Regardless of the size of your youth ministry or church, you absolutely need a website. People of all ages are online now, and in order to remain relevant, you need a presence in the digital age. To top it off, a lot of things have changed over the past decade. A plain information page doesn’t [...]

It’s that time of year again. Summer is winding down and kids are slowly trickling back into a regular schedule. Youth groups often see a sharp decrease in attendance during the summer months, but teens come back to youth during the fall. This is also a time when you might see new faces from kids [...]

When you are hosting your own summer camp, finding a guest speaker can be a daunting task. Do you take the recommendations of others? Book a major national speaker? Or do you just wing it and trying speaking at it yourself? Here are a few tips to help you find the best youth retreat guest [...]

Recently I came across a free website called Huddle that offers a free online workspace for managing files, tasks, calendars, and so much more. It struck me that this might serve a youth pastor very well considering his or her day to day activities and duties. The service acts as a type of “workspace” that [...]

If you are a youth pastor for more than five minutes, you have heard of Teen Mania Ministries,the parent ministry of Acquire the Fire. However, what many people don’t know is that Teen Mania is also the parent ministry of Global Expeditions, an organization whose mission is to go, send and fulfill the great commission. [...]

So you’re ready to kick off a youth ministry drama team? It isn’t as easy as it seems. Take it from me (a person who “launched” a youth group drama team like five times). Teens are not committed by nature. They need persistent adults to keep them driven and excited about the task at hand. [...]

Being in youth ministry for several years, I know what it means to have to relentlessly come up with group icebreakers for services each week. And inevitably, at least half of them were total duds. It gets quite tiring and frustrating after a while I recently found this icebreaker book by Ken Sapp and Joshua [...]

Let me just start off this post by saying that this is not a paid advertisement and I am not getting some kick back from recommending this camp to you. Camp Padre rocks my world. And I mean that. Last January we had the opportunity to meet Jaroy Carpenter, camp director of Camp Padre. He [...]

So you have a great group of kids and you are psyched about what God is doing in the youth ministry. But there’s just one hitch: you have a low budget and don’t know how to keep up with other ministries that have all the bells and whistles. Well…don’t worry about, do something about it. [...]

February is just around the corner and we all know what that means: Valentine’s Day. For middle school and junior highers, it’s a giggle fest. For high schoolers, it’s an opportunity to get mushy gushy with that “special” someone. I have always been a proponent of optimizing this time to talk about the pressures, expectations [...]