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?

Having gone through the series personally, I would consider several parts of the curriculum very valuable for teenagers to hear and wrestle through when it comes to sharing and living out their faith. But before I get to that, a quick point to consider: Bill Hybels is not young and hip. Nothing wrong with that:) however some of the things he mentions in the curriculum (i.e. developing 10-year friendships, hosting dinner parties, talking to his son’s soccer coach) might need a little discussing to help students realize how that relates to them.

Now, about the curriculum. Just Walk Across the Room does a great job of offering practical steps to sharing Jesus in the context of genuine friendships. Oftentimes, the people on our students’ hearts are the friends they care about deeply. In this case, the apologetics and faith-sharing methods they’ve learned might not seem to cut it, and students may shy away from approaching their friends with the gospel even though they care about them the most. This point is good for all of us to realize as we lead out and teach evangelism. Sharing our faith in the context of relationship is the most powerful thing we can do, and our students need to be equipped for this as well as for reaching out to strangers and acquaintances.

Hybels in Just Walk Across the Room also reminds us of the power and importance of testimony, our faith story. He stresses that it is just as important to listen to the other person’s story as it is to tell our own. And when it does come time to tell our own, there are ways to tell it wrong. This section of the curriculum is pretty funny as he goes over some of the “wrong” ways to share our faith story: the long-winded story, the fuzzy story, the religionese story, the superiority story, and the weird-God story. This helped my group to realize that intentionality is key when sharing a testimony. We must remember who we are speaking with; otherwise the words may just fall flat. A great exercise that came out of the curriculum was to write out our faith stories (life before Christ, how we found Christ, and life now) and practice sharing them with each other.

For all of the practical steps and activities in this curriculum, it still reminded me that ultimately sharing the gospel is not always formulaic, or even practical, but it is always intentional, just like a walk across the room.

What do you think of Bill Hybels’ thoughts on equipping the Church for evangelism? What are some other ways we can help our students share their faith with their friends? Respond below.

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?

Too many times we as Christians either avoid sharing the gospel with family and friends during Christmas or we do it in ways that are borderline ineffective or over-the-line obnoxious.

Here’s a few examples of what not to do:

-Spike someone’s eggnog with Communion wine and then use it as an evangelistic opportunity to talk about the power of the blood of Christ.

-Stuff somebody’s stocking with a Left Behind DVD, “Testamints” (Yes, they exist) and a Harold Camping Do-it-Yourself Apocalypse kit (after all we are one week away from 2012!)

-Dress up like Joseph or Mary, buy a doll (male please) from American Girl and then boycott Santa at your local mall.

Please don’t.

But please do…something. A bigger mistake than trying something less-than-effective when it comes to sharing Jesus is doing nothing at all.

So here are three ways to share Jesus this Christmas without coming off as a Grinch:

1. Invite someone to a Christmas Eve service with you.

Christmas Eve services are GREAT ways of engaging others with the…(Read the rest of the article on Greg’s blog – click here).

1. Understand your own faith
2. Other religions aren’t all wrong
3. Know why you’re sharing your faith
4. Set limits
5. Be prepared for what you may face

I completely agree that teens need to understand their own faith.  This is one of the main reasons I appreciate Dare 2 Share’s GOSPEL Journey as it lays out the basics beliefs of what it means to be a Christian. In order to clearly communicate the Gospel, students certainly need to understand what it is that they believe.  It’s safe to assume that if students understand the Gospel enough to make their own decision then they understand enough to communicate it.  But it doesn’t hurt to have the Gospel outlined for them.

Out of fear of overstating the second point, I prefer to say that there are elements of truth in other religions. The fact is, as a Christian, I believe that other religions are wrong and don’t want to step onto a slippery slope where I could give more credibility to them than they deserve. A resource that explains this concept better than I can and helps teens (and adults) to identify truth elements in other religions and bring it back to the Gospel is, Dare 2 Share: A Field Guide to Sharing Your Faith.

