Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Youth Meetings

Youth Meetings are considered to be the backbone of youth ministry. The meetings tend to be on a Sunday evening or Wednesday evening service, which gives you about an hour to engage with the teens. Typically youth meetings have a message and some sort of activity to go along with it to engage the teens in some way. It is extremely helpful for the game to relate to the message in someway. The problem is with such little time can you cover what needs to be covered in the time allowed and how much do you try to cover. Growing up our youth group met on Wednesday nights and this was the night we had a game to go along with our message and Travis would try and do a theme for the month. He was able to make it where we would want to come back the following week and continue on with the topic. He would give us questions to think about like "Who was someone that you haven't forgiven and why?" when we were talking about forgiveness and tell us the next week we would talk about why we need forgive. In the book this is under give them a reason to return, so what creative ways did your youth pastor use to give you reason to return and what new ways can you think of to keep teens wanting to come back every week? Besides food!