welcome
to the Gospel Advancing movement
You’ve taken the 5 Stages Assessment, and now you’re ready to dive into building your ministry on the power of the Gospel and the potential of teens. Read on to find out more about your starting point.
it’s a journey
Building a dynamic, energetic youth ministry with real Kingdom impact doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve found it’s a journey that typically goes through five distinct stages, as a leader integrates the values of Gospel Advancement into their life and ministry:
- Commit: Decide to be a Gospel Advancing leader, paving the way for your students.
- Align: Cast this ministry vision to your leaders and help them become Gospel Advancing leaders themselves.
- Prioritize:Integrate the 7 Values of Gospel Advancing into your ministry programs, training, and events.
- Accelerate: Experience growing excitement among your students and momentum within your ministry, as the Gospel goes deeply into and widely out through your students.
- Multiply: Take Gospel Advancing ministry to other leaders within your network and circle of influence.
As with any journey, it will take time to reach your final destination. But don’t get discouraged! God will honor your efforts to Gospelize your ministry.
your starting point
Below is the road map for your Gospel Advancing journey. You’ll find insights, action steps, and tools that will help you along the way.
In addition, you can tap into more encouragement and ideas by joining this group of youth leaders who are also on the Gospel Advancing journey.
your roadmap - PRIORITIZE
This is when things start to get really exciting! Your ministry leaders are all-in, and you have the foundation set for significant spiritual awakening within your youth.
As your ministry calendar, budget, weekly rundown, leadership development, and disciple multiplication efforts align around a Gospel Advancing vision, the Holy Spirit will do His work of deepening your teens’ faith and drawing nonbelievers to Christ through your students’ efforts.
Now that you know what you want graduating teens to look like, you can put a plan in place to create mature disciples who can multiply themselves. It will take a combination of training, spiritual disciplines, intentional coaching, and opportunities to put what they’re learning into practice. This becomes your ministry programming plan!
Greg Stier uses the analogy of a cold to discuss how discipleship multiplication can happen:
Implementing Gospel Advancing is so much more than just checking the box of an annual outreach event (although those are still good to do) or teaching a series about sharing the Gospel (although that wouldn’t hurt). To truly make progress, Gospel Advancing values need to become part of everything you do in your youth ministry—your weekly programs, monthly events, ski trips, mission trips, summer camps, winter retreats, and everything in between.
For a deeper dive into programming your priorities, check out this podcast from Greg:
Action Steps
- Give the Gospel every week in youth group. Check out this blog from Greg on the value of sharing the Gospel every week.
- Implement Take 5 for the Cause, a time in your weekly program for students and adult leaders to recount the good, the bad, and the ugly of their faith-sharing adventures.
moving to the next stage
Accelerate
Now that you’ve normalized the Gospel Advancing values into your ministry, it’s time to take them to the next level!
