“We need to fire the youth pastor.” Those words, spoken to my boss, drew me into what became a negotiation process between church leaders and a young youth minister. It was one of many times I have been…
Jackie Hill Perry stated it plainly when she said, “The next generation, I imagine, will be one worth watching.” This was Perry’s opening line to her speech at the MLK50 Conference in Memphis, Tennessee this past April 3….
My Incredible Lack of Patience Early on in my ministry, about twelve years ago, I was doing student ministry in a small rural church. I had one student, we will call him Jim, who wanted to sing with…
In the last decade, youth ministry has seen a movement away from the historical focus on law and morality, toward the proclamation of the gospel: the Good News that God loves and redeems sinners through Christ. However,…
I always considered myself a gospel-centered youth pastor. There was a period when I even created a blog entitled “Gospel-Centered Youth Ministry.” But looking back, the irony is striking. The gospel has always been present in everything I…
What can two authors from the 1960s, writing about the problems of public education, teach student ministers today about practical ministry? In the case of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, the answer is,…
I was recently looking for a file in the archives of my email when I came across a letter I’d written years ago to a college where I had applied for a job. I was floored when I…
It can be hard to get students to consider a topic in depth when, on a surface level, they already support it. How do you keep students engaged, wanting to go deeper? How do you help them differentiate…
Over a decade ago, Christian Smith published a groundbreaking study about the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. The researchers coined the terminology, moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD), which became a buzzword in youth ministry circles for several…
