I love reading, listening, and pondering the philosophy of youth ministry. In an earlier post, I wrote about a level one ministry.

Adding level two will greatly enhance a depth that didn’t exist before in your youth ministry. Begin focusing on the following to provide a greater depth than you had before:

• Recognize the role of your preaching and teaching ministry to the students. It’s time to evaluate and get critical about how much time, prayer, and revising is going into your messages for your students. Create a new thirst for spiritual truth by exposing that truth out of the Bible. Figure out how much Bible truth accompanied with stories and videos is being applied. Do you just share a story and attach a verse to end hoping that spiritual change happens? Or maybe you’re great at exposition, but to enhance your teaching ministry it’s time to add some visuals to help students grasp the great truths you are discovering through the word. For example: Pictures, Videos, and Dramas are all great ways to bring that enhancement.
• Develop a core of soul caregivers. This is the part where you have realized your limitations of ministering yourself and you need others involved to help bring about spiritual change.
  • Sunday School Teachers – Find competent teachers to help aid in the spiritual development of your students. Find someone that the students will enjoy and get a different taste from what you bring.
  • Create a volunteer staff – If you haven’t already, you will need a good volunteer staff to help you get to a deeper level of ministry. These volunteers need to be prayed for and screened before entering into serving in the youth ministry. There are several books on screening. Purpose Driven Youth Ministry comes to mind. To the extent you pour into your volunteers is what is going to happen on the ministry side of things. If you train them little, little things probably will happen. If you train them much, then expect more things to happen.
  • Small Groups – It’s time to get small. It’s actually more beneficial the larger group you get to go smaller and smaller. Many ministries have understood this and it’s hard to find youth ministries that aren’t doing this, but so much growth and understanding and fellowship takes place with in a small group. It’s up to you, but I believe most youth ministries have incorporated as a part of the volunteer staff’s responsibility, to lead a small group. Obviously again you want to make sure your leader you put in that position is ready and responsible enough to take on a group. The group size really should be no bigger than 4 students to an adult.
• Build good relationships that invite more disclosure. Teach your volunteers what good boundaries are. There is actually a great book called, Boundaries that I would highly recommend for teaching purposes or something to hand out as a part of training the volunteers. Your volunteers need to know about confidentiality and make sure that they are mature enough not to spread something around a student. When you are talking with a student start with grace and end towards truth. If you do the opposite, you aren’t going to get the student to open up as well. Do some teaching on the lost art of listening. We are a click if were not interested society and when listening to students make sure that you are paying attention to what they are saying. I even suggest that you repeat some of what they are saying just for clarification purposes. This allows them to open up even more as they just heard that you were paying attention.
• Teach how to enter the battlefield for peoples’ souls. Your staff need to be reminded that most everything really is a spiritual battle and we need to beseech the Lord about what these students are going through and go the extra mile with them. Follow-up with students and mention how that “thing” is going that you were praying about. Take extra time out to spend with them. Be bold and step out in faith and try to help aid them through a problem that they are going through. Be sure that you are not in over your head as this can happen sometimes. At the point you are over your head, it’s time to refer them to someone else that can help.

The level two ministry helps break past that surface level of ministry into a ministry where adult volunteers are being equipped to begin to see what’s inside that teenager’s heart.

Coming up will be a post about Level Three ministry.

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