I recently used appreciative inquiry to evaluate and reflect on our year of ministry with my student leaders. Among other things, I asked student leaders, “What are the most valuable aspects of our high school ministry?” and “How has our...

I still remember some of the early program evaluations I conducted with parents.

I went into these meetings excited, ready to reflect upon the program year and celebrate all that God did in and through our ministry. Inevitably, though, my...

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries has recently “been accused of deliberately excluding plus-size women from wearing its clothes by failing to make or sell womenswear in any size above Large.” According to Jeffries, “In every school...

Today I'm linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker's 5 Minute Friday, in which we write for 5 minutes flat.

She sat across the table from me, fingers tapping wildly on the tabletop at a rate of a mile a minute.

Seconds later, this girl, normally so full of...

Unlike so many homes, mine was one in which we frequently discussed money.

In fact, money is still one of my dad's favorite topics. When it comes to money, he often runs past any semblance of social respectability and instead proceeds to ask...

Shortly after my miscarriage, I made my most depressing Amazon purchase ever: A collection of books about miscarriage, loss, and grief. Among them was Mike Stavlund's A Force of Will: The Reshaping of Faith in a Year of Grief.

Despite having...

The point at which I realized this school year was going to be a challenging year of ministry came even before it officially began.

It happened last August at a music conference I attended with several of my colleagues. Despite considering myself...

Dear Senior -

For four years, you've graced our ministry with your presence. Now as your graduation approaches, I've found my thoughts drifting to you more and more frequently. I've used each thought I've had of you as a call to prayer.

As I've...

I have a t-shirt from Youth Enterprise that has the word, “Whatever” written on the front with this passage written on the back:

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is...

In Lent, as we discussed the story of Jesus' arrest, my students were intrigued by Jesus' command to Peter to put away his sword because “all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”

Immediately, students began asking...

As a lover of memoir and an advocate for refugee ministry, Sarah Thebarge's The Invisible Girls quickly stole my heart.

In this book, Sarah weaves together her battle with breast cancer (which she was diagnosed with at the age of 27) with a...

As you know, I think it's incredibly important to discuss controversial topics like addictions, war, and gay marriage with high school students. What's more, the recent increase in the amount of resources (books, curricula, blog posts, and the...

Women.

Their stories litter the pages of Scripture, sometimes as main characters in the story of God and sometimes as more peripheral ones. Yet even in churches that affirm women in ministry, too often we overlook these women. We fail to...

If you look at the teaching schedule for the last month of my high school ministry's program year, you'll see the following topics listed: War, gay marriage, and the question, “Who's a child of God?”

What each of these topics have in common...

Almost a decade ago, I was flipping through a youth worker magazine and came across an ad for a Welcome Pack. Unlike most ads, this one wasn't selling something. Instead, it was trying to convince youth workers to have their students complete a ...

As you know, my very favorite kinds of books are those that leave me in tears one moment and cause me to laugh aloud the next. Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed by Glennon Doyle Melton is definitely one of those books.

In this...

I'm 32 and childless.

Though this has not always been the case, right now, that's an incredibly painful thing for me to say.

My husband and I have been married for 10 years. We got married young and knew we didn't want kids right away. But after...

Three years ago, as part of a graduate school class I was taking, I conducted a thorough assessment of my high school ministry. Among other things, this assessment revealed that in the three years prior to it, only 22% of my congregation's...

This week's review is of Masterpiece: The Art of Discipling Youth by Paul Martin

What the book's about: As it's name suggests, this is a book about the faith formation of youth. Specifically, it's about discipling teens. What makes this book...

When I started my current youth ministry position nearly five years ago, my office was overflowing with old youth group t-shirts. I inherited hundreds of old shirts from a decade's worth of special events.

I felt as though I couldn't get rid of...

My husband and I were on our way home from a brief trip to a local state park on Monday when we stopped for lunch and heard the news about the bombings at the Boston marathon.

Immediately, my heart sunk. As I watched the images from Boston flit...

Next to fiction, memoir is my favorite kind of book. My love for memoir attracted me to Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, a book she calls the “happiest story in the world with the saddest ending”.

Indeed,...

Whenever I mention my youth ministry's rummage sale to people, they usually ask in disbelief, "You're really doing that again?"

To be sure, rummage sales are a ton of work; but as a youth worker, I love how they encourage people to purge in a...

Google the musical, The Book of Mormon, and you'll almost certainly find people using the words “irreverent”, “crass”, and “ridiculously funny” to describe it. It's a show that uses wit and humor to explore faith and in particular, the...

Following a morning devotional time during a mission trip, one of my students found me and announced with a great deal of frustration and fury, “Job sucks”. After asking this student several questions, I learned she'd chosen to read Job during...

