Help Im A Volunteer Youth Worker

A guide to assist the new youth worker on working with teenagers, as well as ideas for the professional youth worker to better reach young people.

Destined to be invaluable for volunteers and youth workers, this practical sourcebook will give first-time and veteran volunteers all the help they need to conduct effective youth work. Topics include building relationships with students, recruiting and training other volunteers, getting along with the pastor and youth director, and more. A Youth Specialties/YouthSource book.

To Be a Junior High Youth Worker . . . takes a distinct kind of adult, just as junior highers are a distinct kind of people. Betwixt and between though they may be, early adolescents are as capable of a genuine spiritual understanding and growth as high schoolers.It’s just that junior highers absorb Bible teaching and demonstrate their spirituality—well, differently. Help! I’m a Junior High Youth Worker! is your primer for understanding young teenagers, then teaching them with a mind-set and with methods that fit them.First Things First. Three axioms that define your territory as a junior high youth worker.So Just What Is a Junior Higher, Anyway? The essence of early adolescence: the need for appropriate rules . . . the dilemma of throwing sixth graders and eighth graders together in the same program . . . small is good.Developmentally Speaking. Changes junior highers enjoy and endure cognitively, emotionally, socially, spiritually . . . their changing relationships with parents . . . individuation and hair under their arms.Time to Teach! Your required dose of pedagogy: the case for fun learning . . . ten top teaching topics for middle school ministry . . . how simulations, role plays, and storytelling can be your best teaching methods for early adolescents.Faith Outside the Youth Room. Spiritual discipleship for middle schoolers: they don’t have to be high schoolers to begin forming habits of prayers, service, and outreach.Help! I’m a Junior High Youth Worker! is help at hand surviving and thriving in ministry to early adolescents.

There are so many benefits to being a youth worker: You get to hang out with teenagers, watch their lives transform, and help them become adults who live for and love Jesus. But when you signed on the dotted line to work in youth ministry, nobody mentioned the negative side effects: isolation, criticism, a general feeling of being constantly overwhelmed, relentless questioning from parents and church leaders. The list can go on... But your frustration doesn’t have to overtake you, or take you away from ministry.Inside the pages of this book you’ll find humor, comfort, and encouragement for those times when you feel like you can’t go any further. Youth ministry veteran, Steven Case, will help you through just about every scenario that adds to your discontent, including complaining parents, dealing with tragedy, and deciding when to leave a bad situation.Find practical tips to help you deal with the challenges of youth ministry, and get soul-renewing ideas to help you continue on, despite the struggles, so you can get back to enjoying youth ministry like you used to!

Provides those in small church ministry--including volunteer, part-time, and full-time youth workers--with a process and procedure that enables them to address their particular needs as a small church.

For more than 50 years, relational or incarnational ministry has been a major focus in youth ministry. But for too long, those relationships have been used as tools—as a means to an end—where adults try to influence students to accept, know, trust, believe, or participate in something. While our motives may be good, it’s possible that by focusing on these goals, we’re not ministering the whole person. When we choose not to engage in the full life of a student, we run the risk of failing them and our ministry. In this thoughtful and insightful book, Andrew Root challenges us to reconsider our motives and begin to consider simply being with and doing life alongside teenagers with no agenda other than to love them right where they are, by place-sharing. As he shares stories of his (and others’) successes and failures in relational youth ministry, you’ll find practical ideas to help you recreate the role of relationships in your youth ministry. If you’re involved in the lives of teenagers, whether as a youth pastor, volunteer youth worker, church leader, or parent, you’ll want to read this book and work together to discover the value of place-sharing in the lives of teens. You’ll see that it’s time to tear down the old structure of relational youth ministry and start again.

This funny, yet extremely practical book offers up 50 creative thoughts, tips, and ideas for teaching Sunday school at any age level in any church.

As profound, as relevant, as funny as you are . . . teenagers still listen to each other more than to an adult youth worker.You may grimace, but you can’t deny it--students talking to each other usually means more to them than adults talking to them.The Student Leadership Training Manual helps you equip your senior highers for leading their peers and taking charge of as much of the ministry as they want or are able--helping and evangelizing their peers . . . organizing ministry teams . . . planning and executing their own youth ministry programming.Here are 31 training sessions for discipling student leaders in a small-group setting--sessions that start in the Bible and reach deep into teenagers’ experience . . . ready for you to implement a clear and effective program that trains your students for higher levels of leadership, regardless of where they are now.Plus 24 pages just for you, a veritable primer on how to cultivate student leadership:The role of adultsAuthority vs. responsibilitySetting student leaders up for successTeaching students not just the whats, but the whys and howsHelping them discover their spiritual giftednessPerfect for youth workers, CE directors, associate pastors, and small-group leaders--anyone who works with a youth group’s core kids.