I really struggle with the point Kelli is trying to make with know why you are sharing your faith. I have observed that teenagers can be more apathetic and don’t sense enough urgency to share their faith.  The truth is, I’d rather work with students who did have an internal clicker tracking the number of people they shared their faith with and even led to Christ vs. students who aren’t compelled to share their faith at all.  We should be motivated to see as many people come to Christ as possible.  You can read Jude 23, 2 Peter 3:9, and 2 Corinthians 5:11, just to share a few verses, that lean more toward sensing the urgency to share the Gospel so more and more people are saved than being too laid back in our approach.  That being said, I believe there is a balance to strike in being Relational & Relentless.

In the same vein I struggle with telling students to set limits because the fact is most of them, in my experience, haven’t set lofty enough goals for advancing the Kindgom.  I am sure to teach my teens that God is the One who will ultimately save them and that their lost friends have to decide for themselves if they will choose to trust in Jesus, but it is definitely our responsibility to share the Gospel.  It could simply be that Kelli and I have different experiences in Youth Ministry but telling my teens to set limits is not the issue I see them struggling with. Convincing them to share their faith more regularly is the greater need in my ministry.

As we equip our teens to share their faith I agree that we need to prepare them for what they may face. Jesus Himself promised us persecution and adversity and rejection when it comes to proclaiming the Gospel to the world.  Again, there is a balance we need to strive for. That being, when we prepare them for push back that we aren’t equipping them with one more reason not to share their faith.

I appreciate the thought that Kelli put into her article and I greatly value hearing perspectives from fellow youth leaders. I don’t have it all figured out and it’s extremely helpful to learn from other’s experiences. However, I am at a place in Student Ministry where I believe teenagers need more encouragement and equipping to help them share their faith, not a better understanding of boundaries or limits that could inadvertently discourage them from sharing their faith, even if that’s not our intentions.  A good book to help refine how you and your students share their faith (and one I would recommend) is Dare 2 Share: A Field Guide for Sharing Your Faith.

What are your thoughts when it comes to equipping your teens to share their faith? Do you find you have to motivate them to be more vocal with the Gospel or do you feel the need to restrain your teenagers from being perceived as overly obnoxious for the Gospel?

A few months ago I saw several Facebook updates from Youth Leader friends asking if other Youth Leaders were doing a “saturation,” ordering “Life Books,” or joining “the Life Book Movement.” I was intrigued as their comments all had evangelistic implications. As I did a little research I came across the Life Book Movements website: http://www.thelifebook.com. I was extremely excited by what I found.

The Life Book Movement, founded by The Gideons International, is a ministry dedicating to putting the Gospel of John into the hands of every teenager on every High School campus in America. As of this fall their website reports nearly 1.7 million Life Books have been distributed. That’s a fantastic start for this relatively young ministry. Considering there are approximately 17.5 million teenagers attending High School in America, we still have our work cut out for us as we are only 10% of the way there. This is where you and I can get involved with our ministries.

Go to their website and sign up for a Saturation. “A Saturation is a short-term mission trip by your student to their high schools to hand out The Life Book to their classmates.”

I was hoping to have our students participate in a Saturation this past fall as part of a series we did called, Campus: we will take this house, that also tied in with See You At the Pole (http://www.syatp.com/). We didn’t want SYATP to feel like some random event we had put on the calendar for the fall so we built this series around it. The focus of the series was equipping teens to live and give the Gospel on their campuses. It was great to see our students respond to the series as teens from our Student Ministry led the charge on every Middle School and High School that is represented in our ministry. The vision was to put The Life Book into the hands of all teenagers leading up to SYATP so that they could share the Gospel, invite their friends to SYATP, and then invite them to church.

