Youth Ministry

National Youth Workers Convention

November 25, 2013 By Gavin Richardson

This past weekend we had the opportunity to teach as well as photograph the National Youth Workers Convention. NYWC has been one of those gigs we look forward to each year. There is just so much happening, trying to capture all the various experiences is a real challenge. Youth Specialties, the entity that runs the conference, uses our photos for their website and print promotion materials. Almost every photo used within their conference guidebook was a photo of ours. It’s fun to give back to the folks at Youth Specialties because they have offered so much inspiration, education and encouragement to myself and other youth ministers.

The last two years we’ve had at least one, sometimes more, photos as cover images for the NYWC web homepage. The first time we noticed this happen we were quite excited.

If you would like our help in capturing your live event or conference contact us. We are glad to help provide photographers who know what you need to highlight your event.

Scenes of a National Youth Workers Convention

November 30, 2011 By Gavin Richardson

Both Eric McFarland & I had the opportunity to do some photography for the Youth Specialties / YouthWorks folks at the National Youth Workers Convention in Atlanta two weeks ago. Here’s some of what you experienced or missed depending on your attendance.

Crazy Youthworkers

Mark Yaconelli

Joplin MO Youth Leaders

Starfield

DJ Promote

Going to the Game!!

Taize' Services

Give a child a Dream

Sasha & Shaun

the Big Room

Saying Bye to Tic

Kenda Creasy Dean

"Posers" & "Paparazzi"

Awkward Interview

Connecting with Old & New Friends

Lunch Break

Artistic Meditations

Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit. He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN. If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) through http://about.me/gavoweb.

Getting Tired of This Stuff : Rant

November 2, 2011 By Gavin Richardson

I happen to be quite nerdy about my craft. Every day I get emails via google news on a variety of keywords associated with my craft we call youth ministry. For over three or four years now since I’ve been getting these emails I get daily discouragement about many individuals that are part of my profession. It seems each week there is some ‘youth minister’ that is being charged or convicted with preying on the teenagers that they were entrusted to mentor, encourage, inspire, and shape into followers of the way of Christ. Instead they construe in their heads that their position of authority (translation = power) grants them the attention of girls (and yes, sometimes boys) that they are physically loved by the teens.

If you do a google image search for ‘youth ministers’ chances are you find a slew of photos that look either like 1. church directory photos or 2. a mug shot (some directory photos can look like mug shots, yes).

I am not smart enough to really know some root cause to this behavior, lack of respect for self, discipline, low self-esteem, addiction to porn, the list could go on. This is just my rant.

Now, I do know that not all youth ministers are engaging in this behavior. Thank you! Thank you! for being who you are & doing what you do.

btw: the screen capture for the photo used today was from todays news digest, the top 3 items. sigh..

7 Youth Ministry Numbers You Really Should Know

October 4, 2011 By Gavin Richardson

This article was originally published October 4, 2011.

One of my favorite pastors had always noted, we need to be ministering to who we are accountable for, and that isn’t always who is on our rolls. Rolls are a terrible statistical number.

In the business world a good “ROI” or return on investment in a project is considered pretty successful if it reaches the 5% mark (sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the endeavor). That doesn’t transfer very well to the church world, where every person counts and everyone has to be involved. This is the reality we live with as youth workers.

Years ago my friend Mark DeVries suggested me to a church in my area that was looking for a youth leader. His Youth Ministry Architects had done consultant work with that church and in their report (which Mark gave to me & was made available on the church website) gave me some new understandings to “numbers” in ministry and what is feasible. I have carried much of those numbers with me in keeping some idea on the growth and health of the ministries I have been a part of.

Some numbers have been around for years, and you will probably hear similar in some youth ministry workshop that you go to in the future. Some of these Mark has written more extensively in his book Sustainable Youth Ministry.

1. 10% of the worship congregation makes up a healthy reflection of numbers in the youth ministry. 200 people in church on Sunday then you can range around 20 teenagers. Sure you can be healthy and be higher or lower for varied reasons, but that’s a good measure. It is important to distinguish the worshiping congregation over the church rolls. An unhealthy congregation cannot expect to have a thriving youth ministry that exceeds its own metrics. If it does it may not be sustainable. Churches that look for youth to be the magic pill saving their church are going to be disappointed. Rolls then become your new outreach focus, not group.

2. 7 the amount of Friends a teen needs to have in the youth group. (This I believe picked up from on of the myriad of Chap Clark writings) You know the question every teen asks when signing up for an event or deciding on signing up, “Who is going to be there?” They need to know that there will be a collection of friends there to talk to and hang with. This number ensures that someone will be there that they know. Small groups, and small youth groups, help to fill this need. The hospitality of a group helps with this. Cliques are killers to this. Notice who isn’t there, list out their friends from the group, are those friends coming? Can you list seven teens? If that sounds silly just think about where you go that doesn’t have some friendships involved. It is a number that is important.

3. 4-6 is the amount of teenagers that an adult can know intimately in a spiritual mentor type role. This makes a great case for the need for many youth leaders in your ministry. Jesus, though he had 12 disciples, is known to have kept just a few of the fellas closer to him and invested in them more than the whole group. This is fluid, a teen you are tight with this month you might have fallen away from the next because you have started to invest in another teen. That’s natural progression and perfectly okay in my book, but you want other leaders in place to fit that spot. So if you have a ministry of 25 youth, then you need 5 adults who are fully invested in the lives of the teenagers, that is if they are equally spread out. Best to have 6 or 7 so that everyone is known.

