When I opened my blog reader Monday morning after a week away, I found blog after blog featuring reactions to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of 17-year old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager.
Not surprisingly,...
One of my favorite pieces to play on the piano is Nocturne in C-sharp Minor by Frederic Chopin. One of the things I love about this piece is it's use of rubato, a technique in which certain notes are arbitrarily lengthened while others are...
Successful mission trips require preparation. Proper preparation builds and unifies teams, roots them in Scripture, equips them for cross-cultural ministry, and focuses them on Christ. Regardless of what type or duration of mission trip your team...
Whenever I mention my youth ministry's rummage sale to people, they usually ask in disbelief, "You're really doing that again?"
To be sure, rummage sales are a ton of work; but as a youth worker, I love how they encourage people to purge in a...
In every youth ministry I've served, I've had students who come from families that struggle financially and, therefore, cannot afford expensive events such as summer mission trips. Although we spend a year fundraising for mission trips and...
I participated in mission trips as a kid and then worked for a mission trip organization in college. Both ends of the spectrum had a profound impact on my faith. Neither equipped me to plan a trip from start to finish.
My first year in ministry, I...
About a month or two after returning from a summer mission trip, I typically hear mission trip participants say these things:
"I don't feel God here like I did there."
"I'm forgetting things."
"It's starting to fade."
On a recent mission trip, I interacted with adult leaders from across the country.
One was permanently attached to her phone. She called her office every 10 minutes to see if a crisis had developed she alone could solve—from 800 miles away....
The most important element of a mission trip is not worship, fun or service. Instead, the most important part of a mission trip is processing or debriefing your day with your team in order to help students wrestle with what they see, hear and do....
At my first youth ministry job interview, I was asked, "How do you plan on fundraising the thousands of dollars required for our summer mission trip?" As a 21 year old, I'm sure I looked like a deer caught in the headlights as I fumbled to answer...