Student ministry has changed a lot over the last eight years, so why shouldn’t your resources? We have put a fresh face on all of the digital and physical resources of The Thread: Discovering the Thread of the Gospel Through the Big-Picture Story of the Bible. The team also went through this 52-week downloadable Bible study to ensure that the same lessons you love and trust are built for today’s students. We’ve tossed out the dated material, cleaned up some previous grammatical errors, and made a better version of one of our most popular year-long Youth Ministry Bible studies! 

Purchase The Thread and learn about God's story and how He wove His thread of love through every page. 

The Jesus Studies, a 52-week fully downloadable Bible study curriculum, cuts through the confusion of teenagers' lives and gives your students a Christ-centered worldview for the major issues they face.

Amplify: Growing a Faith That Lasts is a powerful 52-lesson youth ministry Bible study curriculum that equips students to grow a dynamic faith by studying core spiritual truths. 

Activate: The Building Blocks of Faith, 52-lesson Bible study curriculum, will help your students lay the foundation of a lasting relationship with God through a study of the core concepts of their faith.

The Life: Embracing the Life of a Christ-Follower is a downloadable 52-lesson Bible study curriculum that will equip your students to understand exactly what it means to live as a follower of Christ through a unit-based study of discipleship.

The Rescue: Discovering How the Gospel Rescues and Redeems Us is a 52-lesson downloadable Bible study that will give your students a rich, in-depth understanding of the Gospel and its impact that many of them may have never known before.

Coming up with fun and engaging games for your youth group can be a daunting task. Through years of creating summer camps and working with youth ministries, J. Roger Davis has created SEVEN Youth Group Games books, each packed with 25 field-tested must-play games. The Youth Group Games: Book Bundle includes Water Games, Relay Games, Group Building Games, Large Group Games, Stage Games, Messy Games, and Dodgeball Games. This bundle is the perfect resource to help you hit a home run with your students at your next mid-week service, retreat, or event! 

Youth ministry is a grinding mill of unreal expectations, often combined with a surprising lack of support or resources. When you couple that with a youth pastor who is trying to do too much and trying to be too much -- it's a recipe for disaster leading to stress, anxiety, and ultimately burnout. As a youth pastor, you don't have a lot of leverage to fix the church's attitudes toward ministry, but we can improve our own attitudes. Hopefully, the result will be men and women who lower their stress, anxiety, and burnout and stay in youth ministry for many years to come.

Written by Andy Blanks. The Bible is God's main way of making Himself and His ways known. Your effectiveness at leading students closer to God is tied to your ability to teach the Bible effectively. But teaching the Bible doesn't have to be intimidating!

Written by Dr. Jody Dean. Youth ministry has matured since the days of chubby bunny and the egg-and-armpit relay. On the one hand, there is an excellent opportunity to challenge an information-rich generation to consider the life-changing claims of Christ. But on the other, there are significant challenges to how we do ministry in an increasingly dangerous world.

By Dr. Ben Birdsong. Understanding the generations we serve can be a great tool for the youth worker. With this tool, we can understand the needs, struggles, and mindsets of each generation so we can faithfully point them to the truth of the gospel. With this tool, we can help parents to better understand their children and disciple them well. With this tool, we can help the older adults in the church better understand the generations who have come behind them. With this tool, we can listen to the heart cries of a generation, become a listening ear for them, and encourage them that Jesus will be with them and He never fails. In this module, we will dig into the latest information concerning Generation Z and Alpha in an effort to better understand who they are and how these insights should impact our approach to ministry to them.

By Dr. Noel Forlini Burt. Over the six lessons of this module, we’re going to explore what it means to abide in Christ in good times and in our seasons of spiritual dryness. These six lessons will cover many different topics: childlike reading of Scripture as a means of abiding in Christ, persistence in prayer, and even recalibrating how we teach our own students during dry ministerial seasons. Each of these elements is, I argue, a different way in which we can abide in the One who loves us so much that He gave His life for us.

No youth pastor takes a ministry role expecting things to go poorly or with an internal time clock of when they know that God will call them to something new. But inevitably, it happens. Something changes. Something goes wrong. Something happens outside of your control but impacts you, your ministry, or your family. Maybe something goes particularly right. Or God, in His perfect timing and will, moves you on or over to something else. In this masterclass, we will look at when to leave, how to leave well, and the things you need to thoroughly investigate/ask before saying yes to your "next."

It has been said that leaders have the power to change or affect the lives of others, and therefore, leadership is sacred work. If this is true of leadership in general, it must be infinitely more true for ministry leaders. But how can we expect to participate in this sacred work of leading others if we are incapable or sorely lacking when it comes to the ability to lead ourselves well? In this two-part master class, we are going to look at six big areas of self-leadership—self-discipline, health, time management, saying no, boundaries, family first—and all the things that we struggle with that make up these six areas. These two sessions will offer tips, suggestions, and things for you to consider about self-leadership. But most importantly, they will cause you to ask some hard questions of yourself about the way you lead yourself and consider how those choices impact everyone/everything around you.

If you desire to be an effective youth ministry leader, effective communication is a skill set that has to be mastered. This On-Demand Masterclass will do a deep dive into helping you build a more effective communication strategy by identifying your audiences, exploring a central hub model, and generally upping your communication game with students, parents, and volunteers in your ministry.

Have you ever heard of the saying, "Do it right or do it over?" Flying by the seat of your pants and surviving in ministry due to the grace of the do-over is a typical caricature of a youth ministry leader. However, no matter how charismatic the personality of the ministry leader is, there comes a time when second chances run out, and your misteps lead to your termination. This is especially true with errors and oversites in the areas of organization, communication, systems, wisdom, conflict resolution, and change. But there is another way. In this On-Demand Masterclass, we will look at seven critical aspects of ministry that you really need to get right this year so that you can lead, grow, thrive--and still be employed—in the next year.

As our students go through life, they encounter people and situations that lead them to pack and carry some enormous emotional baggage that holds them back from living in the grace and freedom that Christ provides. As youth pastors, we are in a unique position to help both students and their parents "lighten the load" along the way. In these training sessions, we will look at eight specific bags kids tend to pack as they grow up, how these bags tend to get packed, and the long-lasting negative impacts they can have. Each session will offer practical strategies we can use and equip parents to employ to leverage their influence and prevent some of these bags from getting packed in the first place.

I once heard it said that youth leaders should spend 1/3 of our time reaching and discipling students, 1/3 of our time developing leaders, and 1/3 of our time equipping parents. This is a great model and a healthy approach to youth ministry. But what if leadership development was an intensional part of your discipleship process? What if, as we were making student leaders, we were simultaneously training them to be disciples who make disciples? This is a one-session master class on how to engage, equip, and empower your students to do that very thing.