But something interesting happened to the struggling guy as he laid his title, something that has significant implications for evangelism, both in our personal lives and for the students and families we work with. I share that story and what happened in the video below.

Who’s your “tile master” for evangelism? What have you learned from them?

Sometimes what was being served for dinner seemed strange and unusual to me; like egg plant Parmesan. Which, by the way, is my Dad’s favorite.  In the end I usually ended up eating dinner anyway because if I didn’t I knew I’d be really hungry later and by then it would be too late and time for bed.

Ezekiel 3:1-3 are some strange verses but let’s take a look at them together and then stay with me as I explain them and how they apply to you, your students and evangelism.

And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.

Okay…now egg plant Parmesan, chocolate covered crickets, and sauteed eel are strange things to eat, but a scroll?! I wonder if for a moment while Ezekiel was having this vision from God he thought; “do I have to eat that?”

So what does God mean when he tells Ezekiel to “eat this scroll”? Well, He’s talking about his Word, the Bible. In Ezekiel’s time God’s message was written on scrolls, one page (up to 30 feet long). Ouch…I’m trying to imagine shoving a 30 foot long scroll in my mouth. Anyway…

God’s Word is our spiritual food that tastes sweet and our students need to feed themselves regularly just as they do physically. And when they really “digest” God’s Word, dive into it and read it, they will find that it makes them stronger in their faith and more equipped and confident to share the gospel.

But it means doing more than just reading a few verses when they have the time or taking casual glances at the-verse-a-day-calendar on the refrigerator as they bolt out the door to school. Imagine going through your day only eating small nibbles of a meal. In time your body is going to be screaming “FEED ME!” Going without spiritual food (God’s Word) will bring about the same results; our spirit starts to scream “FEED ME!”

To “digest” God’s Word means to allow it to sink in and penetrate our hearts. Ezekiel 3:10 says; And he said to me, “Son of man, listen carefully and take to heart all the words I speak to you. When God’s word sinks deep into the hearts of our students it will eventually show in their actions and life.

If we’re not careful, doing youth ministry can fall under the “life is too busy” excuse. If we’re going to feed our youth solid food that fattens their faith and equips them to share the gospel, we need to be getting fat ourselves so we’re equipped to pour into our students lives. It’s disciples making disciples.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go eat, I’m feeling a little hungry. Let’s see….uuummm…I think I’ll have me a hungry mans portion of Ezekiel 5,6,7 tonight.

Is your life so busy you only have time to grab a small bite on the way out the door? Is your to-do list and event planning replacing sitting down with God to eat a huge meal that will fatten your faith?

As youth leaders what kind of spiritual diet do you have?  What creative ways do you feed your soul?

Sharing the Gospel is something that I am passionate about and I recognize that it needs to be a priority in our Student Ministry. I talk about it all the time. Whether presenting the Gospel in our large group setting or challenging students to share their faith, I keep it in front of my students every week.

What I am learning in the midst of all of this is that the students I lead respond overwhelmingly more positively when I give them something simple and practical to do in response to the call to evangelize. When I talk about it and share scripture about the call from God to share our faith my students will nod their heads in agreement, but very few of them will take the principles and put them into practice on their own. However, when I talk about evangelism and then give them a clear action point to do in response, the participation of students increases greatly.

Here are just a few ideas that we have implemented this past year that have seemed to work well with our students:

1. We consistently ask students to think of 1 friend or family member that doesn’t know Christ. This helps keep the need for evangelism personal in the lives of our students. We’ve had them write that persons name on the wall (on butcher paper), on their hand, in their Bibles, or on THE Cause Circle (a tool provided by Dare 2 Share). All of these are very visceral ways for students to be reminded of that 1 person.
2. We spend time in our large group and small group settings in prayer for those individuals.
3. Recently, we distributed a single copy of the Life Book to our students as a tool to start a spiritual conversation with a friend at school. We had them write a note to their friend or family member on the inside cover to add a personal, friendly touch. This was a practical way for our students to engage in evangelism before the end of the school year and preview into the campus saturation we are planning for in the fall.

Here are a few more ideas that we will be implementing in the next 6-12 months:

1. We are planning a campus initiative in the fall that will tie in the Life Book Movement campus saturation as well as See You at the Pole.
2. We are partnering more and more with 1st Priority as way to keep our students involved in evangelism on their campuses.
3. Next winter/spring we are taking all of our students to Dare 2 Share’s FOLLOW tour.

