Planning a Well-Rounded Youth Program

A lot of volunteer youth leaders struggle planning the "perfect" youth program. The issue is that a youth program doesn't have to be "perfect." It needs to have input from the youth involved, be well-rounded and be planned in advance. Here are a few tricks I learned to help me plan the best youth program at any size church.

Get Input from Youth - Youth are more likely to come and be involved in a youth program if they feel like they have had a hand in planning the program. An easy way to get their involvement is at the end of the school year or sometime in the summer you take a 3 x 5 note card and on the one side have the youth list three discussions/questions that they would like to discuss in the next year. This could be a thoughtful question or even a book of the Bible. On the other side of the 3 x 5 note card have them list 2 mission type events they would like to do and 2 fun events that they would like to do. (This will be important later.)

Make the Program Well-Rounded - Youth ministry to be successful and healthy needs to be well-rounded. What I mean by that is it needs to include discussion programs, mission activities and fun events. Having just one of those three can make it very one dimensional and what ends up happening is that you don't challenge the youth to grow spiritually, you don't teach them to reach out into their community and help others and you make it boring so that they choose to be involved other activities. I believe that you need all three: discussion programs, mission activities and fun events to make a youth program exciting and attractive for youth to choose to want to be involved.

Plan Ahead - A youth program cannot be successful without careful planning. I typically run a youth program during the school year (August - May). I will talk about summer youth programs in a future blog article. If you run your program during the school year, it follows the natural order of what youth are used to. So you might ask, "Where do we begin?" That’s easy! Remember those 3x5 note cards that you used to take input in from youth- use these as suggestions to craft a well-rounded program based on what ­ they want to do. You will begin to discover that there are common themes and program suggestions that will help guide you in the right direction. You won’t have to work as hard, and the youth will feel as though their input mattered.

As an extra bonus at the bottom of this blog article is a downloadable Word file that I use now to plan monthly what programs will be coming up. Fill free to use it and edit it to fit your own needs.

Youth Planning Worksheet