4. $1,000 per kid per year. The folks at Youth Ministry Architects through their work over the years have given a range of 1,000 per kid per year spent on youth ministries in the budget & staff salary for the youth ministries. In the case of my small church, we have 32 youth on rolls, 3 that are irregular attenders (family dynamics), so for the 29 I feel we are accountable that would be $29,000 a year for the budget. We do not quite meet that, but we certainly know it and we work to fill gaps as we can. We also know that we are not going to have bust out growth years without some financial investment.

5. 50 the general ceiling of teenagers that a paid staff person can keep up with on an effective basis. Do you see business managers who manage 50 people on their own? No, businesses know it’s a stretch and ineffective so they’ll throw structures/positions in place to help. Youth ministries are generally without that. The solo youth pastor at a 200 youth church (active) might be the manager of 50-60 adults throughout the year. Not to mention the programming and administrative tasks. If this is you, you need to be asking for some help. If help is not available in paid help then search out ways to fill in some gaps with parents gifts and talents. But again, that becomes more people in the equation.

6. 20% ceiling for youth ministry is where numbers can begin to become unpredictable. At this point the numbers associated with investment do not always work directly with growth.

7. 1 Family is what you have so don’t sacrifice them. If you are like me then had some ceremony that was before God where you took some vows to another person and thus created a family. You probably didn’t have anything in the vows to uphold, protect, and nurture a youth ministry. If you are single with/without a child/ren similar applies. There is a responsibility to that relationship first no matter what the church says. That isn’t to say that your family cannot do that for a youth ministry, just remember where your priorities and commitments stand first and foremost. Way too often I am seeing youth leaders get caught up with the youth culture and being the ‘everything’ for the teenagers that they are leaving nothing for their family, and sometimes leaving all together. Keeping up with numbers, growth, friendships, and other metrics are great, but the most important number is your family.

As with any statistic you can claim it means something different, but these are pretty observable if you go through writing down who you know really well right now. It probably isn’t that many if you are honest about it. If there are kids who come infrequently then write down who their friends are in the group, it probably doesn’t come to 7. Numbers can fluctuate depending on contexts of environment. Areas that have a single set school system (one junior high and high school) could bring in higher numbers than those who have a spread set of school systems.

So have fun playing with some #’s.

Shalom
-Gavin

Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit. He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN. If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) through http://about.me/gavoweb.

How Not to Burn Down the Church & Other Failures

September 27, 2011 By Gavin Richardson

We went from a quiet prayer-filled reflective room to one with giggles & a thick cloud of smoke. Ah, the joys of youth ministry.

For over a decade I’ve been putting together some really cool prayer station worship experiences for teenagers, youth workers, and regular lay adults of all ages. I was apparently pretty good at this – so good that I had some CDROM project created through Abingdon Press some years back. But all those great experiences and still two failures haunt me.

1. I was a new junior high guy to a large methodist church. This worship stuff was part of my hiring so I talked the senior director to let me set up a worship space. She agreed, so I set some of the youth into the motion of setting up sacred space. One prayer station had a cross & candle in a glass baking pan and the idea was to write on some sheet of paper and burn the paper. Yes, totally not creative, but it’s one of the stations the kids wanted to do so I tested it out. It could work. Worship starts and the youth & adults are moving through the space no problems. As things moved along I saw a sudden bright light out of the corner of my eye. One of the kids lit his little paper on fire & dropped it into the glass pan. However, his burning paper missed the pan and landed on the rest of the papers. So, being brave he picked up all the papers and dropped them into the pan. Now, instead of some smoldering papers we had a decent bonfire (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). We did have enough of a fire to melt the candle so now we had oily wax floating in the pan. Then comes in another brave teenager with a cup of water to douse the flames. So with the introduction of cold water to a hot glass pan (you may know that physics does not appreciate…) and Boom! there goes the glass. Thankfully that did get the flames out, but there was quite a bit of cleaning up to do.

2. We had Lent series one year and, as was customary with our Lent services, we tried to some ‘different’ type of stuff for worship. For some reason there was a lot of permission given to play with Lent (just don’t touch Christmas & Easter). We were exploring an Exodus scripture where the Israelites were ‘pitching their tents’ at the base of the mountain and God had these clouds of smoke on the mountain. So I had this great visual idea of setting up a mountain scene with a tent at the base. How cool to generate some smoke as well! So I proceeded to set up a large cooler in the choir loft, draped fabrics and papers down the sides to give a mountain look. Then set up one of my camping tents at the bottom, just behind the altar. It looked great! Just as service began, I put in the last step, dry ice put into the cooler with some water! A little smoke generated as worship started, “This is going to be awesome!” I said to myself. Then, nothing… Still nothing… Worship came and went and it was very far from awesome. Dejected, I looked into the cooler, wondering “Why?” and saw that the dry ice had totally frozen all the water in the cooler. Now it was just a big block of ice. Apparently using to much dry ice can do that.

I share these perceived failure moments in my years of ministry because they are just that, perceived. People actually liked the mountain & tent visual. They didn’t know there was something else supposed to happen. I even apologized to our lay leader for not creating smoke. She graciously & honestly said, “It was great, I don’t think God needed the smoke.”

That smoky Sunday school classroom where we almost burned down the church was no longer a calm contemplative worship space, but it was still sacred. You can bet that over seven years later that is one of, if not the, most memorable moments in worship as a youth. It also became bonding moment for the group. From that incident on, when planning worships together, there would inevitably be a statement “Let’s not burn down the church this time,” with a collective laughter following. I still think of those two instances in ministry, and that is my own issues at play. I know in my heart they were how God imagined them working out.

May you create and take risks in ministry. They might not go how you imagine it, but they will go how God imagines.

Shalom
-Gavin
Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit. He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN. If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) throughhttp://about.me/gavoweb.