flashback friday (april 8): 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

• 6 Ways To Equip Your Students To Talk About Their Faith
• Introducing "Youth Worker Boost"
• ym360 Trends and Culture Update (April 5)
• Is Your Youth Ministry A Battleship? Or A Speed Boat?

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.

• Doug Fields--Probably my favorite post of the week. Doug Fields nails it here, as he often does, with a super-practical post on dealing with criticism. Take a moment to read this. It's well worth it.
• Terrace Crawford--Love this article from Terrace. Short with good insight: "5 Reasons Why Teens Stop Showing Up."
• Life In The Middle--This is a great post by a friend of ours, Adam Reed. Adam writes about what his youth ministry does to help middle schoolers transition into high school. There are some good suggestions here.
• Doug Franklin--Doug shares a really cool story and weaves in some solid principles for developing leaders. A recommended read, for sure.
• Chad Swanzy--This is a great little tongue-in-cheek post about a "serious" and potentially crippling "disorder," that I myself have struggled from at times. Do you struggle with PTD?
• Small Town Student Ministry--Love this post about the 5 excuses we make for having sub-par youth ministries. A lot of truth here.
• Life In Student Ministry--This article entitled "10 Tips For Youth Pastor Search Committees," by friend Tim Schmoyer, is such a good article. But the question is: how can we get it in the hands of the right people? :)
• Fuller Youth Institute--We alluded to this study and the link between social media and depression in a tweet this week. But Brad Griffin from Fuller expounds on this study really well. There's a lot here, especially some good advice about talking with teens about social media. Definitely worth a read.
• The Disciple Project--This post made me really think, which is what Paul does a good job of. It's a short post about the possibility that you might be overexposing yourself to students if you're over-planning, or simply doing too much. Interesting stuff.

That's all the links for this week. As always, have an awesome weekend . . . And THANK YOU for the chance to serve you as part of the ym360 community.

Share your thoughts with the youthministry360 community:

• As usual, we want to hear your thoughts. Any particular post catch your eyes? Make you think? Did you disagree with anything? Let us know! Your voice makes the ym360 community stronger.