Help! I'm a Small Church Youth Worker provides those in small church ministry--including volunteer, part-time, and full-time youth workers--with a process and procedure that enables them to address their particular needs as a small church.

Features 50 two-page journaling devotionals sends students straight into the words of Jesus to discover the truth--then it dares them to live that truth today.

Here are 45 easy-prep, high-interest object lessons perfect for representing, dramatizing, and illustrating ideas and principles in Bible lessons and talks in junior and senior high youth groups. All that is followed by suggested segues, applications, and directions youth leaders can take in continuing the study or talk.

More than 400 creative events for community building, outreach, and fun! - Food Events . . . If there's one thing kids know and appreciate, it's food. Here's everything from elegant fetes to slobfests galore. - Games and Sports Events . . . You don't have to be a jock to have fun playing these sporting events. - Outings and Overnighters . . . If you're crazed enough to take a group of adolescents on the road -- whether across town or across the state -- here are plenty of trip ideas. - Races and Rallies . . . Your group have a need for speed? Whether it's cars, bikes, buses, or toilets -- if it can be raced, you'll find an idea for it here. - Special Events with a Purpose . . . More than fun. These events carry significant spiritual, moral, or community value. And more -- hunts and parties and theme events of all kinds! Whether you're a youth worker or recreation director in a church, school, club, or camp -- Special Events is your storehouse of proven, youth-group tested ideas.

This book delineates four distinct philosophical/ecclesiological views of how youth ministry relates to the church at large.

This is a manual for quick and convenient access to the spectrum of administrative and managerial tasks that face youth workers every day with a companion CD-ROM that includes not only a student contact database, but all the book s forms in editable format."

The lights are dim. The crowd is hushed.And a dozen teens start laughing hysterically, piling into a human "boat" that helps set up the mind-blowing miracle of Jesus walking on the stormy Sea of Galilee.Maybe you’re after a booster shot for midweek youth group meetings that feel "same old, same old." Or you’ve just been asked (last minute, of course) to run the service at the shelter during your mission trip, and you need a jolt of energy that’ll draw kids into your lesson. Whatever your creative need, Spontaneous Melodramas 2 will fill the bill. Continuing where its predecessor--Spontaneous Melodramas--left off, this volume offers another two dozen tales from the Old and New Testaments that bring the biblical accounts to life . . . with distinctive, contemporary twists!Although these no-rehearsal skits will leave your students in stitches, the humor never buries the message of Scripture. So you can be confident when bringing your kids--whether or not they’re familiar with the Bible--into sketches like:The Sumptuous Spare Rib (Adam and Eve)Touched by an Angel (Jacob’s wrestling match)Love on a Threshing Floor (Ruth and Boaz)The Wizard of Eyes (Jesus heals the blind man)The Great Pool Party (Healing at the pool)Dead Man Walking (Jesus raises Lazarus)Spontaneous Melodramas 2 is full of flexible skits that youth workers, Sunday school teachers, camp counselors, and retreat directors can use for discussion starters, icebreakers, or talk intros. And they’re natural fits for Bible study programming, all-nighters, mission trips, camps, retreats, parent meetings, and many other events.More than a year’s worth of slapstick, pratfalls, and fun, Spontaneous Melodramas 2 will make the Bible--and its unforgettable characters and adventures--extra memorable for your students.

80 sure-fire scripts and other onstage fun to illustrate your lessons and enliven your events! - Just for Fun . . . Short stunts, funny skits, sight gags, easy prep -- we've got 'em all. If you have even one or two students who love hamming it up and making spectacles of themselves, you'll find plenty of funny fodder here. - Spontaneous Melodramas . . . Fueled by groans, catcalls, cheers, and boos from your small or large audience, student actors in these no-rehearsal melodramatic spoofs will bring down the house. Don't know what spontaneous melodramas are? Plunge into an entertaining and instructive explanation of what they are and how to use them for the most effect, beginning on page 51. - Sketches with a Point . . . Drama is an ideal medium for grabbing people's attention and priming them for a meeting, a talk, or a Bible study. Have a particular topic in mind? Find your topic (in the topical index, page 7), and you're on your way to just the right script. Whether you're a youth worker or recreation director in a church, school, club, or camp -- Drama, Skits, & Sketches is your storehouse of proven, youth-group tested ideas.

