Final youth group for the summer

Well, last night was it. We had 27 kids and 5 adults at the Dickerson's last night for our cook out. We played games, ate food, had some s'more's...a great night. The summer schedule starts this week, no weekly youth group meeting until September. Our Fall Kick-off will be held August 26th, time and location to come. In the meantime, here's part of a blog post from tim Schmoyer, a friend of mine who happens to be a youth pastor about what can happen when you take the summer off, and split your group into 2:

"About two years ago we had around 20 jr. highers involved in our “go deep” Bible study...It sounds like a great program, except that the kids who came were only there because their parents forced them. The jr. highers felt like they were learning very little and the amount of life change we saw coming out of that Bible study was very disheartening.

So, we stopped the program for a summer and did a lot of hard evaluating, refocusing, and renewing the vision for what it should be like. In short, we decided that it was too academic and needed to be more intentional about connecting God’s Word to jr. highers’ individual lives. The plan was to take the curriculum out of the classroom and put it into small groups where two adult leaders could co-teach gender and grade specific groups of about 5 to 8 jr. highers for two years....

But two years later I can look back and say it was definitely worth it. This past year we had about 110 jr. highers actively involved, 24 adult leaders passionately teaching in small groups, and amazing stories of life-change like you wouldn’t believe!"

You can check out his whole post here.

Did you catch the increase? In 2 years, they went from 22 to 110 middle school students.


Change...is coming.

Youth Group Recap, June 3, 2009

Game:
Kickball, Middle School vs High School, High School Wins!

Teaching Series:
Wineskins, Have we grown?

Topic:
We watched "Spilt Milk", a video from 36 Parables. We talked about how we should be changed once we've encountered Jesus. We also talked about the need for our ministry to change, we're not the same group we were 2 years ago, so we should stop doing youth group the way we did it then! We also gave the kids a survey, which asked them questions about their growth over the past year.

Key Verses:
Matthew 9:9-19

Attendance:
31, 124% of same week last year.

Main Group Testimony:
See Topic (above).

Small Group Time:
We went through the survey, and then had prayer time with our students. I'll be posting some results from our survey in next Monday's parent email, as well as some correlations.

Closing Challenge:
Change is coming. Be ready for it.

Questions You Can Ask:
Whe is the last time you did not change something because you've "always done it that way"?

Coming up next:
Sunday School (June 7)
Youth Group (June 10, @ Dickerson's)