From Sampler to Sower

Your Peek Behind the Curtain

Okay, this is a new one for me.  I don’t know how, or even if, this will work, but I’m going to give it a shot.

You, dear reader, are hereby offered a All-Access Backstage Pass to our youth ministry’s creative process.  We’re bringing you backstage, and inviting you to check out what’s going on behind the curtain.

Of course, that means you’re getting a glimpse of a work in progress and not the finished product.  As such, this post, and others like it will probably be rambling and scatterbrained, big on ideas, short -at least at first- on actual implementation.

As you know if you are following my weekly updates, our youth ministry is currently in a teaching series called Mythbusters.  It’s set to conclude on Tuesday, February 17th, following our final three lessons focused on Faith, Hope and Love.  That means we’re just under one month out on our next series – high time to get working on what’s next.

Next on the teaching schedule is a Lenten series, culminating, like most Lenten seasons, with an Easter celebration.  Our teaching will be guided by the Lectionary’s epistle readings.

My goal, every Lent, is to very intentionally challenge students to develop the daily disciplines which will ground their faith in an ever deepening relationship with the God whose name they claim.  That’s not to say that during Epiphany I attempt to help they develop a superficial version of Christianity that only affects their Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights – it’s just that Lent provides an intentional time every year to teach them to focus on the presence of God in every part of their life.

And so, I find myself wondering what we will do this year to help move us toward this goal.

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I was talking with a friend of mine recently, about his challenges in getting a new youth ministry off the ground.  He knew what to do, it was just that there were obstacles at every turn.  It reminded me of how hard starting out can really be.  And it got me thinking about how we started out here.

When I first moved to Middletown, over six years ago now, I took things slow.  We moved in the first of October and I immediately started at the church.  However, we did not hold our first youth service until three months later, when school started back up in January after Christmas vacation.  And we didn’t launch our grand opening promoting the service to the general public until March.  During those first several months, I focused on building a core volunteer team and laying the ground work for the youth service we would eventually call Water’s Edge.  Our praise team met weekly to practice.  Our leadership council began planning and preparing.  But we didn’t have any youth services other than our weekly Sunday School classes on Sunday morning.  What I understood then was that for a youth ministry to succeed, it had to have a backbone.

What is a “backbone” program?

According to Todd Capin’s Youthworker Journal article from 1998, now available online from Youth Specialities website, a backbone meeting is “the ministry time around which all other youth group ministries and meetings revolve and function.”  He goes on to give this sound advice: “In fact, until a student ministry has established a backbone, all other facets to the group should be put on hold (or at least pared back) until a solid, regular, backbone meeting is established.”  (more…)