Youth Ministry Networking Links from this Past Week

• Churches work with public schools to bless students, parents & teachers. (Featured Link) Mission Houston connects churches with schools to provide mentoring, prayer, financial support, and service projects. “‘We can do more by working together,’ said Jim Herrington, former director of missions for Union Baptist Association.”
• Churches team up to provide fun festival for kids. I keep seeing more and more of these kinds of events popping up. Similarly, youth pastors from Pennsylvania put together a midsummer festival-like event for teens.

Youth Ministry Links from this Past Week

• Mission trip to nowhere. What if your mission trip had no destination, no plan, you just hopped in the van with your kids and ministered to people as you went? What a cool idea.
• The differences between working in small towns and large cities. Ministry will look different depending on your context!
• Back-to-school event ideas, other than parties. Great ideas that don’t unrealistically over-hype youth group.

The Youth Leader: Personal Reflections of Doing Ministry to Teens

• Why I am in Youth Ministry. Reminders of why we do this, especially after the heartache that typically comes in this kind of ministry.
• Veteran youth leader discusses wanting to make an eternal impact, despite the challenges of school, sports, and other activities.
• What I didn’t learn in seminary. Can you guys relate? I actually feel as if Fuller has done a good job training me in the areas listed here, but other seminaries might not.

Other Links Worth Reading

• Is campus ministry different than ministry to the general public?
• Why Young Life is Evil. A personal anecdote of a bad experience with this parachurch organization. Is it wrong to target the influencers, with the hope that they will influence others?

Have you found any helpful links from the past week? If so, be sure to leave a link in the comments section of this post.

• A couple of youth ministries team up to do mission trips – A couple of churches from Kansas City partner to do several mission trips to St. Louis. Teaming up to do mission trips can create great opportunities to save on the expense on the trip, but also to work along people of other backgrounds. Imagine having a downtown urban church team up with a suburban church to do ministry in Mexico. Does anyone else have experience doing mission trips together?
• A youth ministry does fundraising for a local school sports program – This has got to be one of the coolest ways to serve the local community I’ve seen in a long time. It would be so cool if several churches partnered together to raise funds for any local high school function, like prom (Imagine seeing this: “Due to the generosity of the local churches in our area, prom is only $10″) or another typically expensive school function. What else could youth ministries team up to raise money for in the local community?
• What do youth leaders need most? – It’s much more simple than you might think, though very hard to come by when you try to do ministry on your own.
• Youth Ministry Seminar for only $5 – Bring your volunteers and student leaders to this event. They’re touring 12 cities in Canada and the United States (Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Portland). Serve another church’s leadership team and offer to pay for their registration costs (it’s cheap enough, ain’t it?).
• Simply Youth Ministry’s 4-year small group curriculum giveaway – Josh Griffin is giving away one new LIVE Curriculum to one person just for commenting on this blog post. Contest ends Monday, so hurry up! [Update: Contest is over!] The curriculum looks promising, though I have not had a chance to review it. Has anyone taken a look at this new curriculum yet?