Ash Wednesday and Lent ideas for youth ministry
Ash Wednesday and Lent invite us to slow down and make space for deep, meaningful connection with God.
Sounds ideal, right?
For youth pastors and those who disciple teenagers, Lent offers some unique opportunities and challenges. Although Ash Wednesday and Lent are Spirit-filled antidotes to teens’ busy, stressful, over-full lives, we know that teaching teenagers to slow down, reflect, and pray is no easy task.
If you’re wondering how you can incorporate Ash Wednesday and Lent reflections into your youth group activities, we’ve got you covered. Read on for ideas and resources on worship, prayer activities, curriculum, and teen-centered reflections to help simplify your planning.
Click on the questions below or scroll down to read the full article.
Why is Lent relevant to teenagers in today’s world?
Our teenagers are busier, more stressed, and more overwhelmed than ever. During Lent, we can take away some of the things that typically distract, keep us busy, or use up our time, attention, and money. Instead, we shift the focus toward reflection, prayer, and powerful moments of connection with God and each other. This allows more space for God’s presence and goodness in our lives.
Practicing a yearly rhythm that invites your teenagers to reflect on these meaningful markers of the Church year can help them ask questions, address their doubts, understand Jesus better, and deepen their faith.
What is Ash Wednesday, and why is it important for teenagers?
Ash Wednesday marks the first day of Lent, the 40-day period (not counting Sundays) leading up to Easter. In an Ash Wednesday service, people receive the mark of the cross on their foreheads. As the cross is applied, the person applying it will quote from Genesis 3:19: “From dust you are, and to dust you will return.”
Ash Wednesday is an important opportunity for teens’ faith formation. It’s a moment for their church to be transparent about pain, loss, injustice, sadness, loneliness, and death. Teens are acutely aware of these realities, and they want to talk about them in their churches and youth ministries with people they trust. When we avoid tough topics like these, teens see right through us. Adults earn teenagers’ trust when we show them we recognize and care about their concerns, that we, too, feel our mortality and the hurts that exist around us, and that we’ll be real with them in the face of their questions, doubts, and fears.
Ash Wednesday is an invitation for teens to face the darkness of our world alongside one another and adults they trust, and be reminded of who we serve and with whom we serve. It’s a time to do an inventory of pain and sorrow in our own lives, in our local communities, and around the world, which we can carry forward through the season of Lent.
How can youth leaders explain the meaning of Lent to teens?
Here’s one way to explain it to your youth group:
Lent is a 40-day practice that helps us notice God. If you’ve heard of Lent before, chances are one of the first things that comes to mind is giving something up. That’s part of the practice, but not the whole picture. When you stop doing something you’re used to doing (like eating chocolate), you notice different things. Lent is a season when the Church throughout the ages has chosen to pause and notice something.
That “something” is the journey of Jesus to the cross. Alongside his journey, we’re also called to notice our own journeys toward death and resurrection. In many traditions, Lent starts out with Ash Wednesday, when many Christians choose to wear a cross or smudge of ashes on their foreheads or hands as a symbol of the pain, suffering, and loss that are part of life. It’s a reminder to turn away from distractions and toward God.
Sounds kind of morbid, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing. “Lent” actually means “spring”—the season of new life. So in the midst of all this thinking about pain, death, and loss, there’s this uncanny hope that rebirth is possible. Lent is not a season where we are supposed to feel wracked with guilt or strive to earn God’s approval. God already loves us! Rather, it’s a time to reflect, to notice the painful and the beautiful, and to talk about all of it with each other and with God.
How can youth groups create a meaningful Ash Wednesday experience?
Explain what Ash Wednesday is and why we observe it, and allow students time to reflect quietly on their lives, sorrows, and big questions. It might help to move to a different-than-usual setting that invites quiet and reflection—maybe your church sanctuary or prayer chapel instead of your youth room.
Incorporate elements that lead to reflection, such as:
A time of quiet worship
Journaling
Writing questions, fears, or doubts on a big piece of butcher paper and writing hopes, joys, and celebrations on another sheet of paper
Explain to students the symbolism of marking foreheads with a cross and invite them to go to a station where they can do this. If your congregation holds an Ash Wednesday service and you’re inviting your teens to take part in it, communicate with students and parents in advance about what Ash Wednesday represents and why we observe it. (For more about what Lent can mean for families, read Lent’s invitation to parents.)
You could also make Ash Wednesday the first in a multi-week series that will help students better understand trust, compassion, or Jesus’ character and their own.
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Our low-prep, ready-to-use On-the-Go curriculum can help you take your students on a journey to discover more of who Jesus is this Lenten season. Select from the prayer activities or FYI's most popular curriculum series, Can I Ask That? and create a lent curriculum that fits your ministry.
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What are some creative Lent activities for youth groups?
Use Lent to give something up and make space for something new.
Lent is an opportunity for both “subtracting” and “adding.” When we give something up, it allows us—and God—to fill that void with something new. Together with students in your youth group, come up with a list of things to add or subtract in this season. Check in each week on how things are going.
