Youth Ministry Lessons I Learned in 2010 Pt. 2

The 2nd lesson comes from the theme song of the show Cheers "people want to go where everybody knows their name."

Let me explain, in the fall of 2009 our youth ministry grew to 300 students, going into February of 2010 I was confident we would grow to 400 or more students. I was wrong! LOL. We stayed at 300 and even dropped in numbers. It was depressing & left me scratching my head. The big question is "what are we missing?"

I'm a processor & as I looked at my youth ministry I realized we had a lot of students coming but they were all strangers coming from all over OKC, each student only new a couple students. As I recognized this I realized we would not grow anymore unless our students were building meaningful relationships with each other & our leaders.

With that we didn't waste anytime & we launched community groups (small groups) in May of 2010.

With the groups our students began building relationships with each other & the leaders. I believe this played a huge part in our spiritual & numerical growth that we saw in the Fall of 2010.

Community Groups will always be a major focus for us. It takes a lot of work & leaders but is well worth it!

Later this week I'll share what I learned about community groups.

Youth Ministry Lessons I Learned in 2010 Pt. 1

My blog has been MIA lately but I wanted to take some time to write out some lessons I learned in youth ministry this year.

Having a big outreach month where you spread out your resources is way more effective then putting all of your resources into one big night.

The big night may be more glamorous but the big month is more effective.

In February we did one big night & doubled attendance that night but it only lasted that night, LOL. I can laugh now but I wasn't laughing then.

In September we did one big month & over a month we doubled our youth ministry & they didn't disappear the next month, thank you Jesus!

There is a much greater chance of retention getting a student to come 2-4 weeks in a row versus one night.

A blog by Kevin Moore of Oneighty, plus my February failure really opened my eyes to this strategy.

Lastly let me say this is by far not the one and only way to do outreaches but it was extremely effective for us.

Thoughts?