All NexGen Pro articles – Page 70
-
IssuesSamewise: Fun house
Every now and again children’s ministry throws you a curve ball. I’m not talking about the usual stuff that disrupts, like the family who always arrive once you’ve started a key activity or the unreliable nature of attendance which means you really have no way to know how many children will come and what age they are likely to be. Over time we become pretty adept at making last-minute tweaks to accommodate this stuff but still every now again something new happens. I had a new one recently when I arrived on a Sunday morning to set the rooms up, running late as ever, to discover that all the usual furniture was gone and had been replaced with a horseshoe shape of non-stackable chairs centred around a flip chart. Clearly there was a conference due in on Monday morning and the centre we hire for meetings had decided that they wanted to get everything ready on Friday and had forgotten we exist!
-
IssuesGames: Residential games
Whether you are going away for a morning, a weekend or even longer, here are some great games to get everyone involved. The first few games take up more time but the ones at the end are some quick and easy games for use in any situation!
-
-
BlogMentoring: Peace
Buy your mentee a cactus. Seriously. In fact, the cactus will arguably be a better mentor than you! It has the privilege of doing what you can’t do: spending vast amounts of time with your mentee, including many of the most intimate and crucial times of all. Granted you can talk and it can’t, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a better mentor than this humble desert plant; it definitely listens better than you do.
-
-
IssuesMeeting guide 1: Bae-sics
Meeting aim: To explore a set of key values that help form healthy foundations for relationships, and to explore the values Jesus demonstrated in his own relationships.
-
IssuesMeeting guide 2: Blurred lines
Meeting aim: To explore the age-old question, ‘where is the line?’ within sexual boundaries.
-
-
IssuesMeeting guide 3: Digital relationships
Meeting aim: To begin to explore our sexualised digital culture, including sexting and pornography, from a faith perspective
-
BlogMeeting guide 4: ‘The one’
Meeting aim: To enable young people to think though the idea of ‘the one’ in terms of dating, relationships and what God has to say on the matter!
-
IssuesWhat do you do when you realise you’ve built the ministry around you?
Rich was a brilliant youth worker. When he arrived at the church, teenagers, parents and volunteers alike were dazzled by his charisma and bowled over by his range of skills. He could preach, he could sing, he could play the guitar. He instantly built rapport with the core members of the youth group, and watched as they rushed to invite their friends to church as a result. Within nine months, the group had almost doubled in size, and the weekly youth congregations which formed the centre-piece of the church’s programme for teenagers were attracting over 150 young people. Rich was, apparently, smashing it.
-
Faith at homeForming faith rituals: Rituals at home
How do you view rituals? Religious, solemn, and prescribed? If so, they don’t sound very easy or exciting to use with our families at home! However, for me, at its heart, a ritual is a series of actions or behaviours which are done regularly – it’s something which is repeated. And it’s this repetition which allows us to go deeper.
-
IssuesFast but not least
Has fasting become the forgotten spiritual discipline? It appears front and centre in Jesus’ ministry but has dropped off our radars in youth and children’s ministry. As we enter Lent, Martin Saunders thinks it’s time it made a comeback...
-
Faith at homeA story for home: The woman and the girl
Here is a story for you to tell at home, perhaps at bedtime or as part of a God-time during your day. Enjoy pulling the different faces and making the sound effects together. You could also use this story during a children’s session, using the actions as they are written here, with everyone sitting down, or making the actions bigger, standing and / or walking around the room as you do them.
-
IssuesMark My Words: Improving our relationships with parents
I took a group of young teens to Mexico on a mission trip to build a little house for a family. After painting the house, we had to clean our brushes. Our logistics person had picked up some paint thinner or something of that sort, and two girls did the work, getting it all over themselves in the process. However, whatever we used was not the same as the stuff I was used to in the States. I should have had them wear gloves (though it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, since they got it everywhere). But whatever was in that clear liquid dried out the skin on their hands and arms to the point where they were quite panicked, and in mild pain. We soaked their arms and did what we could in terms of care, and within about five or ten minutes, they were fine.
-
Issues
The Lab: Support and self-care
Being tired all the time, but not sleeping well. Unexplained headaches. Finding yourself forgetting things… While these could be linked to getting older (or parenting, as I’m finding out), it’s also possible that they are signs that your body is telling you that you’re stressed and you need to pay attention. Our work is often underpaid and undervalued with high amounts of stress, especially when working with young people with chaotic lives.
-
Faith at homeTeach us to pray
Bear Grylls recently told a newspaper about the importance he puts on praying with his three sons. We all know how vital it is to get children and young people praying, but how do we start? What are some simple ideas any of us can do? Prayer Spaces in Schools’ Phil Togwell has some ideas…
-
Issues
Schools’ Work: Storytelling
Dream: think strategically and with vision about our work in schools.
-
