Why am I offering this blog?

In my own life I have always preferred things to be brief and to the point. Again and again in my reading I found myself saying, “Yes, yes, I get the point, now move on.” So it seems appropriate for me to embody that principle in this blog. This blog will not have long drawn out explanations or illustrations. My goal is to convey in a sentence or two a complete, understandable and implementable idea and leave the details for the reader to supply and thus make the idea reader's own.

Some of the hints will be down to earth and practical but others will be theoretical and theological, but even the theoretical and theological hints are intended to be of immediate usefulness. The scope of this work is to cover many aspects of youth ministry, but without giving specific lessons, games, activities, or fund raisers. These can be found elsewhere

A few caveats concerning my posts:

• These hints come out of my 40+ years of youth ministry (it depends on when you start counting – I worked with youth starting in college and that would make it 47 years). My experience has been medium sized churches (800-1500 members), mainline Protestant from “suburban-like” communities. Therefore some hints will work in any setting and others will work only in particular settings.
• This work is focused on working with youth of middle school and high school age. Middle school is commonly defined as 6^th - 8^th grade, so the lower end of the target range is 6^th grade. High school is commonly 9^th - 12^th grade and so the upper end of the range is 12^th grade. Other school systems may have different age breaks, but so make your own adjustments as needed.
• Sometimes a post will assume that the readers are “youth pastors,” but we should have something for anyone working with youth in any capacity. Just ignore the “youth pastor” specific hints if they don't apply to you.
• In fact, ignore any hints that do not apply to you. You may say: “This idea is too basic, too dumb, of course I do that…” But for some people these basics may be important. So just move on.
• We all have different sensibilities. I, for one, am a radical egalitarian and bristle at any idea that seems to me to show favoritism. (I would never consider youth group “officers,” for example.) Other people may not be bothered by those ideas but get upset at ideas that are messy, wasteful, or “politically incorrect” in some fashion. So, let's allow and accept posts that might not be appropriate for each of us.