YOUTH MINISTRY STUFF
This page is dedicated to my personal reflections on youth ministry. Feel free to comment on anything related to youth ministry in the comment category “YOUTH MINISTRY”.
I did some work with children while I was a teenager. In 1990 I started officially volunteering in my home church. I felt God’s call on my life into the ministry in 2001 and have been working in youth ministry as a profession ever since. When we left our home church, Pastor Sam said that we were “not leaving”, but “going out from”. I look back on those years growing up there and see how God used that to prepare me for the path He had for my life. Those words of Pastor Sam still ring out to me today and I highly respect the man. We have been back many times to visit family and attend there when we can. We still keep in touch.
I found a church that allowed me to start working while in school (which I finished in 2007 with a B.A. in Biblical Studies/Concentration Theology from Trinity College of the Bible). This church was actually pastored by my father-in-law Hank Haubold. Hank has now gone home to be with the Lord. My ministry there was becoming more adult oriented due to the small size of the church and not really any young families attending. It was a circular problem because we did have “neighborhood kids” coming to our mid-week youth outreach, but they couldn’t support the church. We did have some families with young people attend but they did not want to be the ones to jump-start the ministry. They wanted a group of kids already in place, so they moved on. So Dottie and I prayed that if God wanted us to change our focus to adults then we would stay and work on building the adult ministry; if on the other hand we were to stay focused on youth then other doors would open, which they did. We moved on to another church in the area. The people we left behind were good people and it was a good place to start my professional ministry, especially working with my father-in-law.
I love working with teens. There are so many different dynamics. Everyday can be a challenge and a blessing all rolled into one.
More to come…
