flashback friday (mar 18): 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

• Why Adults Don't Volunteer (And What You Can Do About It)
• Finding The Courage To "Step Out Of The Boat"
• Youth Ministry Essentials: Teaching Students The Story of The Bible
• Have Some Fun With These "March Madness" Youth Group Games

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.

• Youthwork Talk--Our new friend Phil is a great youth minister. He has written a series of 5 posts on Family Focused Student Ministry. This is a link to the first one. These are very in depth posts. My suggestion is that if you are interested in the ins-and-outs of family focused student ministry, take some time over the course of a few days and pour through these. Extremely valuable stuff!
• Crosswalk Student Ministry--This post captures precisely my reluctance to jump on the "Glee" bandwagon. It's a great post entitled "The Glee-ification of Teen Sexuality." Short and thought provoking.
• Welcome Backstage--Noah Watt writes passes along a thought provoking and inspiring post. Noah always writes such solid stuff. His blog is one of my favorites.
• Youth Ministry Geek--Good friend Chris Davis passes along a GREAT tip for those of you who keep tabs on youth culture. YouTube has a "YouTube Trends" site that tracks popular videos and subjects.
• Youth Ministry.com--Doug and Matt continue the series they started entitled, "Help Your Leaders Discover Their Place In Ministry." This is the third part, but you can link to the other two from here.
• Terrace Crawford--All around great-guy Terrace Crawford links to a brief interview he did with MarkO, who has been doing an ongoing series on the Future of Youth Ministry. From this link, you can see what Terrace had to say (which I think is very accurate), and see how MarkO responded.
• Junior High Ministry.com--Kurt Johnston writes a great post about doing some "Spring Cleaning" in our ministries. This is a short post with some really great thoughts in it.
• The Disciple Project--ym360 Contributor Paul Turner writes a great post about how to deal with students who up and leave your youth ministry.
• Rethinking Youth Ministry--The guys at "Rethink" have a great free resource if your youth ministry is doing Lent. We Tweeted about this earlier this week, but wanted to shine the spotlight on it once more.
• Fuller Youth Institute--This is another post we Tweeted about this week. Brad Griffin writes a great post entitled "What Does Success Look Like?" It's all about how parents and the educational system impose certain definitions of success on students. There is a list of adverse effects this has on teens, and some tips on how to reverse the trend. Good content.

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.

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.