Wild Bible characters . . . wild activities, games, discussion starters, and video ideas . . . wild truths for living. Put them all together, blend well, and you’ve got Wild Truth Bible Lessons 2--12 more dynamite lessons for junior high youth groups by Mark Oestreicher. Like its fun, creative predecessor, Wild Truth Bible Lessons, this book invites kids to discover the adventure of faith through the events and responses of real Bible people who did wild things for God. Based on another 12 personalities from the list of characters in Wild Truth Journal: 50 Life Lessons from the Scriptures, each lesson reaches back into history to help junior highers learn about Bible people and principles--and then reaches forward to challenge students to make better decisions, better friends, and better lives. 12 lessons.

You know them as hilarious, boisterous skits that get kids involved, whether they're hamming up front, or in the audience cheering for the good guys, hissing the bad guys, and getting nearly as animated as the onstage actors. Better yet, these no-rehearsal skits are comic takes on 24 classic Bible stories, from Babel to Zacchaeus. Use these skits to take your students into or out of your Bible lesson -- for the humor never buries the central message of the Bible passage. Inside you'll find 12 Old Testament and 12 New Testament stories -- like these: - The First Tongue Twister (the Tower of Babel) - Josephine's Dream (Joseph and his brothers) - The Young and the Hairless (Samson and Delilah) - Dave, the Wave, and the Giant Kahuna (David and Goliath) - Dances with Lions (Daniel) - World Serious: The Empire Strikes Out (the temptation of Jesus) - Good Sam, the Levis, and Judas Priest (parable of the Good Samaritan) - Showdown at Tombstone (Jesus and the demon-possessed man) Unchurched teenagers who can't tell Samson from Solomon, or long-time youth group kids -- everyone will love not merely hearing or reading Bible stories, but doing them. Welcome to more than a year's worth of slapstick, pratfalls, and melodrama. These Bible-story skits are anything but solemn, but they'll make Bible stories memorable for your students.

Starting Right: Thinking Theologically About Youth Ministry is the first academic textbook that introduces youth ministry students (whether undergraduate or graduate level) to a marriage of solid research, real life, and accessible design. Whereas most college-level texts may reflect a thorough (though impenetrable) mastery of the field, they tend to expect readers to plow through unnecessarily thick prose and bland design because “it’s good for them.” Youth Specialties doesn’t agree. In this debut title to a continuing academic book line, college and seminary students will be introduced to real-life research, real-life youth ministry dilemmas, and real-life solutions.Contributing writers represent a spectrum of Christian Education thought and practice, as well as widespread recognition in their field...transdenominational, yet the perfect background to ministry in any denomination or ministry organizationThis text includes thorough indexes, design, and graphics that compel readers from page to page (now that’s a first for a college text!); organization that permits professors to use any part of the text, in any order, rather than plod through the entire book from beginning to end; a perfect primary text that gives students a rich, academic, and readable (though not “popular”) grasp of every aspect of youth ministry a typical Intro course touches, while also serving as an ideal secondary text.

Start Discussions That Matter to Your High Schoolers About God. About themselves, their, beliefs, their questions, their lives.[Burst: More than a quarter-million copies sold in this series!]More High School TalkSheets—Updated! contains the same kind of provocative, compelling, discussion-starting questions that are hallmarks of the best-selling TalkSheets series—now updated for new-millennium high schoolers. Here are 50 more creative discussions that focus on relevant, real-life topics:The FutureDeathPrioritiesAIDSHeaven & HellPremarital SexPrayerKnowing GodHomosexualityMaterialism & Consumerism. . . and 40 more subjects of perennial interest to teenagers.TalkSheets are convenient, effective one-page reproducible handouts with intriguing questions that will get churched kids and unchurched kids alike talking and thinking about the Bible—and how its principles affect their daily lives.Use TalkSheets to launch your own lesson—or use them as stand-alone Bible studies. Each TalkSheet comes with detailed information and suggestions for discussion leaders: Bible references galore, Internet resources, further group exploration, and activities to pursue during and after the meeting.More High School TalkSheets—Updated! is the perfect discussion-starting resource for youth meetings, small groups and cell groups, Sunday school, and camps and retreats.