Three things teenagers have to see in you before they trust you.

1 - Authenticity.

Are you real or putting on a show? Teenagers hate to be lied too.  If your private life does not line up with your public persona, you are lying to them. Eventually the truth will come out and they will not trust you. Teenagers have plenty of people in their life that consistently say one then and do another. Don't be one of them!  If you are who you say you are. If you keep your word. Teenagers will love you. 

Teenagers just want you to be yourself. If you are a 34 year old Dad who likes country music, then don't act like a hipster around them. If you are really into sports, then be into sports. If you love reading then talk about the books you read. 

Teenagers are trying to discover who they are. Because of this, anyone who knows who they are and is comfortable in their own skin is very magnetic to a teenager. Just be yourself and they will love you! 

2 - Expertise.

Teenagers are looking for someone who has been down the road a little further than they have. Someone who really knows the Bible and can unpack in a way that is interesting. Someone who totally understands money and isn't afraid to share the secrets they have learned. Someone who has mastered the art of writing, teaching, photography, media and graphic design is someone that a teenager will be want to be around. 

3 - Love. 

Teenagers spell love T-I-M-E. When you take the time to get into a teenagers world, they will begin to get into yours. 

CLICK HERE -  to check out my ebook titled "12 things every Youth Pastor needs to know".

Learning to pace myself. Taking small steps toward big things.

I want us to reach a lot of teenagers for Jesus. I want us to have a strong presence in local schools. I want to build up teams that train teenagers to become leaders in the local church. 

I want what I want and I want it now! However, I know that it is the small methodical steps that will move us toward our goals, not large leaps. Because of this we are walking our way through a series of questions that will get us to where we need to be. 

Where do we want to be in the fall?

We have a very detailed picture of what our youth ministry looks like as far as team members, ministry departments, school outreaches, small groups and facilities by October of this year. 

What do we need to do in order to get there?

It doesn't do anyone any good to have an idea of where we want to go but not map out exactly how to get there. So we have come up with a six step journey to our fall destination. 

Step One - Capture a Clear Vision

Step Two - Give the students ownership. 

Step Three - Create Momentum

Step Four - Raise up a team of leaders. 

Step Five - Have strong summer gatherings. 

Step Six - Keep walking out step two through five. 

The last ten weeks we have been walking through the game plan.

Last night was a strong step in the right direction. We had very strong attendance, new volunteers meeting, kids responded amazingly well to the message on authority and everyone had a blast during our activity time. 

Next week we will take a few more steps.

We will continue our "Look at life a whole new way" teaching series.  We will get our new team members officially plugged into their host, registration, cafe, production, and activities teams. We will open our mini Cafe, as well as launch our new game room area with Fooseball, Air Hockey, 14' Video Game Screen, and board games for students to hang out and enjoy. 

We are not where we want to be. But at this pace, we will be right where we need to be when school starts back up in the fall. I'm learning to pace myself and so should you. 

Here are a few questions for you and your team.

Where do you want to be in the fall? 

What is your game plan to get there?

What do you need to start doing that you are not?

What do you need to stop doing that is keeping you from moving forward?

Who do you need to add to your team?

What is your game plan to add them?

To continue to grow as a leader and ministry be sure to check out GROWTH VIDEOS and YOUTH MINISTRY UNIVERSITY

HELP! I CAN'T DO THIS ON MY OWN. Four questions I ask myself in order to build a team.

Nine weeks ago when I jumped back into the role of Youth Pastor here at TheCHURCH at Visalia we only had a few volunteers serving in the Youth Ministry. If I was going to Pastor a growing church and lead the student ministry to where it needed to go, I was going to need more help. A lot more. 

So we started to ask questions and walk through a step by step process of team building. Last night we held a VIP Banquet for people that are interested in finding out how they can make an impact in the lives of the next generation. Sixteen adults filled out applications and were added to our volunteer team! 

I've found that statements like "I need more help", "I have too much to do", or "I can't do this on my own", never changes anything for the better. Statements don't cause change, questions do. 

Here are four questions I ask myself to help build a team. 

Why are we doing this ministry?

It is so important to clearly define why you are doing what you are doing. If people don't know why they are doing something ... they will quickly stop doing it. Give people a cause to role their sleeves up and rally around. 

What needs to be done each week?

What are the things that need to be done each week? At ECHO, (our student ministry) teenagers need to be greeted. We need to gather the information of all first time guest so we can follow up with them. Students need a great worship experience and message that will inspire them to change. We need to give teenagers a compelling reason to attend. Because of this, we we will have food for them to eat before service as well as activities for them to enjoy after the service. We need to follow up with those that attend. And students need to a place to draw close to each other as they draw close to God in a small group environment. 

Because these things are what need to be done; we will establish a ministry department for each of these items. We wrote up job descriptions for Host Team, Registration Team, Service Production Team, Cafe Team, Activities Team, and Community Groups. 

It is important to note that we wrote up the job descriptions before we recruited the workers. God will never give us anything that we are not ready for. So we create the ministry and then God will give us people to do the work of the ministry. 

Who do I know that I could personally invite?

