Purpose-Driven Youth Ministries Conference - Day 2

WOW!

How do I summarize this day?

We were privileged to hear from Doug Fields again. But we were also blessed with the appearances of Lee Strobel (author of many books like “The Case for Faith” and “The Case for Christ”), Becky Tirabassi and Jim Burns. What a line-up!

Here are some of my thoughts that came out of today. They are not necessarily directly related to any of the messages, but things that God is speaking to me about my life, family, and ministry. They’ll be brief, some maybe even too much so. If you’d like to hear more, just write me and ask.

I was reminded how crucial incarnational ministry is as an approach. As well, I am reminded that we cannot forget to “factor in the ”unfactorable.” What I mean by that is what we have called for some time the “God-thing” factor. We plan an event, meeting or activity and, as it is under-girded by prayer, we trust God to do His “thing” in spite of our plans or along with our plans or whatever.

Team-building is another element that continues to be a foundational issue for healthy youth ministry.

Several ideas came to me as I listened and mused and sang and prayed. Here’s a short list of them:
1. Use our home in Slovakia for having Slovak youth-workers come to receive training, equipping, mentoring and encouragement.
2. Using index cards, make reminders for the senior guys in my small group to help them remember the purposes of the church.
3. Using a map of Banska Bystrica (our home city in Slovakia), have our ministry team mark where the junior & senior high schools and colleges are and mark how many students are in each.
4. Develop a training tool for use in Slovakia entitled, “Feeding The Soul of the Youth Worker.”
5. Develop a tool for helping youth-workers determine which one of the 5 purposes a youth-worker “bleeds” when “cut”.
6. Visit the following sites for various reasons:
        a. www.leestrobel.com
        b. www.homeword.com
        c. www.minusmedia.com

This has been a refreshing day. The high school band led worship tonight and it was very blessed. I was refreshed to step into the presence of the Lord with 1500 other youth-workers!

More musings later...