A paraclete is someone who walks alongside someone.  We’ve got our cleats on to walk alongside you.

As part of our Lenten observations this year, each week (including Easter) a teen is teaching an object lesson to the church. These teens are the recipient of years of children’s sermons, particularly at Advent, so I thought I would create a little holy tension in them by proposing they teach the church family in a way they were recipients of when they were younger.

A paraclete is someone who walks alongside someone.  We’ve got our cleats on to walk alongside you.

Creating memories and experiences for your teens is one of the bottom-line goals for youth ministry.  It is certainly what we at Wild Frontier have learned over our twenty years of searching and questioning.  Experiencing is also the number one task in Faith Shaping and is at the core of spiritual formation.

You are a great teacher.  You are a great Bible teacher.  But unfortunately, your senior pastor is not.  At least not enough to keep the teens’ attention.  Between worship songs that are older and unfamiliar and/or your pastor’s style of preaching and/or other reasons which you know, your youth may not get much out of church.  Since your role as the youth worker is to bridge the parents to the youth and to bridge the youth to the church family, here are some ways to help your youth engage during “adult church.”

Myth #9 – The Bible is only taught in church.

We youth workers do like to talk.  And we do like our “youth talks.”  Youth talks are an important part of youth ministry because part our “programming” (see Mythbusters) is teaching.

To answer what we should talk about, I’d like to start with the following quote from William Berger, a camp director. He posted an answer to a youth ministry series of questions for the blog, Life in Student Ministry.

“The pastor gives a few random verses to go with the topic and in 20 minutes the teens walk away with nothing more then its bad to smoke or its bad to hate people or something like that.

Myth #8 – Christians are the type of people who are overweight.

Written by Brian Farmer

Conviction can be a hard thing to be hit by, but it can be a quite positive impact when we respond properly.  I was listening to a top secular radio station in a larger market area when I heard some surprising news.  I learned that recent research has shown that Southern Baptists were the fattest of all denominations and were on average much fatter than the general population.