Use Lent to help teenagers in your ministry develop prayer practices.
Lent provides time and space for quiet and reflection, as well as the chance to establish or develop habits like a prayer practice. Fuller Youth Institute’s On-the-Go curriculum includes many prayer activities you could try—here are a few that pair well with the Lenten season:
Use Lent for mindfulness and reflection.
Mental health experts recommend regular reflection—like mindfulness practices—as an effective way to manage normal levels of anxiety and maintain mental health. The Fuller Youth Institute’s Daily Replay prayer is an Ignatian Prayer of Examen adapted for teenagers today. Try this prayer during Lent to help teens become aware of God’s presence, review the day with gratitude, pay attention to their emotions, forgive and ask for forgiveness, and look toward tomorrow.
Use Lent to notice pain and grief in your community and take action.
Help your young people name the “ashes” or signs of death, pain, or fear that plague your community, social systems, local leadership, and even the church. Then, spend 40 days listening together to the ways we may need to rethink our values, the ways we have forgotten those around us, and how we can align with what God is doing in our neighborhoods.
What are some age-appropriate things teens can give up for Lent?
When we give something up during Lent, we allow space for something new. If we give up an hour of video games or TikTok, what can we do with those extra 60 minutes? If we stop buying mochas, what could we do with that money instead?
Encourage teenagers to try giving these habits up during Lent to make space for God to do something new:
Give up a social media app or video game
Give up gossip or complaining
Give up buying their favorite drink, candy, or snack
Give up sleeping in late on Saturdays
Give up buying new clothes
Give up using headphones during certain times of the day (like the bus ride to school) or on a certain day each week
Have a weekly no-screen day (either individually or as a group)
Encourage teenagers to make these creative commitments during Lent to allow God to speak to them in new ways:
Commit to switching phones to “do not disturb” by a set time each evening
Commit to a daily time of prayer
Commit to getting a good night’s sleep
Commit to spending more time noticing and connecting with other people
Commit to spending more time connecting with someone important to them, like a parent, pet, friend, older relative, or mentor
Commit to volunteering: walk dogs at an animal shelter, play basketball with kids at an after-school program, help serve a meal at a community center, pick up litter at the park, help an elderly neighbor bring their trash cans to the curb
Donate some of the money they would have spent on treats or new clothes
Download Sticky Faith Every Day plus 2 other free downloads!
Sticky Faith Every Day is a FREE 8-week curriculum that helps students reimagine and re-engage spiritual practices as a way to notice God more every day.
How can youth pastors and leaders help teens deepen their faith during Lent?
The six weeks of Lent can be a valuable opportunity to experiment with your youth group’s usual rhythms and format.
Here are some ways your group can explore listening to God more deeply together:
Focus on developing a prayer practice through new prayer habits, such as a daily walking prayer, or a one-off or multi-week series on prayer.
Add stations to your worship time that encourage reflection and prayer. Set up a few areas in your gathering space where students can read a different Bible passage related to Lent and invoke their senses through lighting candles, drawing, adding to communal art, writing prayers, kneeling, or other ways of bringing the passage to life.
Lead a series using Fuller Youth Institute’s Can I Ask That? curriculum to explore Jesus’ nature together. Here are a few that would pair well with Lenten themes:
Encourage students and leaders to give up something together and talk about the experience weekly.
Provide students with journals to use during Lent and hand out (or text) prompts for Scripture reading and reflection. You can also use those journals together during worship times.
Create and use a Lent Bible-reading calendar or experiment with an audio Bible reading app or playlist (and check out How to Read the Bible with Teenagers).
What are some modern ways for teenagers to engage with Lent?
Try giving up something non-traditional.
Maybe you and the teens in your youth group fast from social media, commit to not gossiping, or decide not to spend money on something you don’t really need, like boba or fast food. Notice how it feels to live into that challenge and what it allows more space for. Perhaps students may find they start thinking about people differently when they don’t gossip out loud, or that their boba money can go toward an animal shelter or homeless ministry in your community.
Read prayers and Scriptures of lament together throughout the season.
Remind teenagers of the long tradition Lent holds in the Christian Church. Let them know that when we feel sadness, grief, and doubt, we are part of a large collective of people who have experienced the same feelings across time and place. Exploring these themes in Scripture can help bring people together.
Invite students, adult volunteers, your ministry team, and others at your church to help prepare daily audio Bible readings.
Create a calendar of Bible readings for students (and their families), and challenge them to commit to reading or listening to a particular passage on a particular day and time. Have each person record themself reading a passage, then text that audio recording to the group. This allows students to hear Scripture in varying and familiar voices throughout Lent and feel connected to others moving through life and faith together. When you meet, ask students to reflect on what they noticed about that week’s passages and where and how they encountered God.
Lead your students in a series on a Lenten theme.
Find research-based curriculum compassion, trust, gratitude, doubt, lament, and prayer available in the Fuller Youth Institute store.