Youth Ministry Conference and Youth Specialties’ National Youth Workers Convention.

Mentoring and Accountability
While all of these things are great ideas, they should all be done within accountability. This might be in the form of other youth workers or a mentor that is investing in you. In the end, learning does have great benefits but is still work. We need to have people who are our cheerleaders encouraging us on and at the same time a coach pushing us when we do not want to go any further. This encouragement and support can only make us better and improve our ministry.

Jeremy Smith is a 26-year old youth pastor at the Air Force Academy chapel, working for Club Beyond, and attending Denver Seminary for his Master”s of Arts in Counseling Ministries. He has been involved in Youth for Christ for eight years and absolutely loves sharing the life of Jesus with teens. Check out his blog at Seventy8Productions.

Add Comment March 18, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Does Coolness Expire?

I was asked recently why/how I got into youth ministry. I told him clearly it was for the money!

After we had a good hearty laugh (sigh), I described how my great youth ministry experience as a student and in particular thinking my youth pastor was super cool got me thinking about getting into the ministry for myself. Besides giving him the Sunday school answer of “because God told me to” these were definitely catalysts the Lord used to make his calling me into ministry much more clear as I graduated high school.

This answer, however, spurred another question. He said, “You seem like a guy who students would think is cool, but you’re also a young guy. Will your coolness expire as you get older?”

I told him confidently that love, care, presence, and availability for students and a passion for God will always make me cool. It’s not about my clothes (lame), my knowledge of Justin Bieber or Kate Upton trivia (lacking), or my taste in movies and TV (vastly superior). It’s about pursuing God and being willing to engage students so they can do the same. I told him there were tons of youth pastors in their 40′s and 50′s and even more volunteers that age and older. It was a great opportunity to share the awesomeness of youth workers, especially the veterans!

I only hope I can be an effective youth worker 20 years from now and not take the sucker bait to accept the demotion to adult ministry… Well, unless God tells me to.

Matt Johnston is the High School Pastor at Journey of Faith in Manhattan Beach, CA. If you’re into it, you can check him out on twitter here and he blogs occasionally here. Also, be praying for him as he’s a Dodgers fan and baseball season is about to start. It will be a rough 6 months.

2 View Comments March 17, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts “Learn to Love” by The Cluster of Students

A song written for the 40 Days in the Word campaign (we called it The Book in Student Ministries). So good!

JG

2 View Comments March 16, 2012

Geoff StewartMore Posts Giveaway: iPrize Wheel App for iPad

There a few words I enjoy more than “Free Stuff” and here it is. Perhaps your youth group has great prizes or perhaps not, what better way to give them out than with the prize wheel and lets face it, sometimes the worse the prize the more students love it. The iPrize Wheel App is completely customizable and can be populated with whatever information you want easily and quickly. Save the hours of building and then storing the real thing with a simple App, its tons of fun, runs on your iPad and costs $5 ($10 for an even more epic version). There is more information on their website or just go straight to the App Store.

We are giving away 4 iTunes download codes away to the top responses to this question:

Question: What is the strangest / worst object that is currently in your office that you would give away with the iPrize Wheel?

Josh GriffinMore Posts Stage/Set Design from You Own the Weekend: Mission

We encourage each of the leaders of the You Own the Weekend series to decorate our youth room however they want – this week was really fun! The students from Mission Viejo High School did some cool stuff:

1) They had a “You Matter” built on stage
2) Students could come up and autograph the sign at the end of the message
3) They took pictures of all of the students at their high school and hung pictures of them all over with the words “You Matter” on the back.

Super cool – love letting students run!

JG

Add Comment March 16, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts 5 Questions with Brian Berry

Brian Berry is a youth worker and author of the just-released book, As for Me and My [Crazy] House from Group Publishing and Simply Youth Ministry. Brian was kind enough to answer a few questions for the blog!

Tell us about your new book, As for Me and My [Crazy] House!

It’s a book that flows from my everyday crazy life. I’m just your average guy who is sincerely trying to follow Jesus, love his wife, and raise his kids to love Jesus in the midst of being a full-time youth pastor. I’ve been a youth pastor in 2 churches for a total of 18 years and I’ve been married for about that same amount of time. I’m also parenting 5 kids: a freshman, 6th grade, and 4th grade sons along with 3rd grade twins: a son and the only daughter of our family.

Several years ago I felt like God spoke to me as I was praying for my marriage and I wrote down three sentences that flowed from that experience. This book is built around them, each taking up about a 1/3 of the book. They are:

the best gift I can give my marriage is a healthy me.
the best gift I can give my kids is a healthy marriage.
the best gift I can give my ministry and community is a healthy family.

What is your favorite story from the book? Were there any stories cut or deemed too far over the line?

Here’s one from the second chapter that still makes me laugh: “When our boys were little, they found great joy in naked running. No, we didn’t raise them in a nudist colony, but that didn’t stop them from running naked wherever they could. Change a diaper without a new one ready to go, and they’d likely break free running naked. Give them a bath, get mostly dry, and sprinting naked would often ensue. They evidently found great joy and laughter in the hilarity of naked feet slapping the floor and unrestricted movement of clothing-
free moments. We often would joke and call out ‘NAKED PARADE’ as they went by laughing. We even have a child who, if you sent him to the bathroom, would strip naked to poop. We called him the Naked Pooper. Thankfully, he only did this at home.”

