“I’ve never seen students take hold of training like this. Dare 2 Share LIVE helped get our students and church members excited to share the gospel and pray for the lost to come to Christ.” –Youth leader from Greenville, South Carolina
Have you ever felt like your youth ministry is in a rut? One where you’re just going through the motions, providing a few hours of Christian-flavored entertainment every week for the teens in your church? Maybe you’re noticing that there are no new kids coming through the doors of your youth group, and the teens who do consistently attend seem a little bored once the games end and the sermon begins.
This is a frustrating place to be, especially when you genuinely want to see your students on fire for their relationship with Christ and for sharing the gospel with their lost friends. So how do you get your ministry wagon wheels out of that old, boring rut and start blazing a new trail toward exciting, life-changing, gospel advancing youth ministry? Take your cue from Jesus (and the youth pastor from South Carolina quoted above!) and get students sharing the gospel and making disciples.
When we look at how God used the original disciples to reach the world with the gospel, we see a strategy of disciple multiplication. Jesus’s final instructions to His disciples were to go into the world and make more disciples (Matthew 28:19)—to multiply themselves as followers of Christ. Then those new disciples would make more disciples, who’d make more, until 2,000 years later, here we are!
Our students are the “original disciples” in our ministries, and our job is to help them multiply themselves as followers of Christ in other teens around them. This means that the most effective, sustainable, and biblical answer to waking up the faith of our students and reaching lost teenagers lies not in how cool our youth group is, but in how empowered our students are to disciple others.
After all, students are the ones on the front lines of ministry, building relationships with their lost friends every day at school. They’re the ones who can best relate to their peers and explain why Jesus gives them the peace, joy, satisfaction, and purpose that all teenagers long for and struggle to find. While you may only get one conversation with an unsaved teen, your students will have many open doors throughout the school year to bring up Jesus with their friends.
God desires to use our students to reach other students in ways we never can. Equipping them with the gospel is how we can see the kind of spiritual transformation in this generation that we care so much about. And as we train up our students and help them get a taste of the purpose and empowerment that the mission of the gospel unleashes in their lives, it will ignite their passion for God and for the lost people He loves.
A Practical Place to Start
One of the best events to inspire and prepare your students to make disciples is Dare 2 Share LIVE. This one-day training event teaches teens to articulate the gospel and emphasizes the important roles that prayer and caring for others play when sharing Jesus’s message of grace. It’s a day of worship, empowerment, and getting practice at sharing the gospel in the real world.
You don’t have to sit in your ministry rut week after week anymore. There is a better strategy where students are challenged with a mission that deepens their faith and ignites their passion to bring others into God’s kingdom. If you’re looking for an easy way to jumpstart this biblical directive to make disciples who make disciples in your youth group, join us at Dare 2 Share LIVE on October 13, 2018 at a satellite site near you.