Due to such a high demand of The Life Book they had already distributed all of the books they had printed for the fall of 2011. However, I am getting ready to order The Life Book this winter so we can participate in a Saturation in the spring of 2012. I have also marked it on my calendar for next summer to order books so we can be prepared for another Saturation in the fall and tie it into See You At the Pole next September. This is an innovative way to get the Gospel to every student on every High School campus in America!

In addition to Dare 2 Share, The Life Book Movement, and See You At the Pole, what are some other evangelistically focused ministries and resources that you use to equip your teens to take the Gospel to their campuses?

Jesus set the pace for all of us with his own brand of hands-on earthly outreach. He got up close and personal with sinners so that he could transform them into saints. As a result he got dirtier than a cowboy on a cattle drive during his three and a half year stint of earthly ministry. If touching contagious lepers, casting out pesky demons and scrubbing the crud encased feet of his sweaty disciples doesn’t count as gritty, I don’t know what does. Suffice it to say that the only thing lacking in the ministry of Jesus was a great big bottle of Purel.

What does all of this have to do with you and your ministry? More than you might think!

Too many times in our sanitized ministry world of clean carpets, crisp outlines and cool glasses we miss the messiness of what it means to be a follower of Christ. To be a follow of Christ means that we follow him anywhere and everywhere to reach anyone and everyone. It means we follow him into the barrios and alley ways to preach the gospel to the poor and the downtrodden. It means we wash feet, cast out demons, reach prostitutes and advance the kingdom of God in the trenches and stenches of humanity.

But it’s hard to pick up your cross if you’re busy developing programs and having endless meetings all while manicuring a soul patch. In far too many churches the demands of the professional ministry world has replaced the call of Christ to get gritty with trying to make our ministries more pretty.

But the ministry of Jesus was far from pretty. As a matter of fact it was pretty ugly. He ministered primarily to the blue collar and poor. Why? Because he …(Read the rest of the article on Greg’s blog – click here).

How should God’s Word fit into your students’ evangelism efforts?

Some Christians seem to think it’s pointless to refer to God’s Word in a spiritual conversation with an unbeliever. They fear it will make no sense to the unreached, or worse, shut the conversation down cold.

Granted, shouting and spouting Bible verses of condemnation is not a particularly effective style of evangelism. But does that necessarily mean there’s no role for the Bible in touching the heart’s of those who have yet to embrace the reality of its divine inspiration?

Of course not. Truth is truth. Regardless of whether someone acknowledges it as such or not. And God’s Word is truth.

The following two passages make it crystal clear that there is something internally powerful about God’s Word. It is sharp like a sword or a surgeon’s scalpel. When we listen to it, it can cut deeply into our consciences and speak to our souls with its searing truth. And it always accomplishes its goal, whether it be conviction or conversion.

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:12-13)

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So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11) 

What does this mean for your teenagers as they share their faith? Simply this: As they talk about spiritual things with others, it can help to use spiritual truths from specific Bible verses. Not to be preachy, not to be spewing forth rote words rattled off at a million miles an hour. But in the context of a loving, caring, deep conversation, the Word of God can help move the discussion beyond “my opinion vs. your opinion” and drill down into the soul.

Using specific truths from God’s Word will also allow your students to redirect the discussion and say things like… “Hey, I’m not the one who said this or that…(i.e., Jesus is the only way to God). God said it in the Bible—and there’s a reason it’s the bestselling book of all time…”

So load your teenagers’ spiritual backpacks up with a few key verses that can help them as they communicate God’s truth. If they don’t already know some key verses, it’s time for them to memorize a few. Be the coach and challenge them to get with the drill. Here’s a list of easy-to-memorize verses that I think every Christian teenager should know by heart:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

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“I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life.” (John 6:47)

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Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

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For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

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The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)

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For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Memorizing these verses and sharing them in a caring, thoughtful way will give your students some useful truths from God’s Word to pick from when they are discussing spiritual things with their friends.

God’s Word goes deep into the lives it touches. Let the surgeon’s scalpel do its work!