In this short video, Brian Burchik, High School Pastor at GSM, shares about where we should find our identity. We often seek to find value in numbers, students, volunteers, sermon compliments, and more. This can feel encouraging at times, but what happens when someone comes along who has much more than us? As ministers, we need a better system for finding value. Watch this video for more!
Archive - Resources
RSS Feed
You Cultivate What You Celebrate
Something we say a lot around here is, “you cultivate what you celebrate.” This is a simple truth that is constantly played out when developing student leaders.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of a difference encouragement can make in a student. When you compliment them on a project or attend one of their events, it can literally make their face light up. While there is potential for pride, when done correctly, encouragement spurs most students on to keep getting better at what they do.
Knowing that student culture is created based on the things you celebrate, it is extremely important to ask yourself, “what do we want to celebrate?”
If you want to raise students up who are great at music and can use their gifts for the Lord, celebrate music! If you want to create student disciple makers, celebrate student led discipleship!
The opposite can also be true. If you tell students that they are not capable of being leaders, you will create a culture of students who come only to be fed.
This change does not happen over night. When you cultivate something, it takes time! But when you celebrate something, people take notice. They get excited about getting on board, they seek to become better, and they can truly be empowered to make a difference.
Questions for the week:
What should you be celebrating that you are not?
What are you celebrating that you should spend less time on?
Should lessons focus on morals or the Gospel?
We spent the majority of our time today and yesterday planning out our Spring curriculum. I’m pretty excited because we’ll be talking about Job, Psalms, and Proverbs in a series titled “Uncharted.” We are working with a cool group called Wayfarer to establish what we teach.
I recently completed a project where we reviewed several different Bible curriculums for kids. I was rather frustrated to find that much of the popular curriculum today is simply about teaching kids virtues. For instance, the story of Merriam and Moses teaches kids that they should care for their family, the story of Adam and Eve shows that we should make good choices, and so on.
While those are valuable lessons in the stories, should we limit God’s Word to a simple book of virtue? Here are a few potential problems with focusing only on the virtues:
How to Recruit and Keep Volunteers
Without volunteers, our ministry would never survive! As church employees, we wish we could connect deeply with every student individually, but we simply cannot. That’s why volunteers are so important: they represent Jesus to each student and make sure no one falls through the cracks.
The difficulty for most ministries, however, is actually recruiting volunteers. In the following video, Anita, our volunteer coordinator who supervises over 250 volunteers, shares some practical tips for recruiting and keeping volunteers.
Prefer Reading?
5 key tips for recruiting and keeping volunteers
1) Identify Your Needs in Student Ministry: Do you need small group leaders? Worship Leaders? A set-up team?
2) Identify Your Target: Who should you go after to be a volunteer? Your number one source should be parents, but you can also go after friends, young adults or college students, and even High School students who desire to help with Middle School. Another important idea is to target people who are gifted in the areas of need from point 1. It would not make sense to go after a worship leader who cannot sing!
3) Recruit, Recruit, Recruit: Do whatever it takes to recruit people! Make phone calls, invite people to dinner, send out e-mails, post it on facebook or your website, ask in the church bulletin. The more personal the invite, the more likely the response, but blanket e-mails will turn up volunteers you may have never known.
4) Train Your Volunteers: People don’t like to fail, so set them up for success and they will want to volunteer all the more! Have a solid information packet ready for them that answers their questions, but be prepared to be there for them personally as well. Don’t assume that others know how to disciple just because you do, we must continually train our volunteers!!!
5) Celebrate Your Volunteers: People love being appreciated. Celebrate them by sending them a card or gift on their birthday, sharing amazing God stories that they have been a part of, calling them, praying for them, and so much more. You will be amazed at how encouraging the little things can be and people return to things when they know they are appreciated and making a difference.
What are some ways you celebrate your volunteers?
What are the benefits of student leadership? (part 2)
Last week, we introduced the first benefit of student led discipleship. You can read about it here. This week, we’ll be exploring the second benefit: spiritual growth amongst our leaders.
Girls leading their discipleship group
One student, named Rebecca, had this to say about being a LUGHead (High school student who disciples middle school students):
“Being a middle school discipleship leader has helped me grow in my relationship with God so much. Each week, preparing a lesson has helped me to learn how to dig into Scripture and really learn about God in new ways. I’ve never prayed for anything as hard as I have when I became a LUG Head. Everything that’s within me wants my LUG girls to know God in an intimate way.”
Click to continue reading
What are the Benefits of student leadership? (part 1)
There are two simple and consistent fruits that we have seen in student led discipleship. Today we will hit on the first benefit, and next Tuesday we will explore the second one.
Students Leading Time in the Word
The first is the reproduction of disciple makers. Each year, we have more applicants to be LUG Heads (the name for our High School students who disciple middle school students) than the year before. When we ask freshman why they want to become LUG Heads, the answer is almost always the same: “I want to have the same impact on middle schoolers that my LUG Head had on me.”
Click to keep reading
Believe Leader’s Guides
One of our favorite resources is the Believe book. It is an excellent study that clearly explains the Gospel.
We’ve noticed that sometimes students, even those who have been in church for years, struggle to explain the gospel in its simplicity. They hear so many messages and get a little confused by all the “Christianise” that they constantly need a refresher on the simple truth of the Gospel.
It is the perfect study for both non-Christians and veteran believers. We teach our students through this curriculum once a year and consistently see students accepting Christ and entering the Kingdom. We also see students developing a desire to share their faith because they are confident in what they believe.
Believe answers the following questions, among others:
1) What are the major belief systems in the world?
2) Who is God? How do we know who He is?
3) Why do bad things happen in the world?
4) Why are we separated from God?
5) What, exactly, saves us from our sins?
6) How do we receive the salvation that has been achieved for us?
New Leader’s Guides
We now have new leader’s guides to go along with the curriculum! The Leader’s guide is an excellent tool for helping your students process what God is teaching them and how it can impact their lives. You can now get an eCopy of the Leader’s Guide for absolutely free! All you have to do is sign-up for our newsletter you will get both the Leader’s Guide and Believe.
To sign-up for the Newsletter, simply click here: Newsletter.
Moving through Kairos Circles
Randy spoke at LUG last night about how we can move through Kairos circles. If you have no idea what a kairos circle is, you need to watch this talk! Moving students through the circle is the primary method we use for discipling students. It is an effective way to help them understand their feelings, balance those feelings with truth, develop a plan to respond to those actions, and then they actually respond!
Here is the full lesson:
Romans Leader’s Guides posted
Our team has worked really hard over the past couple of months to complete leader’s guides for the book of Romans. We have now posted them online for you to use for FREE! Check them out right over here.
Empower 2011
The Empower training for all GSM volunteers and parents is only a few days away! We have some exciting things planned and will be giving everyone copies of the Romans Leader’s Guides for the Fall.
Registration begins at 8AM and the conference will go until noon. This year it is free of charge, but there will be some snacks on sale.