If you are looking to get started I would highly recommend you utilize THE Cause Circle provided by Dare 2 Share. CLICK HERE to download the PDF. This is a great way to help your students start a visual action plan to begin praying, pursuing, and persuading their friends toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What are things you are doing to implement evangelism in a practical way in your student ministry? What ideas have you put into practice that your students have responded to? Share your thoughts below and let’s help each other fuel the priority of evangelism in our Student Ministries and on every High School and Middle School campus in the nation!

The gospel message of “faith alone in Christ alone” often gets painted as narrow-minded, exclusive and decidedly unPC.

But does following Jesus and believing He is “the way, the truth and the life” make us narrow-minded bigots?

I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point your students have or will internally ask themselves this question about their Christian faith.

Helping Teens Find the Answer

It’s important you help them wade through this one.

So does it?

In one sense, yes. For we do believe Jesus when He says, “no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). There’s no denying the singular nature of this statement. But in another sense, Jesus’ offer of life in and through Him is anything but exclusive.

The paradox is that in actuality, the message of the gospel throws the invitation to eternal life through Christ wide open to everyone.

For Jesus extends the free gift of salvation and a restored relationship with God to everyone. And that means EVERYONE—from the most devout saint to the most notorious sinner. Back in Jesus’ day, this was radical, revolutionary and distinctly uncomfortable to the religious of the day.

And it still is.

Because Jesus’ salvation message of love and grace embraces cutters and porn addictions. Gossips and bullies.  Losers and liars. It’s freely available to anyone and everyone. All it takes to enter in to this astounding, transformational, personal relationship is faith and trust in Him alone to forgive our sins and give us eternal life.

Regardless of what we’ve done, once we’ve put our trust in Him alone, God sees us through “cross-colored” glasses and welcomes us in… Read the rest of the Energize Article Here.

John’s pretty spiritually apathetic and his lifestyle shows it. In fact, most of the friends that he hangs out with outside of church are not Christians and, unfortunately, he fits in with them a bit too well.

After a lot of pressure and evangelism training from his youth pastor, he finally gave in and decided to bring God up in a conversation with his unsaved friends. He tried it… once. Never again. It was so akward. His friends looked at him like a deer in headlights. The fact that God was in their conversation felt like mixing oil and water. In the end, John hoped his friends would forget he ever brought it up so they would go back to being normal again.

Meet Sarah. She also is a high school junior who attends the same youth group every week, but does so because she enjoys journaling about what the Lord is teaching her there. She looks forward to hearing what God is doing in other people’s lives and reflects on the youth pastor’s words throughout the week. She, too, hangs out primarily with unsaved friends outside of church. As someone who follows the Lord with her lifestyle, she doesn’t fit in that well, but her friends still accept her and her “quirks.”

Sarah went through the same evangelism training as John and also took the youth pastor’s challenge to bring God up in a conversation with her unsaved friends that week. Her friends knew she was a Christian, but they’ve never explicitly talked about it before. Their conversation, too, was akward, but her friends didn’t give her the “deer in the headlights” look. They heard her and weren’t totally suprirsed by the subject matter coming up. God might even come up in their conversations again and Sarah might be willing to even initiate it again.

As youth pastors, sometimes we push all our kids to bring God up in their conversations. This is good, but we need to remember to be sensitive to the Johns in our group. Not only will they never again bring God up in a conversation, but doing so almost caused more harm than good. It’s not that we shouldn’t encourage the Johns to share Christ nor that a person should be living a perfect Christian life before bringing God up in a conversation — just be aware of the dynamics that might be in play when we do so.

The best way for students to bring Christ up in their conversations with unsaved friends is to live a life that reflects Christ first. That means we have to focus on not only encouraging and training them to share Christ, but to live it so their evangelism efforts have a stronger foundation.

The first step to evangelism for our youth group kids is discipleship. Discipleship and evangelism must go hand-in-hand. You shouldn’t do one without the other.

What happens when the spiritually apathetic kid tries to share his “faith” with an unsaved friend?

How many of us can relate to frustrations we had as teens when we heard our parents say those famous 4 words, “Because I said so!”? I would imagine most, if not all of us, could share at least 1 of those stories. Why wouldn’t we think that teenagers would get frustrated with us if they continued to hear us tell them to share their faith (because I said so) vs. seeing us do it ourselves.

When I call our students to share their faith I try to encourage them with a recent story from my own life in which I had the opportunity to do it myself. I was actually given a great opportunity on our winter retreat to allow some of them to see that I do it. We rented charter buses to make the 2 1/2 hour trip from Johnson City to Gatlinburg and I sat in the front seat of the bus (because only cool people get to sit in the back). One of the young men I’m discipling sat up front as well. He, along with a few others, were able to see and hear me engage our bus driver in a spiritual conversation. He shared his beliefs, I shared the Gospel, we agreed to disagree and he wasn’t all that interested in what I had to say. But the conversation took place, and my kids were able to observe it and not just hear about it.

