Planning Youth Programs

As summer is in full swing, now is the time to think about planning for next year’s programs and activities. The farther you plan and get activities and programs on the calendar, the more success you will have with those activities. For a lot of youth leaders, planning in advance is very difficult. We like to spend our time forming relationships with our students, rather than work on administrative planning. The truth of the matter is however, that if you don't have good plans in place it won’t really matter the types of relationships that you form.  

If you're lucky enough to have good volunteers who are skilled at this, you can turn the planning over to them. However, as I discovered early on in my youth ministry, I had to do this task myself.  So I came up with an easy way to help in my planning out the year’s activities, discussion programs and mission opportunities, as well as, a way to get student’s input. In order to do this you simply need a pack of 3 x 5 cards and pens or pencils for all your adult leaders and students. (If you can find different color cards to give the adult leaders, this will help you keep their ideas separated from the students.)

Then at one of our largest activities (usually during the summer) I would gather them together and have them do this: on 1 side of the 3 x 5 card have them write down three questions of faith that they would like to discuss or learn more about. Examples could be, "What does the Bible say about suicide?" Or "How can I share my faith?" They could also list books of the Bible that they would like to study. The point was to get them thinking about what they would like to talk about over the next year. Once they had done that, on the other side of the card they were to write 2 fun activities that they would like to do and 2 mission opportunities that they would like to do. Give them 5 or 10 minutes to complete this. Now you have a whole stack of ideas to work with and begin your planning for the next year.

Note: Sometimes you will get some real duds, but by in large you will have a wealth of ideas to work with for the next year. It goes without saying that if multiple people ask for the same thing, then you definitely want to make sure that you do that sometime during the year.

Good luck with your planning and have a great year getting to know your student’s by drawing them deeper in their faith.