I've found through the years that many high level volunteers are not primarily moved by corporate pushes to volunteer but rather personal invites. So I when I need help, I always ask myself, "Who do I know that would be great to serve in or run this ministry department". Then I set up a coffee meeting, cast the vision of "why", hand them a written job description of "what", and invite them to join the team. 

How can we inspire individuals from the church body to serve?

One of the best ways to inspire a large group of people to begin to serve in our ministry is:

1 - Inspire them with a message on serving. Faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. So teach a message on the "why" of your ministry and give them the faith they need to serve. 

2 - Give them an opportunity to respond quickly. In the lobby or online have people sign up to attend a special VIP Banquet to hear about the roles they can play. 

3 - Announce and offer sign ups for at least 3 weeks after your message. This will give more people a chance to sign up, and allow potential attendees to put the date on their calendar. 

4 - Hold the VIP Banquet. Feed Them. Inspire Them. Inform Them. Give them a chance to sign up. 

We have walked this through and are currently in the process of adding 16 new volunteers to our team and ministry departments. If this will work for us, I know it will work for you. 

If you are wanting to master the art of Team Building, I would like to invite you to enroll at Youth Ministry University our twelve month online training course for Youth Pastors. The cost is only $75  for the entire year of training. Find out more by CLICKING HERE

10 things to do when your service sucked.

We make sure that everything looks great on our social media posts. The room looks full. The stage looks amazing. The people look like they are having a blast. But lets be honest. Every message isnt epic. Every gathering isn't packed. Every service isn't amazing. Sometimes the worship was flat, the message was off, people are bored, and something that sounded great in a creative meeting, just didn't work. 

You probably can't tell it by my Instagram photos, but I've had more, "that was horrible" moments in ministry than I care to remember. So after 24 years of great days, good days, and "what in the world world" just happened days. I thought I would talk about the 10 things we do when our service sucked. 

1. Remind ourself of the "win".

Every time we have a service that is subpar, we get together as a team and remind ourself of why we do services in the first place. We gather together on a weekly basis to "Bring people to Jesus and help them live like Him".  In order to do this our services need to be "remarkable" and "life altering". Our worship and message needs to be so good, powerful, or thought provoking that people will leave not only remarking to friends about what they experienced but most importantly begin to change the way they live. 

2. Be honest.

When we gather together as a team we have to trust each other enough to be completely honest about what happened. Nothing will change without an open and honest discussion about what we did that was not remarkable and life altering. 

3. Celebrate the wins. 

Some things did not work, but some things did. We don't want to focus only on the losses of the day. We want to take some time to celebrate the wins. Maybe someone came to the church that had not attended in a long time, accepted Jesus as their Savior, or starting serving behind the scenes. These are huge wins. They might not change the fact that our message was flat, but they did build momentum in some way and they deserve to be celebrated. 

4. Fix at least one thing before the next service. 

Some things that go wrong are going to take some time to get right. But most weeks can be fixed with small tweaks. We don't ever want to procrastinate, we want to be proactive. So we fix at least one thing before our next gathering. 

A few years ago we had an exceptionally bad weekend. The worship was flat. The message was subpar. The attendance was down and our offering was low. So I text my friend Perry Noble to see if he had any advice on how to bounce back from a tough weekend. The following three points are some tips that he gave me. We have applied them ever since.  

5. Realize it wasn't as bad as you thought. 

Because we are so invested in what we do, we look at it way more critically than others. Sometimes we are much tougher on ourselves than we should be. When the service is off a bit, we want to be honest about it but also realize it probably wasn't as bad as it seemed. 

6. Know that one bad service will not kill you. 

Jesus said that he will build His church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. If Hell itself will not stop the Kingdom of God, I doubt that bad song selection in one church service will stop God from redeeming the world. One bad service will not kill us. 

7. Keep your head up. 

Don't pout. Don't sulk. Don't put your head down. We are leaders. We can't lead anyone anywhere with our head down. We need to keep our head up and lead our church, lead our people, and lead our team. 

Making Jesus known to the world is the most important work taking place on planet earth. Because of that ... 

8. Don't Quit. 

Don't quit striving for excellence. Jesus deserves your best. Your people deserve your best. Don't have a "poor me" mentality and quit when times get tough. 

9. Do better next time. 

Regroup. Be honest. Fix problems. Do better next time. It's just simple. 

10. Remember it's never about us. 

It's not about our guitar solo. It's not about our funny story. It's not about our chance to shine on stage. The reason for gathering together is to bring people to Jesus and help them begin to live like Him.  When we have a bad service, we need to remember it's not and never will be been us.  

I hope this has helped. Now go do something great this week for Jesus!

If you want to get more practical advice check out Youth Ministry University and our Build Growth Curriculum. 

Why did we do an outreach event and not reach out to the schools?

Well, before I answer this question, let me give you some back-story. 

September of 2013 our church plant started gathering weekly. Out of our love for the next generation, we decided that our first full time hire would be a Next Generations Pastor to oversee Kids and Youth. Over the past two years we have seen many great things happen in our kids and youth ministries. Eight weeks ago our Next Generation Pastor left to seek a position as a Senior Pastor. When this happened I knew that hiring another person to run these departments was not the fix. We had to firmly establish the WHY and the WHAT of our youth ministry before bringing in another person to run it. So I decided to step in and become the Youth Pastor as well as the Senior Pastor of our Church.

