Category Archives: Youth Ministry

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Benefits Of Involving Students In The Life Of The Church

This post is part of the Foundations Of Youth Ministry series. Check out the rest of the series!

One thing I’m convinced is necessary in youth ministry is student involvement. Several years ago, youth ministry could be a one-man show, with the youth minister as the main star. I’m not so sure how effective it really was, but it seemed to be the main trend in youth work for quite a while.

Youth with hands up

In order for a ministry to student to be effective today, the students have to be involved, not only in the life of the youth ministry, but in the greater church as well.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing about this necessity. Today, I’ll address some of the benefits of involving student in the life of the church. My next post in the youth ministry category will take a look at some of the dangers and challenges. And the third part of the series will look at some examples from my ministry, both successful and unsuccessful.

Benefits of Involving Students In The Life Of The Church

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Engage: Philippians

Engage: Philippians

Our annual Winter Retreat at our camp system was this weekend. We called it Engage: Philippians. Our goal was to present the letter of Philippians in a fresh, new, exciting and deeper way than our students have ever understood it. We had an incredible weekend!

This is typically a weekend focused on high school students. This year we opened it up to college-age students as well.

I’m not sure how successful we were. The weekend was a great success, sure. And if we’d focused on strictly high school students, it would have been a huge success. If we had geared it to only college-aged students, it would have been smaller, but still a great weekend.

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Youth Ministry Posts at JeffRandleman.com

Youth Ministry

One of my blogging goals for 2011 is to refine JeffRandleman.com into a more specific writing platform. I’ve narrowed down my range of topics to four main categories that this blog will focus on, and removed a couple of topics to their own domain.

Family posts can now be seen at http://family.jeffrandleman.com. And my hobby of photography has been moved to http://photography.jeffrandleman.com.

Instead, JeffRandleman.com will focus more specifically on a few areas. One of these areas will be the topic of Youth Ministry. My goal, for now, is to write on this topic twice a month, on the second and fourth Mondays of each month. The frequency of posts about youth ministry may increase as I become used to a busier writing schedule this year.

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The NightMare

The NightMare

The NightMare

We took some of the teens from our church to the NightMare tonight. The NightMare is a Christian themed haunted house in Tulsa, OK, presented by Guts Church. They have done an exceptional job with this presentation.

While we were in line (close to the front, within the first couple of hundred), we watched another five to six hundred people arrive and line up after us. The NightMare will see approximtely 40,000 people this year, and have the opportunity to present the Gospel to them. That is awesome!

Based on the quality of the presentation we saw tonight, we estimated that Guts Church probably invested well over $100,000 into this opportunty to present the Word to the world. That’s awesome, too!

They started us off in a mortuary, where we saw a body in a coffin. They announced that we were dead, and that this was the beginning of our NightMare. After leaving the mortuary, we entered an elevator, which descended into hell.