On Easter, as our opening hymn began, so too did my tears. Fresh tears of grief flowed freely, the result of having endured the most difficult two weeks of my life. Those tears mixed with tears of joy that came from celebrating the risen Christ.

As a child in the 80's and a teenager in the 90's, I somehow missed all the boy band fads. I was never an NKOTB or Backstreet Boys groupie or really, even a fan. To be honest, I don't feel as though my life is lacking because I wasn't.

It's only...

In his blog post, Give Every Teen a Voice on More than Dodgeball, Chris Wesley said, “I have mixed feelings when it comes to student leadership groups within your student ministry. While it’s important to create leaders, to group them risks...

For the last eight months, I've been immersed in a research project, investigating what high school students in my denomination (ELCA) believe about Jesus. Among other things, I asked hundreds of students, “Why did Jesus die?”

The majority of...

I've done the 30 Hour Famine – an event where students fast for 30 hours in order to "taste" hunger and raise money and awareness to fight world hunger - ten times as a youth worker. Traditionally, it's been one of my favorite events but I've...

This week's review is of Imaginary Jesus by Matt Mikalatos.  

What the book's about: This book is about the author's search for the "real Jesus". It's a story of rooting out all the imaginary Jesus' surrounding him and discovering the...

Last week's list of “33 Ways You Know You Were a Youth Group Kid” from Buzz Feed generated quite a response in my world.

As someone who was a youth group kid in the 90s, I absolutely relate to many – if not most - of the things on this...

In every youth ministry I've served, I've had students who come from families that struggle financially and, therefore, cannot afford expensive events such as summer mission trips. Although we spend a year fundraising for mission trips and...

Every year, my church holds Youth Sunday. One of the challenges of Youth Sunday is helping both students and parishioners alike to recognize it as worship, not a performance.

To help students understand Youth Sunday as worship, we intentionally...

In his recent thought-provoking post, Andy Blanks raises the question, “Is Athletics Hurting Your Youth Ministry?”

In eleven years of youth ministry, I certainly have experienced the tension between not just sports and youth ministry but...

One of the things I appreciate about my childhood is that my parents encouraged me to dabble: To try a variety of things in order to discover my interests, passions, and abilities. Throughout grade school and middle school, I dabbled in many...

This week I offer you just one review of Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith.  

What the book's about: This book is a retelling of the Christmas story, featuring the wise men as it's central characters.

Why I read this book: Oddly...

On Monday morning, my online world erupted when Efrem Smith, an author, consultant and regional leader for the Evangelical Covenant Church tweeted “Until Youth Worker Journal does more to honor youth ministry experts of color and in the urban...

This week I offer you just one review of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

What the book's about: This book tells the story of Kamila Sidiqi, a young Afghan woman whose life changed overnight after the Taliban seized control...

I confess I have a love / hate relationship with contemporary Christian music.

There have been times when Christian music has truly ministered to me. I remember being at the National Youth Worker's Convention in 2003, just a month after I left my...

Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication by Charles Swindoll

What the book's about: The life of Moses.

Why I read this book: During my youth ministry's recent retreat, I used the life of Moses as the basis for our exploration of self-image. To...

Yesterday, a colleague told me about Snapchat, a photo messaging application that allows the user to take photos, send them to a controlled list of recipients, and set a time limit for how long the photos can be viewed before they vanish from the...

Interrupted: An Adventure in Relearning the Essentials of Faith by Jen Hatmaker 

What the book's about: Jen's journey from being a pastor's wife immersed in the church world to a woman passionate about social justice and caring for the last,...

In reflecting on the success of the TV show, Friends, it's producers have said, "Our best episodes became the ones with just the six of them in the room.” To the show's producers, the heart of Friends was not it's flash. It wasn't special...

For years, my husband and I have joked he should crash one of the workshops offered for youth worker's wives that are held at various youth ministry conferences we've attended. We've always said this partly in jest, but partly in truth, wishing...

As a young girl, my favorite Christmas presents were always books. I looked forward to Friday nights because it meant I could stay up and read as late as I wanted to.

Not surprisingly, I still love to read today. On my day off, you can usually...

My all-time favorite sitcom is Friends. Though I was a bit late to the party initially, I've now seen every single episode.

Let's be honest: I've seen every episode way more than once. I can recite most of them word for word.

Yet, I return to...

The Christian life demands service. It requires faith to be more than just theological musings that are blogged about or even debated with others. Without action faith is, after all, dead. (James 2:26)

For this reason, throughout my career in...

I participated in mission trips as a kid and then worked for a mission trip organization in college. Both ends of the spectrum had a profound impact on my faith. Neither equipped me to plan a trip from start to finish.

My first year in ministry, I...

What do you want to be when you grow up?

As a kid, it seemed like someone was always asking me this question.

For a long time, my answer was teacher... Until it was architect and then later, writer.

Never once was it engineer, which is what my...

Let's do a quick word association.

