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Flashback Friday (Sep 3): This Week’s Links From The Youth Ministry Blogosphere

One of the things we are committed to at ym360 is Networking. Our vision for networking is connecting you to people and organizations doing awesome youth ministry.

Flashback Friday is a feature where we give you the run down of all the interesting posts from the past week in the youth ministry blogosphere. Consider it our way of keeping you connected with what is going on.

This week’s posts from the ym360 Blog

• Student Leadership: The Key To Building Ownership In Your Youth Ministry
• What Students Need To Know About Sharing Their Faith
• What Is Student Leadership, Really? (With a link to Doug Franklin’s Free E-book)
• Evaluating The Purpose Of Your Discipleship Programs

Posts From Other Awesome People

We search the Internet to bring you relevant information to help you be a better youth worker. Here are some links from posts we thought were pretty great.

• {Un}Common—Jonathan Pearson writes a creative and short (the best kind!) of post about keeping your inner fire going. Not specifically youth ministry oriented, but valuable for all ministers.
• Youthminister.com—Bradley R. E. Wright wrties an article entitled, “The Lies We Buy About Youth Ministry.” An article from this month’s Group magazine. I liked this article when I read it in the mag. Thought provoking.
• Youth Specialties—Andrew Burden writes an article that got some good responses about boys, pranks, and rough-housing.
• Jeremy Isaacs—Jeremy writes a short and creative post about that one little thing you might need to change in your youth ministry.
• More Than This World—Chris talks up Simply Youth Ministry’s “SYM Conference” and posts the GREAT promo video. I agree with Chris: I thought last year’s SYMC in Chicago was the best youth conference I had ever attended. I cannot WAIT to return this year!
• Youthworker.com—From the E-journal, Jeff Dye writes about the idea of good Bible teaching vs. social events.
• More Than Dodgeball—Josh gives some insight/hindsight into their summer calendar, some changes they made, and whether or not they were successful. Interesting glimpse into Saddleback’s youth ministry programming and philosophy.
• Rethinking Youth Ministry—Brian writes an interesting and challenging post about the idea of calendaring, parents, flexibility, and program overload.
• Not A Mega Church?—A devotional thought about perspective, written just for youth workers!
• KendaDean.com—Unless you have been living in media isolation for the last month or so, you have no doubt heard of Kenda Creasy Dean’s book “Almost Christian.” I have not read it yet, but I will very soon. The guys at YMToday posted an executive summary of the book. Kenda links to it in this post.
• REyouthpastor—Jeremy Zach writes an interesting post on burnout and youth pastors.

That will do it, folks. As always, have a great weekend . . . And THANK YOU for the chance to serve you as part of the ym360 community.



Andy Blanks is the co-founder of youthministry360. Andy has worked in youth ministry for 12 years, almost exclusively writing, designing, and developing curriculum. Andy is a teacher at heart and loves to challenge teenagers and youth workers alike through his writing and speaking.

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