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Youth Specialties | Press | Regarding Activities in Youth Specialties

On Monday, we released from the company the President of Youth Specialties (YS), Mark Oestreicher. For many years, Marko was a courageous leader for this organization and we appreciate his years of service. Youth Specialties has been going through a transition since Zondervan purchased it several years ago, and at this time we feel we need to make a change.

via www.youthspecialties.com

I have known Marko a little bit for sometime. We shared a mentor at different times in our lives , and Marko actually interviewed me for a job at a previous church he was at. Thankfully for both of us I did not get it. He started his youth ministry career at a church right down the street from where our old campus was. In fact he took our youth group name with him to Omaha when he went to work there. Nobody has done more to advance junior high ministry more than Marko.

I can't say I am surprised Marko is no longer at YS. I would be surpised and saddended if he was terminated like this press release seems to be saying.

I'm not surprised because anytime a company like YS gets bought by a larger company like Zondervan there is usually transition at the top soon after. Eventually the corporate owner want's to exert its will and their is resistance and well, chage. Have no clue this is what happened at YS though. And I am not saying it was a bad thing anyway. Change is often good.

It sounds like Zondervan was not happy with how the conferences were going. Zondernvan did not buy YS just for the books. Conferences can be lucrative!

I wonder where Marko will go from here? Will it be heading up the Saddleback Youth Ministry publishing machine? Perhaps somewhere in student missions? My best guess, he will be a consultant. Much of the same perks, and more flex for the family. And it pays enough.

I hope he continues to use his voice to increase the depth of junior high ministry.

Media Clips for Preteens

When I first started at my church, I had no clue what I was doing with preteens. I remember first walking into a sunday school class on the first day and thinking "these students are KIDS"! It was a big moment for me though, because I slowly warmed up to the idea of preteen ministry, and have learned to love it.

One thing that is POWERFUL for preteens is video clips. It's a rare occasion when I give some sort of message that doesn't involve at least a clip at the beginning to introduce something, or a 3 minute clip to really drive home a point. However, with preteens being preteens, you are rather limited with what sort of movie clips you can show them. However, here are some that clips I've shown with the topic and have worked really well.

Toy Story - friendship

The Lion King - selfless sacrifice

The Incredibles - family

Kicking and Screaming - letting sports control you

Wall-E - serving the community

Hannah Montana - Being genuine

Up - life is a journey

Shrek - openness

Finding Nemo - home

AND MORE...

Pop culture can be a great vehicle for displaying biblical and Christian truth and meaning, but at times it must be challenged and cultivated. Make sure you aren't doing yourself more harm than good with showing a "good clip" that needs a lot of time to explain why we as Christians can't think or act like that!

Lesson from Panera at lunch time...

I just got back from a retreat with our junior high students this past weekend. Had an incredible weekend. Definitely some good blog posts coming your way regarding it!

I had lunch at Panera Bread Company today as I was enjoying a delicious bowl of soup while editing some parts of my masters thesis. It was probably was the busiest that I've ever seen a restaurant like Panera at noon time. The line was almost out the door. They had probably seven employees making sandwiches. Not to mention cleaning up after the customers.

Lesson learned though: work prevails when teamwork prevails. Never underestimate the power of a team community working together towards a common goal. Sure some of the customers at Panera were getting frustrated because of the wait and the craziness of the atmosphere, but the service was still excellent and employees were cordial and kept their cool with the anxious patrons.

Work prevails when teamwork prevails. Your volunteer team MUST work together. Parents and youth pastors MUST work together. Youth pastors and the rest of the ministry staff MUST work together.

It's a MUST. Thanks Panera.

bad church happens

I have seen this happen so many times. Church’s can be tough places to work. Bait and switch ministry description, or maybe even deception.

Check out this heart wrenching post about their experiences in youth ministry. When I have more time I will post some more thoughts. I wonder what you would say to this couple? Would you do anything differently?

Unfortunately, neither the leadership of the church nor the church itself turned out to be what we were made to believe they would be. In fact, it was almost the exact opposite. (This is not said with any sense of malice toward the congregation. Not at all! People are where they are in their journey with Jesus. We were simply made to think they were at a different place in their journey--a place more in keeping with our own philosophy of ministry and overall discipleship.) Although we tried for several months to work within the structure and situation with which we were presented, eventually the friction between us and the pastor began to heat up.

Read the whole thing here.

By the way this sort of thing can be prevented. More on that soon.

get your self fired part i

Some observations: (add your own in the comments)

• Way to sit in the front row youth pastor! That makes every SP happy.
• Too bad the camera guy missed the money shot, still pretty amusing.
• Obviously a teenager posted this he called the “lady” old.
• The youth pastor kept the $5 instead of giving it to the lady. Nice.

Lesson Learned

I've done it. You've probably done it. Let's face it, we've all TAUGHT something to students that after thinking about it, we probably realized that it wasn't quite right what we taught them. Maybe it was just something you said accidently, or possibly is was something that you just didn't understand when it came to the Scriptures.

