Youth Pastor Training and Leadership

One of the greatest privileges and most important things we do as youth ministry leaders is to communicate, teach, and proclaim God's Word to teenagers. It is critical that we honor that Holy privilege by putting in the time, effort, and study as we prepare. In this training session, we will do a deep dive into sermon prep and uncover what I believe to be four key areas in our preaching and sermon prep.

Ministry to a middle school audience is challenging and extremely rewarding. This is the phase of life where questions are being asked, doubts are being processed, and brains are being hard-wired. In these three training sessions, Kevin and Ethan will dispel some of the myths and stigmas that come with working with middle schoolers, and they will walk you through some ways to fully lean into your middle school students.

Nobody in ministry does it alone; we need volunteers, parents, students, and staff around us. While a staff team is not a guarantee in every youth ministry context, if and when you end up leading a staff team (or a volunteer team), they are worth taking care of. What are some things you need to consider when it comes to leading, growing, and caring for your staff? Let's talk about it.

Youth ministry leaders, hear me out. Recruiting, training, developing, equipping, and retaining volunteer leaders is critical to the success of your ministry. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that your level of success or failure in the areas of building and developing your volunteer leaders will be directly proportional to the success or failure of your ministry's growth and impact. Yes, volunteer leaders matter that much! You may think that you are Superman or that you can be a one-man band, but a reality check says you are not, and you can’t. No matter how great and charismatic of a leader you are, without great, bought-in, equipped, passionate volunteer leaders, you and your ministry are going to struggle and wither in effectiveness. But if you can surround yourself with a team of great volunteer leaders, the sky is the limit because those leaders have the potential to have an even greater impact on how your ministry runs and the effectiveness that it has in ministering to students. With that in mind, here are 12 tips on developing your volunteer leader team.

As a youth ministry leader, it's so easy to get focused on all the things (preaching, recruiting, training, partnering with parents, event planning, meetings, etc.) that we can neglect the most important thing; the state of our own souls. We are called to minister out of the overflow of our own hearts. Instead, we often find ourselves ministering out of the overflow of our own exhaustion, frustration, and emptiness. This is not sustainable or healthy ministry! So in this On-Demand Masterclass, let's talk through 11 tips to keep your soul healthy while leading a youth ministry.

You have a group of dedicated volunteers. They show up when they are supposed to, and they do what is asked of them. . .for the most part. But how do you develop that group to serve others well? How do you motivate them to approach serving teenagers as more than just being dutiful to the Lord? How do you lead, train, and support that group so that they go from a "group of individuals" to a team? Join Dr. Jody Dean in this two-session Masterclass on-demand to hear how he's training students at New Orleans Baptist Seminary to develop a team that serves.

Youth ministry never stops! Every new student, new family, new volunteer, or new ground taken in your ministry starts a new plate spinning. Not to mention all the added responsibilities that, for some reason, didn't seem to make it on your pre-hire job description. Before you know it, your potential success in youth ministry can be overtaken or completely undermined by your inability to get it all done. In this two-session masterclass, you'll learn how to take the reins of your time and personal management by implementing the C.R.A.M. strategy.

As someone called to youth ministry, you're passionate about discipling teenagers. You're passionate about pouring into students and their families. You love the work you do with youth and the local church. You spend countless hours and sacrifice much to live out that calling and that passion. However, sometimes in the living out of that passion and calling, we find ourselves pouring out more than we are filling up. Sometimes we can find ourselves beginning to waver in our walk with the Lord. So in this training, we're going to be taking a look at some of those spiritual disciplines we need to be regularly practicing to be filled and renewed as we live our ministry calling. In session one, we will cover the inward disciplines of prayer, study, fasting, and meditation. In session two, we will cover the outward disciplines of servanthood and simplicity, solitude, and submission. Lastly, in session three, we will walk through the corporate disciplines of worship, celebration, guidance, and confession.

Any New Orleans chef worth his roux would tell you that a truly delicious gumbo isn't just about one specific ingredient but is instead a masterful combination of different select ingredients that, when blended together, create an explosion of flavor. Likewise, as leaders in youth ministry, we are called to make disciples. To accomplish this Sacred task, we have to get into the kitchen and build the recipe ingredients that, when mixed together, not only lead students in our particular ministry contexts to come to faith in Jesus Christ but also guides and supports each of them as they grow in relationship with Him. In these sessions together, we will look at seven key ingredients to providing your students with a discipleship strategy or pathway that does just that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

As school returns, the summer heat begins to fade, and another ministry year starts to ramp up, two things are on the minds of a majority of youth pastors: 

1) Oh no, is Halloween on a Wednesday this year? 
2) I need to plan the Fall Retreat! Planning retreats are often daunting as they require attention to detail across many different areas simultaneously. 

This masterclass series in planning and programming a fall retreat will walk through everything you need to get right with creativity and programming, the questions you need to ask and answer about logistics, and will help you eliminate the potential pitfalls so many make when planning. 

"The best engine for a successful, thriving youth ministry is a strong kid’s ministry. What happens if you have a strong kid’s ministry but you don’t nail the transition from kid’s ministry to student ministry? How do you make sure you’re prepared? And then, on the other side of youth ministry, there are students dropping out of church at an alarming rate, and this is even for students who are regularly committed to their church during youth group and during their middle school and early high school days. What is behind that? 

This two-session masterclass will dig into each side of the critical transitions that have to be successfully navigated in youth ministry. It will provide you with several ideas, tips, and tricks to help you nail the transition from kid’s ministry into student ministry and help you discover ways you can we help students take meaningful steps into college while also keeping them connected to the church and to their faith."