Our 2015 Focus

Yes it's true!   Our youth ministry team of volunteers restructured last Saturday.  BUT we will save that for another post.

Our focus this year is success in discipleship.  Now I could have stood up before the youths and said, "Students for the next 52 weeks we are going to have a discipleship class that will meet at 4 on Sunday afternoons . . . . "  I may have started with 15 but would have ended with maybe two and we probably wouldn't have made it to all 52 weeks.

Soooo what do we do?  Easy peasy!  Don't remake the wheel.  Look for a system to use that can fit into our already established youth group gathering.  So for the year and a little more (cause we break to the beach in the summer) we will be working through LeaderTreks Deep Discipleship on Sunday nights at our youth group gathering.  I'm taking the small group lessons and editing them down to fit our time frame along with a message that ties in ans supports that small group time each week.  Deep Discipleship is a systematic way to work through discipling the students.

On top of that we discussed at our team retreat about discipling as many students one on one as we possibly can.  Now our volunteers are already busy humans so I didn't want to add another time during the week that they have to meet with the students outside of Sunday night.  Our students are busy humans as well.  So let's use our Hang Time as a time to disciple.  Not talking about pulling a students aside for 35 of 40 minutes to talk.  What we will do is take a students and just sit and chat with them for about 10 minutes or so at Hang Time for about ten weeks.  During this time we will find out where they are at in their faith walk and what they can do to help them move to the next level.  After the several weeks of brief meetings we will give the students who want to pursue discipleship even further on their own with a copy of "I am a Disciple" a 40 day journal.

Our team members will transfer their notes from Know Growth to a spread sheet we are creating so we can see where all our students are "at a glance".  As a youth pastor I'm really looking forward to this.











Our goal is for our team members to disciple as many as we possibly can in 2015.  We want to see students stick with their faith after high school.  We want to see students grow and reach other students.  We desire to make disciples not just believers.