If I said the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, what would you say?

Perhaps you would say words like mainline, traditional, denomination, bishops, synods, liturgical, baptism, Paul, or grace. These are...

The idea of Rachel Held Evans' book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, is simple. For a year, Rachel took the Bible literally, focusing on one specific command (targeted at women) each month. It's not an entirely new idea. A.J. Jacobs did it in The...

In her address to the Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama said, “We are playing a long-game here." Though the First Lady was, of course, talking about the long-term political agenda of the Democratic party, I believe she...

In our culture, everyone wants to be great.

Students do. Their parents do. And if we're honest, we do too.

For this reason alone, Steven Furtick's new book, Greater, will gain an audience. After all, how awesome would it be if our faith in Jesus...

A year ago, I visited Kiziba Refugee Camp in western Rwanda.

This camp is home to more than 20,000 refugees from the Congo, where an on-going civil war has resulted in the death of more than 3 million people. It is a conflict rarely talked about...

About a month or two after returning from a summer mission trip, I typically hear mission trip participants say these things:

"I don't feel God here like I did there."

"I'm forgetting things."

"It's starting to fade."

Read the rest of this article...

A member of my church council recently asked me, “What do you feel is the key to our church keeping you as our youth worker?”

To me, this is an interesting question, one I believe is often overlooked in favor of it's close relative, “When...

While on vacation, I saw this sign, an advertisement attempting to lure passerby's into a shop because of it's “cool stuff”. Each time I passed this shop, I was struck by how much this shop's advertisement mirrors the way we so often do youth...

On a recent mission trip, I interacted with adult leaders from across the country.

One was permanently attached to her phone. She called her office every 10 minutes to see if a crisis had developed she alone could solve—from 800 miles away....

The most important element of a mission trip is not worship, fun or service. Instead, the most important part of a mission trip is processing or debriefing your day with your team in order to help students wrestle with what they see, hear and do....

These days, there are few leadership roles I'm not willing to give students.

This is a significant change from my early days in youth ministry, when there were few leadership roles I was willing to give students. In those days, my student leaders...

For about a year, I've been captivated by an image that for whatever reason, I have not been able to forget.

The image comes from the final day I spent serving at an Easter Seals camp for special needs kids and adults. For three days prior, I...

As the election approaches, I continue to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus politically. Walk into an evangelical church and many people will suggest this means voting republican. Walk into a mainline church and you'll hear the opposite:...

As I said in this post, I love Jesus and the church.

As a youth worker who loves Jesus and the church, I believe that one of the most important things I can instill in my students is a love for the church. To do this, I encourage my students to...

I am, without a doubt, a church geek.

As a kid, church felt like my second home. As a tween, I remember being upset when I was asked to serve on the worship committee rather than the staff-parish committee. As a college student, I loved to go...

One of my favorite questions to ask people at the end of the school year is, “As you think about this year of ministry, what are you particularly thankful for?”

This year, I used this question with both my students and my colleagues. In the...

At my first youth ministry job interview, I was asked, "How do you plan on fundraising the thousands of dollars required for our summer mission trip?" As a 21 year old, I'm sure I looked like a deer caught in the headlights as I fumbled to answer...

Recently, I heard a well-known Christian speaker give a sermon called, “What happens when the dream dies?”

The funny thing is I heard this speaker give the exact same sermon five years ago.

At that time, I remember sitting in the...

A quick search on Amazon using the words, “leaving church” reveals dozens of ominous sounding titles:

You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church
Essential Church?: Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts
Generation Ex-Christian: Why...

“State colleges corrupt people's morals and weaken Christians' faith.”

Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not sure I've ever actually heard someone utter these exact words, I suspect that this is the underlying belief that drives...

A few years ago, I met Steve, a high school kid and professed atheist. He and I spent a week together on a mission trip, visiting old people and leading a Vacation Bible School for kids. Without meaning to, in the midst of serving, Steve...

This Christmas Season, the Christmas story characters that have most captivated me have been the shepherds – the riffraff to whom the angels first announced the birth of Jesus in Luke 2. As part of their announcement to the shepherds, the angels...

A few weeks ago, my high school ministry hosted a Parent's Night Out at our church in order to raise money for our summer trip to my denomination's youth gathering. Over the course of 3.5 hours, 17 high school students and four adults watched nine...

"What kind of irresponsible parent would send his or her child to Africa on a mission trip?"

This was the question that echoed in my head this past fall as I lead my ministry's informational meeting about our summer mission trip, a meeting during...

A few weeks ago, in his blog, "Who Determines What Your Ministry Looks Like?", Kurt Johnston posted this quote by Steve Jobs, the recently retired CEO of Apple:

“It isn’t the job of the consumer to determine what they want.”

That quote was...