Um, lots of stories were cut to keep the thing at a level I’d be willing to read myself. As for too far over the line… sure, but if I printed it here I’d be in trouble too Take me out for coffee and we’ll swap ridiculous stories.

That’s awesome – you’re on for coffee. Have you got a failure story from parenting just to prove you’re human?

A few months ago at Christmas we were shopping in the mall. We decided to stop and go to dinner. After we were done, we headed to the bookstore next door. We were in there for a good 15 minutes when this random lady walks up to us and says, “Hey, did I see you guys eating next door?” We said, “Yes, that was us.” Then she said, “Um, I think you left your daughter in there and she’s confused and crying.” We looked around and much to our horror, discovered Becky wasn’t with us. She’d gone to the bathroom and we left without her. Now, every time she goes to the bathroom at a restaurant she makes everyone at the table tell her we won’t leave without her before she’ll go.

I recently wanted to take my kids with me to Mexico to serve with our high school team and I had all 4 boys in my truck. I met the students and leaders at church and then discovered I had miscounted and I was 1 seat short. So I had to call my wife to come and get one of my kids. I won the loser dad of the year award that day.

do I need to go on?… this is getting painful.

Hahhaah … OK. So what would you say to the youth worker who doesn’t have a family yet, but wants to prepare for one well?

Rock on. Being married and raising kids is awesome and a joy. But it’s hard. Maybe the hardest thing you’ll ever try and do.

Getting married or having a kid will change your life, it just won’t change you. If you have trouble saying no or keeping your priorities straight between marriage and ministry now, a family will only compound the problem, not solve it. I honestly believe that the best gift you can give to your marriage and even to your kids is a healthy you. It all starts there. So take a good long look in the mirror, invite God to speak, and keep working on being the man or woman of God you’ve been created to be. Then when a spouse or kids are added to the mix, they’ll be so stoked you are who you are… most of the time

What is the key to balancing a great youth ministry life and a great family life?

Honestly, there is no key… or at least I haven’t found it. And if you read this book you’ll find out I actually think balance is a myth that we should rethink all together.

So to that end, I don’t have all the answers nor can I guarantee success. I don’t know how to do that and I’m not sure God even grants us that. But I can tell you I’m in the trenches with you in this. So I guess I’d say: take care of your soul, love your spouse, be a parent, and be a youth worker. In that order. That’s the road I’m on, and the only one I know how to write about and share with you. My conviction is that its also the path that has the greatest chance of landing myself, my marriage, my family, and my ministry in the will of God.

Thanks, Brian! And you can pick up Me and My Crazy House today!

JG

3 View Comments March 16, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Follow Up and Follow Through

Really enjoyed reading this post over on the Generation to Generation blog. They hit on two critical youth ministry concepts that you have to grasp early and often: follow up and follow though! Here’s a clip, head there for the whole article:

Sometimes one of my faults is not following up on things. I really need to write things down, keep things in my Outlook calendar to remind me to do something or to re-visit something I’ve started but not finished. Sometimes I get so busy with a new project that I forget to go back and make sure the old project I was working on is complete or if it needs some further attention. I need to do this with with my high school small group as well. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in presenting a new lesson or new scripture or a new life application that I forget to go back and see how my guys are doing with things we’ve already talked about.

I don’t forget about one of my guys who has been going through a tough time or dealing with a specific issue, I’m great at follow up with that, but sometimes I forget about the general topics we talk about. For instance a few weeks ago my guys asked if we could do a lesson on girls and dating and sex and what the Bible says about these things. We had a great lesson that night and I know I made them really think about how a relationship would look like and how to make sure that they put God in the center of all of their relationships. This past week I got a text from one of my guys asking some very specific questions about what the Bible says about an issue. That should have been my reminder that I need to follow up with all of them and see how they are doing with that topic. I need to build a reminder into each small group time to begin and ask questions about past topics and make sure everyone is still on task with prior topics.

Head over there for the rest of the thought!
JG

1 View Comments March 16, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Mission Owns the Weekend Theme Video

Great video made by students for the Mission Viejo High School weekend of our You Own the Weekend series.

JG

Add Comment March 15, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts LeaderTreks Free Leadership Style Assessment

The gang over at LeaderTreks sent me a link to a new Leadership Assessment Tool they’re launching this week! It is totally free – just know that at the end of it to get your results they will require some info about you including your email. I just took the test – got some interesting results! Would encourage you (and your team) to take it and talk about it at your next meeting together!

If you look around and carefully observe leaders in action, you will notice that different people lead in different ways. Every leader is unique, but some leaders are more effective than others. Effective leaders are responsive to their followers and are able to provide what the team or group needs at the time when they need it.

This tool will help you learn more about your leadership style. The following questions will help you discover your tendencies as you lead. As with any assessment, your results will only be as accurate as the answers you give. Be sure to answer based on who you really are, not who you would like to be or who others think you ought to be.

Take the LeaderTreks Leadership Assessment Test right here!

JG