Question: Do your leaders know what to do if a student comes to them in a crisis? As I met with my Small Group Leaders over the past month, a common desire was to know how to respond to students walking through a difficult season. For this reason, I shot a video to cover our 3 Step Crisis Response. Check it out:
In this video I covered the three steps I want our Small Group Leaders to take when a student approaches them with a crisis situation.
Clarify – Before jumping to conclusions or dismissing a statement as irrelevant, it’s important to clarify what a student is saying. Use phrases like: What do you mean? Explain that to me. What does that look like? This will ensure you are seeing and understanding what the student is actually telling you.
Notify – When a student confesses that they are walking through a troubling time, it’s always the best bet to play it safe and relay the situation to a paid staff member. They will help you with your response and determine what steps need to be taken next. As a youth worker, you are a mandated reporter and must notify the appropriate authorities if a student confides that they are in harms way. When it doubt…notify the youth pastor!
Follow-through – It doesn’t matter if the crisis situation was monumental catastrophe or a momentary unwarranted worry, you will earn the trust of students if you follow-through. In the follow-through you get to be pastoral and regardless of the situation, point them back to the love, grace, mercy, and comfort of Christ.
I hope this helps you think through how you are communicating with leaders and encourage you to steal this video or remake it yourself. Just give your leaders a plan for crisis situations!
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David Hanson: Texas native, Texas Tech Red Raider, M.Div. at Truett Seminary, husband to Ashley, father to Ava, Ben & Madelyn, Student Pastor at The Fellowship in Round Rock, Tx, table tennis (ping-pong) extraordinaire, addicted to coffee. For anything else…you’ll just have to ask.
In episode 007 of Youth Ministry TV, David, Ben, and Kevin Libick discuss why Middle School Ministry is so unique and important. If you are a youth pastor overseeing 6-8 graders, this is a must watch!
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In Episode 006 of Youth Ministry TV, David and Ben discuss how to have hard conversations with students, parents, and leaders. Those conversations are coming! Are you ready?
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In episode 005 of Youth Ministry TV we discuss the steps to discipling students, when to stop discipling a student, how to handle parents, and how to set expectations.
Steps to Discipling Students:
1. Decide why you will be meeting.
2. Set a duration to meet.
3. Set expectations and goals together.
4. Over communicate with participants and parents.
Tips to Discipling Students:
1. Unify your Discipleship process.
2. Set start & end dates.
3. Call certain students into discipleship.
4. Leave time for at risk students who need your time.
5. Set a limit on the number students you commit to.
6. Don’t be afraid to stop meeting with students who don’t follow through.
Thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed and I would love to get your thoughts! Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and leave us a comment. Finally, discipleship is a difficult process. Help your fellow #youthmin folks out be sharing this on Facebook or Twitter using the buttons below!
A subtle shift of attention, applied energy, and an investment of time has lead to ministries becoming infected with the disease within youth ministry. Is your ministry infected? Find out:
4 Symptoms of The Disease within Student Ministry
Raising Leaders
Do we want leaders? Yes. But not everyone is a leader. God uses both the outspoken extroverts AND the quiet introverts. We are called to make disciples, not leaders. Leadership is a byproduct of first being a faithful disciple.
Retaining Students
If your whole goal in ministry is to add numbers, you are missing the point and have the disease. There are a lot of fancy sayings like “Living things grow, dead things don’t” “If we’re counting people, and God cares about people, then I care about numbers.” These are fancy ways to say, “we care most about numbers.” Focusing on growth can take our attention away from faithfully preaching the gospel and get us looking for tactics and gimmicks that will get butts in chairs.
Developing Behaviors
We shouldn’t focus our time and attention on making good kids (modifying behavior). We should focus on getting students to fall in love with the person and mission of Jesus Christ. When students fall in love with Jesus they will naturally chose to live in a way that brings glory to Him. Simply teaching them obedience to the law will lead to spiritually dead pharisaical students.
Placing Students First
Placing students first means catering to their whims in ministry rather than championing Christ and allowing ministry to flow forth from there. Once again, this is subtle shift in focus that can happen unintentionally. So we must be intentional in the ways that we structure our ministries. Having a mission statement through which to run all ministry decisions can prevent us from simply throwing an event for the sake of making students and parents happy.
Thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed and I would love to get your thoughts! Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and leave us a comment. Finally, we just like to give away free stuff because we love you guys and value your hard work in Youth Ministry. Click the button below to get some helpful parent resources that will help you engage and train parents.
We don’t talk about suffering very much in Youth Ministry. More specifically, we don’t talk about suffering as Youth Pastors.
Sure we make silly jokes about not being taken seriously, or getting paid less than everyone else, but rarely do we talk about suffering IN THE MINISTRY.
So for this edition of Video Monday, I wanted to share this video I recently came across about suffering as a leader by Matt Chandler in his talk at Catalyst 2014. He has a few really good one-liners in there that we in youth ministry can take to heart:
“God’s at work in the mess.”
“Following Jesus can end badly.”
“The man goes in the ground, the message moves on.”
Take a watch:
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David Hanson: Texas native, Texas Tech Red Raider, M.Div. at Truett Seminary, husband to Ashley, father to Ava & Ben, Student Pastor at LifePoint Church in Plano, Tx, table tennis (ping-pong) extraordinaire, addicted to coffee. For anything else…you’ll just have to ask.