When you start leading something it is more important to discover “where you are” before you decide “where you are going”. So over the past eight weeks in leading the student ministry I’ve been looking at where we are as a group. Here is what I’ve discovered. 

It is not a large group.   Before April we had about 25 students coming to our midweek gatherings on a regular basis. 

Still building identity. The group of individual teenagers that gathers is still trying to discover their identity as a group. They are friendly with each other but there is not a lot of cohesion between individual students. We are in one place, but we are not together as one. 

Young in age and faith. The majority of the students that attend each week are between the ages of 12 to 15 and many are very young in their personal walk with Jesus. 

Not enough trained volunteers. The few people that are a part of the youth ministry are incredible, but there is not very many of them and most are not trained in how to walk out leadership in a youth ministry environment. 

The students are hungry.  From the very first week in meeting with the students, I could see that they are hungry to do be a part of something special. If given the chance they would bring their friends, serve in ministries, and make an impact in their friends. 

Once we took the time to discover where we are, we started looking at not only where we want to be at in the fall, but what steps do we need to take as a group in order to get there. 

We will begin to grow the group.   Numbers matter because people matter. Every Number is a name! Every name has a story and every story matters to God. We want to reach more teenagers for Jesus! 

We will establish clear vision.  Vision is the thing that brings different types of people together. Give people a “common cause” and you will have “community”. 

We will build a strong, well trained team. Take the summer to establish teams of students and adults to run and facilitate the weekly work of the ministry. 

Use students hunger for more to gain momentum. The students want to have more fun, hang with more friends, and have more gatherings. So we will use the desire they have for more physical things, to give us the opportunity to see God do the spiritual things they need. 

Ok, now that we have the back-story set up. Lets answer the question that I’m blogging about today. Why did we do an outreach event and not reach out to the schools? 

Knowing that the students are hungry for more, we need to build a volunteer team, have a common cause to build community, and reach more students than we currently are. We decided to do an outreach event. We wanted to give teenagers a physical reason to attend, so we could share Gods word personally, and they could begin to be renewed spiritually. 

Four weeks ago we started planning out, and building momentum toward our first ever "Black Light Food Fight". Here is what the night consisted of:

Before the service- the first 25 teenagers at the door would receive a free T-Shirt.

During the service  - we would do a message titled “The Value of You”.  You can view this message by Clicking Here

After the service - we would give away a Hover Board and do a giant food fight. 

In order to reach out to more students on this night, we decided to: 

Announce it for four weeks in Youth Service. 

Announce it for four weeks in our Weekend Services at TheCHURCH. 

Do Social Media Pushes. 

Give students “food fight” bracelets so they could hand them out and personally invite their friends. 

The reason that we decided to not do anything “corporately” as a student ministry in the local schools like; school lunch visits, school assemblies, or passing out flyers to students. The reason we did not work with FCA, Sports Teams, Music Departments, or other student organizations is simply because we know all of those things work. Reaching out to the local schools, would have caused a lot of students to attend our event and that is exactly what we did not want. 

With where our youth ministry currently is, reaching out to the schools would have caused us to have more students attend than our student and volunteer base could have handled. 

We would have had an incredible night. If we would have done what we know to do in the schools, we could have had 150 to 200 students show up for the Food Fight and it would have been a complete loss.

Here are three reasons why:

Current Students:

Our current students would have felt completely lost by the overwhelming number of visitors to their group. They don’t even know each other yet. With the size that we currently are, to have 100 to 200 strangers in the group would not have brought the group together it would have torn it apart. We need our students to know this is their group, so they stick around, get plugged in, pursue Jesus and become a foundation that can be built upon. 

Current Team:

The team we assembled could have run the Black Light Food Fight with out much trouble. However, we could not have continued to minister to 100 to 200 students on a weekly basis, The team currently lacks the size and training to minister effectively on a weekly basis to that size of a group.  

Lost Momentum:

Because the ministry is not ready to add 100 to 200 teenagers. Going into the schools and getting all of these kids to show up would have been an incredible night, but we would have quickly lost all of the students that we gained. Pouring 5 gallons of milk into a one gallon container makes a mess. We are not looking for a mess, we are looking for spiritual momentum in the lives of teenagers. 

Those are the reasons why we did an outreach event and didn't reach out to the schools. However, what we did do was inspire and equip our students to bring their personal friends to the event and it worked. 

8 weeks ago we had 3 adults volunteering ... at the food fight we had 18. 

8 weeks ago we had 25 students attending ... at the food fight we had 73. 

This outreach event was a great win. Because it gave us what we need the most. It gave us momentum and not a mess. 

We will take the summer to cast vision, build teams, build relationships, and build disciples so that in the fall, we will be ready to reach out to the area schools! We started.  

welcometoecho.com

Here are some questions for you and your team:

Do you know where you currently are?

Do you know where you want to go?

Have you thought through the steps you need to take in order to get from where you currently are to where you want to go?