When most of us think of “youth ministry,” there are usually several classic images that come to mind: goofy games, contemporary worship music with lots of energy, young youth ministers with cool clothes, and big summer church camps. While these things can be good (and I’m sure a lot of us have plenty of nostalgic youth group memories that look [...]
Kids aren’t stupid. Today’s teenagers face more pressure to learn well and succeed academically than ever before. AP and IB programs around the country treat high school students like college students in the amount and difficulty level of the work assigned to them. Outside of the classroom, students are exposed to a host of heavy and difficult concepts in the [...]
Student ministry is best when it is embodied. Student ministry is the smell in the basement after you and a dozen teenagers played some active games. It’s the sound of voice cracks as unashamed 15-year-old boys sing to Jesus. It’s taking communion together at the end of a mission trip and laying hands on seniors to pray for them at [...]
For the last two years, I’ve been teaching Scripture, theology, and ethics at a small Christian high school that shares space with a local church. It took me a year and a half to realize that, on one of my classroom walls, half-hidden behind a filing cabinet and obscured beneath a coat of paint, was a Bible verse, written in [...]
For the first two years of my life at college, I slept in late on Sundays. There was a hole in my heart I couldn’t seem to fill by partying on Friday and Saturday night, but Sunday service wasn’t the answer. The local church was just a place for people to come and be fake together. As a college student [...]
I work with college students and so, like it or not, I have to deal with social media. Over the years, I have resisted being saturated in the world of the ghost, the gram, the book, and the bird, but my tech-savvy students keep dragging me back into virtual spaces I find nearly impossible to keep up with. I wish [...]
