In light of recent research and our commitment to the importance of parents in youth ministry, FYI invited a handful of youth pastors and short-term missions experts to help us better understand how to invite parents to walk with their students in the justice journey.
When faced with the question, “How do you minister to families?” many of us balk, stutter, or change the subject. While we care deeply about the families of our youth ministries, we cannot always articulate or strategically plan for the ways we care for, equip, and encourage them. This article will help put some language around three of the most common approaches to family ministry, in addition to giving you some tools you can use right now to assess your approach to families.
Chap and Dee Clark recently co-authored Disconnected: Parenting Teens in a MySpace World. This brief excerpt from Disconnected highlights the emerging reality of midadolescence, along with offering faith-building strategies that can help parents move kids toward a growing faith in the midst of the midadolescent reality.
When you look at the students around you, what do you tend to see—their potential or their hindrances? Their advances or their setbacks? This second report from our Urban Youth Workers in America (UYWA) study takes a closer look at the “full-ness” and “empty-ness” of both urban kids and non-urban kids.
Most of us have no trouble focusing our ministries on the spiritual needs of students — it’s what we do best. But how carefully do we look at the “whole kid” in our approach to youth ministry? These findings from FYI’s Urban Youth Workers in America research dig up some powerful truths about the reality of holistic ministry.
How do the kids in your church know when they have become adolescents? How do they know when they have become adults? As we re-think the value and necessity of rites of passage in our ministries, we may help bring clarity to these life stages and help students through the zones of identity confusion.
What does the future hold for youth ministry as we know it? Kara Powell caught up with author and professor Ryan Bolger to learn from his research and perspective on the shape of youth ministry in the emerging church.
We all scratch our heads wondering how to respond to the loss of students from church after high school. Research on this pattern, as well as the patterns of those who return to their faith later, may inform our response as churches who have the opportunity to nurture them — both to prevent some from leaving and to welcome back others who have left.
Think about the last student who showed up at one of your youth ministry events for the first time. Did they come back? If not, why not? If so, that’s great, but do you know what your ministry did that kept them coming back to your church?