I was humbled a few weeks ago. I was teaching a message called "UnWorship" looking at the worship practices in Leviticus, and I was actually pretty stoked about my big idea that God revealed to me. I made a mistake though, and my boss was there to correct me IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE GROUP. During the morning, I kept saying that the two men Nadab and Abihu were Moses' GRANDSONS. I felt like such a dork. I knew that Aaron, who was these men's father was Moses' brother. But for whatever reason, it registered in my mind as his grandsons. And as I said before, my boss loves me enough to gently (and humorously) point out that I was incorrect.

After about 4 minutes of feeling like a total loser, it got me thinking about something. Am I willing to be totally humiliated in front of eighty 5th - 8th graders to make sure that these students are confronted with the truth of God's word? Perhaps totally humiliated is an unhelpful phrase in that question and a better phrase would be "whatever it takes" to make sure students are taught the true stories from God's story. I want to be. But I think it's going to be some more lessons on humility for me in order for me to understand that I witness and testify to God's word and Spirit working in our world, and that I'm not changing any hearts.

Becoming a Student of Learning Part 1

When I came into working with youth back in college, I never knew that I was going to get into talking about learning styles, educational philosophies, and active learning paradigms.

All I wanted to do was teach God's word. All I wanted was to build relationships with students and point them to Jesus. All I wanted was for students to "get it" when it comes to the Christian life.

But slowly but surely, I've realized that behind ever great message, bible study, Sunday School lesson, retreat theme, service project reflection is a learning philosophy. With that said, there are good and bad philosophies. The question is, what makes a good learning philosophy?

A learning philosophy is a set of ideas, structures, and a vision for your audience receiving what you are communicating. A good learning philosophy doesn't just teach content in a way that gets to the audience, but it gets THROUGH to them. That's what I think is the difference in philosophies.

Generally speaking, junior high students are "concrete thinkers" when it comes to ideas. They can primarily process ideas that is able to be linked to an object or a corresponding metaphor. Knowing this sort of predisposition, we as teachers can build that reality in our stories and teaching structure.

We will have a couple more parts to this blog in the coming days. BUT, I think the most important posture that we must take working with junior high students is to become a student of learning.

What are some things that you have LEARNED about LEARNING?

how to keep your job part I

If you want to have a long career in youth ministry the most important thing, by far is to maintain a rock solid relationship with Jesus Christ. We will talk about that a lot here. The difficult thing about youth ministry for us Pastors is this; you can do 99 things right every single week, but doing one thing wrong, making one misstep intentional or not, could easily cost you your job.

Being in ministry for 16 years I have seen the many ways you can get yourself canned. Some of them ridiculous and undeserved some of them totally deserved, even if the youth pastor did not think so. 

The reality is, we serve the people in the pews. They pay our salaries, we are accountable to them (and yes God!!). If you get one or two parents sideways with you, life can get very uncomfortable, very fast. This could happen to anyone! The longer you stay in your current church, the less likely this will happen. Longevity in a consistent ministry helps smooth over the inevitable bumps that come along in ministry.

Most JHP's are young, and new in ministry. You don't have the longevity, the history, the maturity, to withstand a category 4 parental hurricane. By the way I have seen Senior Pastors get blown out too, it just happen to the "youth guy" more than the "old guy".

How can you get out a head of a potential storm? Simple. Be proactive.

When I first started out in ministry I met every week with my "boss", the senior high pastor. And every week I turned in an "accountability report". It was a simple sheet of paper.

At the top was the date the report was for. "Week of June 16th 2004...."
It also stated how many days out of seven I spent doing my "quiet time". If it was not at least 4 I was going to get a stink eye. But that was subjective and just us. Your boss might not care about that. But he should and you ought to tell him that!

The next question was what did I accomplish in the past week. I would list kids I met with or at least talked to, volunteers I spent time with, and whatever regular ministry time I had. I would give a report of our mid week gathering and Sunday morning gathering. I would talk about what lessons I taught and how I thought it went.
I would also list how many hours I worked that week.

The next question was about what I wanted to accomplish the following week. How many kids I was planning on connecting with, what schools I was going to visit, what I had planned for mid week and Sunday etc...

The third question asked about any unusual activities during the week. Did I have an unusual conversation with student or parent. Was I worried about a certain volunteer. Just anything out of the ordinary that I thought my boss should know about, even if it was only to put on his radar. 

There might have been more questions on there, but I can't think of any. Each week, every week I would make a copy for myself and turn the original into my boss. He would read over it, we would discuss it and then he would save it in a file.

If a parent ever asked "Hey, why are we paying that guy, what does he actually do"? My boss would have be able to hand over the file folder so that parent can actually see I was doing something besides shopping for baby food for some game. If the finance committee ever started to wonder how they could cut back on staff, we would have a pretty good case about why I should be allowed to keep my job. You get the idea. It took about 15 minutes of my time but for all I know saved me huge headaches.

You probably wouldn't have to do something like this forever, although it is not a bad habit to get into. In a perfect world this would not be necessary. But you live in youth ministry world which is not a perfect place at all.