After much thought and prayer, we recently changed our youth group’s purpose statement. It’s not original, but it lines out exactly what we feel the Lord wants us to do.
Our church’s purpose statement uses the 5 “I-words” (Inspire, Include, Instruct, Involve, and Impact). This summer our Pastor is re-emphasizing the purpose statement with a new sermon series called “I-5 The Driving Purpose“. It’s play on words from the major interstate 5 that runs through California.
Our youth group is using the same biblical purposes, but they’re just not alliterated. The words we selected were Reach, Connect, Grow, Serve, and Honor.
Here entire is the purpose statement:
The Coastline Student Ministries exists to Reach non-believing students, to Connect them with other Christians, to help them Grow in their faith, and to challenge the growing to Serve in their ministry and Honor God with their lives.
This give direction to everything we do in the youth ministry, and every activity we put on is directly tied to our purpose statement. This also helped set me free from feeling like more of an “activities director” than a youth director.
I recently put all this into our summer calendar, you can click here to check it out. I’d be interested to hear what your youth ministry purpose statement is.
We’re trying a new experiment here at the Coastline Student Ministries. In an effort to bring my communication with the parents to the next level, during our recent youth conference, I posted updates of our trip throughout the three days we we’re away. This is something we’ve never tried before, but I think it was very helpful in a few different areas.
Before we left for our trip, I sent out an e-mail to the parents letting them know of the Twitter updates. I had three areas in particular that I wanted to focus on with these updates. Here is a short clip from the e-mail I sent out. Continue Reading »
Have you got leadership all figured out? Yeah, me neither… although I’m trying to learn more about it all the time.
Recently, I was thinking of all the people who had an influence in my life when I was growing up, and I was amazed how God used all kinds of different people and personalities to mold me into who I am today. That was an encouraging thought for me because I realized God isn’t looking for a specific type of “mold” when it comes to leaders… He can use anybody! I don’t know about you, but that’s especially good news for me. Continue Reading »
In my last post, I talked about how Christ’s deity is shown through His names. In this article I want to talk more about how His deity is shown through His works. Regarding this topic – I love this quote: “What He did validates who He was; Who He was validates what He did…”
A. He Creates. (John 1:3; Heb 1:1-3; Col. 1:16) Christ is the creator and not a created being. A created being, in God’s government, could never do for us what Christ accomplished in our redemption. Continue Reading »
We’re trying a new experiment here at the Coastline Student Ministries. In an effort to bring my communication with the parents to the next level, during our recent youth conference, I posted updates of our trip throughout the three days we we’re away. This is something we’ve never tried before, but I think it was very helpful in a few different areas. 