This time of year, my work mailbox gets clogged with one thing: advertisements from mission trip organizations, all promising a "life-changing experience" for my kids. With so many organizations out there, how can you sift through all the...

Over the last week, several friends have sent me a link to this article from The Christian Post. Among other things, this article declares that youth ministry is a 50 year experiment that has failed and as such, suggests that youth ministries...

Three years ago, as I interviewed for a new youth ministry position, regardless of the size or type of church I was interviewing at, I always knew one question would be the same: “How important do you think short-term mission trips are for...

On Tuesday, one of my students walked into our Student Leadership Team Meeting and promptly informed me that she had to leave at 4:30, a full half hour before our meeting was slated to end.

As I’ve spent a great deal of time with this team...

I’m a big fan of the TV series, “The West Wing.” In fact, I own the whole series and watch it far more than I’d like to admit. In one of my favorite episodes, President Bartlett asks CJ Cregg to “jump off a cliff with him” and...

As part of a class that I took called “Christological Foundations”, I read Scot McKnight’s “The Jesus Creed.” As with other Scot McKnight books that I’ve read, I devoured it, finding it to be a fresh, thoughtful look at faith,...

Last spring, I used Youth Specialties “3 Story” Curriculum with my youth ministry, largely because I was required to do so for a graduate course I was taking.

The subtitle of this curriculum is “Preparing for a lifestyle of evangelism” and...

I’m often amazed at the way some Christians seem to despise all things Disney.

A few years ago, during a workout at Curves, I heard two moms discussing how Christians needed to boycott Disney because of its routine use of pagan and magical...

For three years, I’ve ignored the pleas of my students to serve at Feed My Starving Children, a non-profit Christian organization committed to feeding God’s children in body and spirit by hand-packing meals specifically formulated for...

Two weeks ago, I met with one of the girls I mentor, who I’ll call Brooklyn. During our meeting, she expressed frustration to me over the fact that as a teenager, she believes she has no power; That there is nothing she can do to fix the...

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been reminded over the last several weeks that moving is one of the most stressful things in life. Evidently, on the stress scale, it falls just behind death and divorce. Or at least...

My church’s annual meeting was two weeks ago. At this meeting, members of our church came together to learn about our church community, pass our church’s budget, and elect church council members.

Because I believe that my high school...

Last weekend was my ministry’s annual winter retreat. The focus of this retreat was no small task, as we set out to survey the book of Revelation, discussing end times, heaven and hell, and God’s vision for a better world.

I literally...

Growing up, I loved my church. In fact, when I went away to college, one of my favorite parts about spending a weekend in Chicago was going to church on Sunday morning.

Why?

Because going to church felt like going home.

I literally grew up in my...

I absolutely love to read.

For me, reading is life-giving. It’s something that restores my soul in a way that few other things do. I love well-written fiction that causes me to get lost in the story. I also love spiritual memoirs and the way...

I’m tired of tolerance.

That’s right. You read that correctly. I’ll even say it again.

I’m tired of tolerance.

For quite some time, “tolerance” has been a hip, cool buzz word here in America. Everyone – especially...

Growing up, dinner was a sacred event in my family’s house.

Throughout elementary school and junior high, my family ate dinner every night at 6 pm. In high school, dinner time fluctuated depending on my extracurricular schedule. Despite...

I’m a firm believer that in a youth ministry setting, unless we process service projects with our students before, during, and after we complete them, they’re a waste of our time yielding little, if any, long-term impact in either the...

The trait I most dislike about myself is the fact that I get jealous insanely easily.

When I psychoanalyze myself, I wonder if perhaps this is because I’m an only child, used to having all the attention. Or maybe it’s because I was...

I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Brooklyn Lindsey entitled Why Youth Talks Keep Getting Shorter. In her post, Brooklyn talks of how she’s recently become OK with 10 minute talks, saying, “Shorter messages, intentional preaching...

Dear Parents -

There are days when I simply don’t envy you. So often when I see you, you’re overwhelmed, running from place to place, chauffeuring your kids from one activity to the next, doing all you can to simply survive another day...

Last Wednesday was our first youth ministry meeting of the school year. It was a night of laughter, fun, and joy; A night when upperclassmen welcomed underclassmen into their midst with open arms.

For our first night, we played a series of...

One of my favorite stories in Scripture is when Jesus heals the man with leprosy in Matthew 8:1-4.

In Jesus’ time, if you had leprosy, you were untouchable. Those with the disease were condemned to a life on the margins of society, isolated...

“Dear Lord, I know you don’t get prayers from trees all that often, but please hear me out. My forest is dying. The humans have come and chopped down the trees. I fear I am next. Please save us, oh Lord! Teach the humans the error of their...

I like my church. A lot.

One of the things that I like most about it is it’s theology of grace.

Despite this, there are times when I sit in church listening to the sermon and I find myself thinking, “Just once, I’d like for this...