If you’re not already familiar with Deep & Wide Youth Ministry, you should definitely check it out. While the point of this post is not to review its strategy, basically it’s a plan for your ministry that follows the pattern of 
Jesus with his disciples as well as the Great Commandment and Great Commission: take kids deep into God’s Word while pushing them to go wide with the gospel.
Of course, we would all love it if our kids went both deep and wide all the time, but it obviously takes a bit more than just bringing up the idea and expecting them to all pursue it wholeheartedly for the rest of their lives. Like what? I’m glad you asked. Here’s three practical ideas for how to take your kids deep and wide in 2012.
1. Adopt “Deep & Wide Ministry” as a lifestyle.
Too many times we read strategies and even models of ministry as just another approach to ministry, something we follow in order to try to get God to perform a certain way in our youth group. Although none of us would come right out and say it like that, for all intents and purposes, that’s often how we function.
Deep & Wide Youth Ministry is partly a ministry strategy, but more importantly, it’s a lifestyle to adopt for yourself personally. It’s not just something your ministry does, it’s something you first become and then it oozes out of you and into the people around you.
Unless you’re digging deep into God’s Word and intentionally going with the good news yourself, any changes you make to the ministry to try to take your kids deep and wide is purely superficial. You must crave God’s Word yourself and passionately share Him with others in front of students before it will catch on. It’s not a program — it’s a lifestyle.
2. Implement Deep & Wide ideas naturally.
There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with an idea and saying, “I know what will take kids deep and wide! Let’s do _______!” In all your excitement, you rush off to implement it and it just flops.
Why did it flop? Probably for several reasons, but perhaps the most common reason is that we implemented an idea when that’s all it was — just an idea.
If we take point #1 above to heart first, Deep & Wide Ministry flows naturally into our ministry because it’s already so ingrained into us. In fact, to do anything else doesn’t even sit well with our conscious anymore.
The best way to implement ideas that take students deep and wide is to let them naturally flow from your heart and the people around you who are living this out in their personal lives along with you.
3. Build a Deep and Wide Team.
Students will catch your passion for going deep into God’s Word and wide with His message, but it can’t all rest on your shoulders. This has to be something that’s embodied and lived out by the other youth leaders in your ministry, as well. It has to become part of the ministry’s culture, it’s DNA, the very vibe of the ministry. Push your leaders to go deep and wide at every training meeting, in every email, and after every phone call. Do whatever you can to help ingrain this into them and encourage them to live it publicly for kids, not primarily for the sake of the kids, but for the sake of your leaders and the accountability kids can naturally provide by making it so public.
The bottom line
Taking kids deep into God’s Word and wide with His message to the lost world around them is not as simple as setting up a couple evangelism training programs or buying deeper curriculum for small groups. It’s about embodying the very thing you want your ministry to become.
Adopting a deep and wide mentality in our lives is easier said than done. What do you anticipate the barriers will be for you personally?