Bottom line, we have to live it to lead it. Our teens need to hear stories of our evangelism adventures – good, bad and ugly. Better yet, when we are given the chance, they need to see us in action. They need to see us live it so they’ll know that it’s more than just because we told them so.

What are ways that you model an evangelistic lifestyle to your teenagers? How frequently do you share stories of proclaiming the Gospel to someone? What are other opportunities that we should look for as Youth Leaders (a.k.a. Leaders of Youth) to share our faith in their midst?

“Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.” – Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes in life and especially in youth ministry it seems that we find ourselves with not enough… not enough time, not enough resources, volunteers, patience, you name it, it all seems to be wearing thin. So how do we use what little time we have with students most effectively to make a maximum impact?

I recently spoke with Rob Kelly who is a veteran youth pastor of Northern Hills in Brighton, Colorado, where he is currently on staff as a teaching pastor and elder. We discussed this very topic and I believe he offered some great insight on spending our time wisely in our youth ministries. Here’s how our conversation went…

What is the biggest trap for youth leaders?

 Sometimes the “squeakiest wheels” in the youth group demand the majority of the youth leader’s time and attention. It could be conflicts, drama or any host of issues that keep us away from our main goal as youth leaders. Youth leaders are usually uniquely equipped to handle conflict or certain issues that may arise, so they can get sucked into all sorts of problems that are squealing for their attention. It’s not that some aren’t important to deal with; it’s just that we need to be conscious of how we spend our time and engagement with all of our students.

What advice do you have for youth leaders in this area?

1)      Make outreach central to your youth ministry

The purpose of student ministry sometimes gets misconstrued as “babysitting” or behavior modification. When we neglect outreach we miss out on training and equipping students to be part of the huge mission of Christ to seek and save the lost. Don’t let your group stray from that mission.

When you empower your students as ambassadors of the gospel, they become the ministers and the referees. The little problems get engulfed by the bigness of God, His grace, and His goal to reach EVERYONE with the saving knowledge of Jesus. When we stay on that track, our time will never be misspent!

2)      Evaluate how you spend your time

Just like when you’re doing a budget, you have to start with where you’re at. Spend some time looking at how your time is spent with your students and determine if changes need to be made. You don’t necessarily have to go this far but when he was a youth pastor, Rob made a chart that showed how much time was being spent with each student each week (by himself and by his volunteers). This showed him if his students were being invested in regularly and consistently.

What about your teaching time? Take a look at the kinds of things you focus your teaching on. In a given year, which topic gets the highest word count? Does this align with the mission of your youth ministry? Does it work towards Jesus’ ultimate mission of making disciples who make disciples?

3)      Keep an open dialog between you and your adult sponsors

Talk to your adult sponsors regularly about your students. They usually have a pretty good pulse of what’s going on. Make sure that you’re empowering them to resolve conflict and those “squeaky wheel” situations wherever possible and appropriate. Also, make sure they’re on board with the mission and central goal of the youth ministry so that they can be guiding the students in that direction too. That way you’ll be a well oiled machine for the advancement of the gospel!

What are the biggest youth leader “time traps”? Any advice on how battle those?

I’ve been thinking lately about the word “collaborate” and what it means. By its definition it means; to work willingly with one another. As well I’ve been thinking about the above verses from Acts, particularly verse 44 that says; “all the believers were TOGETHER and had everything in common.” As a result I’ve wrestled with the following thought. As believers and as youth workers we have one thing in common, the advancement of the gospel. We have a Kingdom mindset. Yet, while we have this one thing in common why aren’t we collaborating (working willingly with one another) more. Why does it seem some churches and youth groups are NOT collaborating but rather competing with another?

God never intended for us to try to out do the church or youth group down the road. I’ve personally seen one youth ministry advertise in the paper an upcoming community outreach event. The youth ministry was going into the community to meet some physical needs such as painting, yard works, etc. and share the gospel. Just days later a neighboring youth ministry decided to hold their own version of that same event and they too took out an ad in the paper announcing their intentions. However, they had an added bonus. The first five students to sign up would receive a gift card to a local restaurant. Eventually the buzz around the local coffee shop was about how the two youth ministries were using “marketing schemes” to draw students into their churches. Eventually one of the youth ministries ended up canceling their event for reasons unknown.

