How to Produce Evangelistic Students

At its heart, Christianity is an evangelistic religion. We have been so moved by what Christ has done in our life that we are compelled to share it with others. However, one of the biggest problems that faces mainline religions like the one that I am associated with is that we have lost the passion to share what Christ has done in our life with others. Furthermore, we have experienced or witnessed evangelistic methods that are turnoffs therefore making the word “evangelism” a bad word.

Be that as it may, here are a few suggestions on how you can encourage students to share their faith with others.

Lead by Example-If you want your students to share their faith with others, then you also have to share your faith with others… This is a leading by example! This is a practice that Jesus used often. He didn’t just tell his disciples how they should share about the kingdom of God, he showed them. If you want your students to be evangelistic and share their faith with others, you need to model it for them.

Help Students Know Their Own Story-Students need practical ways to share their faith with their friends and family… One of the best ways is helping them articulate their own spiritual journey. If their story is filled with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll-That’s okay because it’s THEIR story-but make sure the focus rests squarely on Christ and his redemptive work. If their story isn’t quite as dramatic, encourage them to point out how God is moving in their life. Either way, having everyone write out their personal story is a great way to help them build confidence around sharing their faith with others.

Create Opportunities to Share Their Faith-Every opportunity you get, have some students share their personal faith testimony. This can be done during worship, on a mission trip, on a retreat-ANYTIME! The more opportunities you allow students to share their faith stories with others the more confident they will become and the easier it will be for them to share it with their friends, family and even with people they don’t even know.

Relational Ministry

Relational ministry might be described as any step toward building a relationship with a student in your ministry. It could be a big step, it could be small—either way, it's simply the effort toward truly living in community and sharing life together.

Ministry with young people should be known for this! Students that are a part of your ministry are there to be known, loved, and cared for. All of these things take time—and time is what we can offer that the world (and too often, parents) isn't giving. 

Relational ministry takes time—but not as much as you might think. Here is a list in order of significance for you to follow.

Be Present - going to a student’s sporting event or school performance such as a band concert or play is major. Other colleagues of mine see this as an opportunity to have a date night with their significant other. The key is staying and making sure that the student knows that you were there.

Talk with Them - in a world of texting and emailing it’s often nice to hear someone’s voice. Take five minutes and give the student a call to check in with how their week is going. This will mean a lot to the student but also to the students family that you care enough to individually call them and ask how their day was.

Send Handwritten Notes - this may sound old-school, but everyone including my 18 month old daughter loves to receive mail. The art of writing a handwritten note is going by the wayside, however, for certain students this could mean the world. Whenever I receive a handwritten note from someone I cherish it, and so will your students.

Connect Through Social Media - if you are not Facebook friends with your students, you should be. If they have a twitter account, you should be following them. From time to time write an encouraging word on their wall or send them a direct message through twitter. You could also use other social media platforms like Insta Graham, Interest and others. This takes very little time but this is the world in which most students live and to see that they have an adult who understands the media and uses it, shows that you care about meeting them WHERE THEY ARE.

Text message them - I’m not talking about a mass text that you sent to all your students, rather, a personal text just to them so that they know that you are thinking about them. Again, text messaging is where most young people live today and it youth and young adult workers are not using that media, we will quickly become irrelevant.

I would offer you this challenge. This week try to begin a habit of relationship building with your students. Relationships are the hardest and most time-consuming part of the Young People’s Ministry, however, I would argue that it is the most important.

PS: don’t forget to encourage your leaders as well. 

Helping Students Grow on Their Own

Helping students develop a desire to grow on their own is an important part of the discipleship process. Too often, youth ministries primarily encourage attendance at programs, which sets students up for a spiritual drift after graduation if they can’t find a “program” to attend. Here are a few ways to help students develop their own relationship with Christ.

Give them a book you’ve read.
Think about the books that shaped you as a teenager and find the equivalent today. Tell students the story of why this book was important to you and your faith and encourage them to take steps down that journey as well.

Issue a challenge that’s out of their comfort zone.
Owning your faith usually takes root when a student rises to a challenge. Want to see someone grow? Push them to participate in a missions trip a long way from home. Watch them grow raising the funds to participate, and enjoy a front row seat to the refining process as they get to push past their breaking point into a moment of deep spiritual cementing.

Read something alongside them and meet occasionally to discuss.
You gave one of your core students a prayer journal? Did you share a 1-Minute Bible with them? Read a copy of it yourself at the same time, and meet up a couple times to check in and discuss what you’ve been learning.

Equip your small group leaders.
Last year we did “grow on the go” tubs filled with a few resources for leaders to give out to their students along the way. A push for a devotional during a message is great, but a personal nudge and gift of a devotional from a small group leader is the best.

Live it out Yourself.
If you want to help your students grow on THEIR own, model it to them yourself. So much is caught rather than taught, so frequently do personal “check ups” in your own life to make sure you’re growing, too.

3 Practical Teaching Tips When Speaking to Students

One of the key roles of a youth worker is speaking to teenagers. For some this is a gift that comes naturally—lots of youth workers are gifted speakers, while others have had to learn how to communicate effectively to an audience. Regardless of your skill level, these tips will either affirm what you’re already doing or help you push forward in your skills to speaking/preaching/teaching.

Find Your Own Preferred Style

Everyone has a preferred style of taking notes or jotting down reminders. Whatever your preferred style, go into a meeting with the student with some key points that you want to address with them. These could be questions, concerns, etc. If you must, you can out a manuscript so that you don’t miss anything, however, this seems less spontaneous and more like a lecture so be careful.

