By Andy Sahl Sunday mornings can sometimes be a scramble in our youth ministry.  Our (Episcopal) Parish has a large youth center that gets used for a number of events every weekend.  This means we do a lot of setup on Sunday mornings.  Sometimes that setup can lead to us being distracted from being fully present from our youth and

The ELCA World Hunger program has launched a line of Web-based resources, Hunger Education Toolkits. The Hunger Education Toolkits will help you design, host, and lead a learning experience on hunger or hunger-related topics. 100 People: A Global Village This activity will help participants see the stark realities of our world by looking at important characteristics of the world’s population.

   By Tom Schwolert Influenced by relational faith circles “To encircle young people with authentic, available, and affirming adults who support them in their faith and life journey.” The traditional model of youth ministry asserts that if we build a youth group that is big and active, we will profoundly influence the faith of young people. The reality is that

I’ve been working in children, youth and family ministry for 23 years, and in that time, there is one thing I have learned:  The longer I do this, the more clueless I am. Seriously. When I started out, I was quite certain I knew and understood the whole thing. I knew what to do…I had great advice…I was program-ready at

Exemplary Youth Ministry is really about leadership on multiple levels — your leadership as the youth minister, your adult leaders. One of the key findings of the EYM study is that the pastor is the chief youth minister. A senior pastor who champions and keeps youth ministry central to the congregation’s culture is critical. Now in case you are nodding

For years I have struggled to move beyond the “if we build it they will come” programmatic formula for youth ministry. In my quest for fidelity to the great commission I’ve asked if counting heads in our programs is not bearing fruit (as both my experience and studies like Christian Smith’s Soul Searching tell us)…then what do I aim at

Recently, I was asked, “If you were to go back and do youth ministry again, how would what you know now change what you would do?” I had quite a few things on my list, (hindsight is amazing!) and here are two of them that are directly related to the Exemplary Youth Ministry study results. So, if I were leading youth

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