uua.or g Building Healthy Youth Ministries Beyond Youth Groups, Beyond Cons Bart Frost Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministries UUA
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Building Healthy Youth Ministries
Beyond Youth Groups, Beyond ConsBart Frost
Director of Youth and Young Adult MinistriesUUA
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Getting to Know Each Other
• Groups of 3 with two people you don’t know– Introduce yourself (30 seconds each!)
• Name
• Congregation
• What draws you to youth ministry?
– Two Passions– One Loathe
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Youth Ministry > Youth Group
• Adult leadership
• Youth Leadership
• Developmentally Appropriate Ministries
• Whole Church
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Developmentally Appropriate Ministries
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Whole Church
• Multigenerational Spaces
• Families
• Sundays and Everyday
• Mission and Ministry
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What are YOU doing?
• Rejoin your group• Take turns answering three questions:
– How does your congregation minister to youth?
– What programs serve them?
– How are they invited into the life of the church?
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Beyond Congregational Life
• Kenda Creasy Dean “Almost Christian”– Thin places are where God reached through
Heaven’s floorboards and grabbed human attention (disorienting human experiences is how God works)
– Developmentally, teens tend to conflate the symbol with the sacred thing it represents, until the symbol is the sacred.
– Reflexivity is more that just critical reflection, it needs a language and a community to support it
• Discipleship• Covenants• Leadership Development• Clustering
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Hurdles
• Join with your triad again• Silently think of one major challenge for youth
ministry in the work you do. What’s your hurdle• Share your hurdle (30 seconds each)• As a group, choose one• Person with chosen hurdle, explains it (2 min)
– Other two actively listen without speaking
• Listeners as direct, clarifying questions(3 min)• Listeners discuss the problem with the speaker
(3min)• Speaker reflects on new insights or awareness
(1min)
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Resources
• “Almost Christian” Kenda Creasy Dean• “Greenhouses of Hope” Dori Grinenko Baker• “Youth Ministry Advising” UUA Bookstore• “2004 Study of Exemplary Congregations in
Youth Ministry: Assest for Developing Spiritually Mature Youth” www.exemplarym.com