Practice It Once or Twice By Yourself

Prepare your lesson early enough to provide time to run over the talk out loud as if you were giving it live on stage. Work on your delivery, and add new thoughts and ideas to your outline as you progress through the run-through. So often great lines, dramatic pauses, or a fresh idea come through when you’re practicing. Too often what looks good on paper doesn’t work verbally, so get the kinks out before you’re in front of your students.

Debrief Your Talk

There’s nothing more valuable than being able to critique your self after a talk. Find someone that you trust and will in a loving but direct way share with you their thoughts about your talk. Debriefing your talk can help you improve how you give future talks, so this is very important. I find that my wife is a good person to do this with. She serves as a pastor and is a very good speaker herself. You may even want to get one of your youth leaders to help you with this process. However you debrief your talk… Do it! You’ll improve greatly if you open yourself up for honest feedback. The truth of the matter is this: People are critiquing you anyway; why not give them permission to share their observations!

(I got these ideas from a weekly e-mail that I get about youth and young adult ministry.)

Great Resources for Students

Here are some great resources to get in the hands of your students.

1-Minute Bible by Doug Fields
You've committed yourself to more Bible reading plans than you care to admit, and you're 187 chapters behind in your latest attempt. If this sounds familiar, then the One Minute Bible for Students is what you need to get back and stay on track. Do the math. There are 1400 minutes in a day. It will take you One Minute to read a passage of Scripture.

Student Leaders Start Here by Leader Treks
Student Leaders Start Here is a practical, interactive workbook, to help students grow in leadership. It focuses on three topics that are crucial for developing as a leader, and gives students a personal leadership profile for their strengths and growth areas in each topic. Give this book to the individual student who is growing in leadership, or use it in your student leadership team and small groups when you follow the bonus pages for small group facilitators. 

Stripped Clean by Jeff Storm
Give your teenagers a guilt-free, up-close look at materialism—one that strips away the overwhelming messages of a consumer society. You'll see authentic changes in readers as they tear out pages to use in Jesus-centered activities 

Case for Christ Student Edition by Lee Strobel
Who Was Jesus? A good man? A lunatic? God? There's little question that he actually lived. But miracles? Rising from the dead? Some of the stories you hear about him sound like just that—stories. A reasonable person would never believe them, let alone the claim that he's the only way to God! But a reasonable person would also make sure that he or she understood the facts before jumping to conclusions. That's why Lee Strobel—an award-winning legal journalist with a knack for asking tough questions—decided to investigate Jesus for himself.

Live Large. Be Different. Shine Bright. By Josh Griffin and Doug Fields
In Live Large. Be Different. Shine Bright., Doug Fields and Joshua Griffin share about some important character qualities that will help teenagers live large, be different, and shine bright. A lot of what Doug and Joshua write about doesn't seem to get much sermon time, but these topics are definitely worthy of consideration and experimentation—topics like competition, laughter, cliques, encouragement and several others will help teenagers in the process of being a more vibrant follower of Jesus. 

More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell
With almost 10 million copies in print, More Than a Carpenter continues to be the most powerful evangelism tool worldwide. Josh McDowell's timeless examination of the true nature of Christ and his impact on our lives is one of the best-selling Christian books ever. Written by a former skeptic of Christianity, it is a hard-hitting book for those who doubt Jesus' deity and his purpose. 

Your Own Jesus by Mark Hall
A true storyteller and a teacher with a heart for ministry, Mark Hall traces the downward spiral caused by spiritual compromise with the world, and then charts the upward road to wholeness and restoration that comes when we claim our very own Jesus. When that happens, believers experience authentic fellowship with the one living God. Through fascinating personal stories, scriptural insights, and discussion questions for practical interactive study, Your Own Jesus: Student Edition will set readers free to live without compromise with the Jesus they come to know intimately and love fully.

Middle School Survival Series by Kurt Johnston, Mark Oestreicher, and Scott Rubin
There are six books in this series: My Faith, My Family, My Friends, My School, My Changes and My Future.  Each book consists of 72 easy-to-read mini chapters written specifically for young teens.

4 Ways to Be More Relational in Your Young People's Ministry

1)  Add a “welcome time” to youth group each week.
We’ve all seen this before, the “shake hands with 15 people around you” but when used sparingly it can be really effective. As your group grows, it’s surprisingly easy for the “basics” like a warm greeting to slip through the cracks! Our students have come to love this time—we’ve expanded it to several minutes so that people can actually have a short conversation rather then just a cursory greeting. This is a great chance for introductions to be made, too! We have a volunteer every week who works hard to get to know someone new and makes it a point to introduce them to us specifically each week.

2) Have everyone in place before and after the service.
If you are still running around finalizing details of your program when everyone is coming in, it’s gonna be tough to be relational! Work hard to do program-related stuff before students arrive; if you’re still dialing things in as they’re walking in, it’s simply too late. And tell everyone on your volunteer team they are “dead to each other” once youth group starts.

3) Build down time to hang at every event.
If you’re at a youth conference, camp, or other big event, the planners have been paid to fill up every waking moment with something. In many cases, youth leaders choose a late-night option or yet another training session when what the group might need is some discussion time. Maybe a break is in order, and you need to ditch a session and go get some frozen yogurt and just talk over what they’ve already learned. Relational ministry fights the go, go, go approach.

 4) Train your leaders in the art of asking good questions.
Help your leaders ask good questions—open-ended questions that require thoughts instead of a simple yes or no. Help them have an instantly ready queue of questions to ask someone they are meeting for the first time. Give them the tools to help them fight the awkward silences of first getting to meet someone.

(I got these ideas from a weekly e-mail that I get about youth and young adult ministry)