Now, according to Acts 2:44 these two youth ministries could have been a huge blessing to the entire community if they had collaborated on the project, and maybe even seen the same results we see in the book of Acts; “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

I believe by NOT collaborating we’re only hurting THE Cause instead of advancing it. Imagine for a moment what your youth group would look like spiritually and numerically if you collaborated with other groups in your area. Imagine the impact made on your community. What would people be saying? How would they react and respond? Hopefully they would be filled with awe at what God was doing and be drawn to a church and/ or youth ministry as a result of the gospel being shared, not by gimmicks.

I’ve recently returned from Chicago where I took our students to the Dare 2 Share Game Day conference. If you’ve taken your students to the Dare 2 Share conference before you’re familiar with the outreach experience on Saturday afternoon. This year we partnered and paired up with students from two other youth ministries from the Chicago area. Our students spent an hour meeting people and sharing the gospel and many of them were rejected and shunned, and others were more open to listening. But what our students learned that afternoon is that serving and sharing the gospel takes collaboration. They learned they are not alone. They were there collaborating (working willingly with one another) for the same purpose, to advance the gospel. They weren’t there competing for peoples attention in hopes of them joining our youth ministry or one of the other two we partnered with. We came together with a Kingdom mindset and one purpose, to share Jesus together as the body of Christ.

The point I’m making here is that there needs to be more of it going on. It’s time we stop competing or thinking we’re the only ones that know what we’re doing. We’re all on the same team, so lets start acting like it. Evangelism is not a contest to see who can get the most students to join our youth ministry. We should be TOGETHER and have EVERYTHING in common when it comes to the advancement of the gospel.

What are some methods or tools you’ve used to collaborate with other youth groups to share the gospel in your community?

Or is it?

Fortunately, Christ’s command to go and make disciples isn’t limited to those with a certain personality. Just because you’re a bit shy doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for the first step in making a disciple: evangelism.

The problem is that we often associate evangelism with super-outgoing people. Us introverts look at them and think, “Wow, evangelism is easy for those guys! I wish I could do that,” when really scripture says nothing about having to be an extrovert to share the gospel. In fact, the beauty in diverse personalities is that it provides opportunities for the gospel to be shared in a plethora of different tones and styles, including ways that an extrovert could never be able to share the gospel.

We can glorify the stage evangelists all we want — and many of them do a great job! (*Greg Stier* *cough cough*) — but what about that introverted girl in your youth group who really just wants to talk quietly through some stuff she’s thinking? Often an introverted youth leader will be able to connect with her on a level that no extrovert could. The long silent pauses in the conversation would kill a bubbly, out-going person! An extrovert would start talking too quickly and ruin the moment of a deep theological truth of the gospel that was finally sinking in!

Or what about that youth group boy who’s quiet himself? Who’s he going to feel safest talking to? The loud, outgoing guy who’s running around talking to everyone? Or the quiet, reserved youth leader who’s confident enough to strike up a conversation with the boy even if it takes a little bit of courage?

Obviously I’m drawing some broad stereotypes here, but the point is clear: introverts have the ability to make deep connections with people and share Christ in meaningful, effective ways. It may not be the same way that the outgoing cheer-leader does, but not everyone is going to receive it that way anyway.

Instead of looking at the people you consider to be dynamic evangelists and being envious that you could never do what they do, look at what you can do. Embrace your own style of evangelism that no one else can live out besides you. Chances are pretty good that it’s a style that no extrovert could ever live up to. And chances are even better that one day they’ll be thinking, “Wow, evangelism is so easy for those introverted guys! I wish I could do that.”

 As an introvert, what is your style of evangelism?

Taking the Hit for Us

This mom’s noble sacrifice serves as a modern day parable for us as we explore the next step of our GOSPEL Journey acrostic, the “P”:

Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again.

The Bible says that God’s anger over sin was headed full speed at each of us. But out of His great love for us, Christ pushed us out of the way, sacrificing His life so we could have a restored relationship with God now and live forever with Him in heaven. Jesus died in our place!

The Centrality of the Atonement

Did you know there are some theologians in our day who find the theology of the atonement uncomfortable? The brutal, bloody, substitutionary nature of Christ’s death makes them uncomfortable – so uncomfortable that they’ve set off in search of extra-Biblical alternate explanations for this divine transaction.

And certainly in some respects, the bloody payment Jesus provided should make as all uncomfortable, for it was a horrendous price for God to pay for the forgiveness of our sins. But the stark, unsettling nature of this reality should never make us squeamish about the clear Biblical teaching of the atoning sacrifice of Christ’s death. It is a critically important theological truth which is central to the saving message of the gospel. And as such, it is vitally important that we communicate this truth to our students.

Why Blood?

Why did blood have to be shed to make us right with God…(read the rest of the Energize Article Here)