If you take a step back and look at student ministry from the prospective of all the ways to impact your ministry you know how much stuff there is out there. Conferences (for you, you and your volunteers and the teens in your ministry), one day events, retreats, camps, missions and service project opportunities, books, magazines, curriculum and the likes. With all this stuff it is easy to create a monster of complexity that keeps students busy and changed on the surface. But ask yourself: how many teens that graduate from our ministries graduate from church in college or after? If you’re like me this question has plagued you from your first days in youth ministry.
The time has past, the stakes are too high in youth & children’s ministry to go on any long fooling ourselves that more is better. We must focus our ministries back on Matthew 28: 19-20 & Acts 2: 42-47, it’s time to get back to making disciples who not only know God but obey His Word.
In Simple Student Ministry Geiger & Borton have brought the importance of discipleship back to the forefront of student ministry in a encouraging, stretching and dare I say simple book that will knock your socks off and really convict you. Simple Student Ministry gives you the means of how to turn your ministry around and impact not only the lives of the students in your ministry now but the lives of their friends and your community. Simple Student Ministry isn’t another model or books telling you to do ministry the way they do, in fact the talk about lots of student ministries across the country in case studies and examples. It is going back to the call of the church to make disciples and helps you in your struggle through connecting with God to find the process for making disciples that best fits the context of your ministry environment. They work through the fact that the “process should be crystal clear (clarity) and move students to great levels of spiritual commitment (movement), all of your programs and leaders should be aligned (alignment) to the process God gives you and should leverage (focus) all your energy and resources on your discipleship process.”
Simply put this book brings us back to the early days of our dreaming when God called us to impact the lives of the teens He would put in our lives. I couldn’t stop underlining and writing notes in the margin, the authors write in such a way that allows you envision your ministry along the way. They have struggled through designing their own process and have great insight that will be so helpful with the transition from complex to simple. I really encourage to make this book a priority read for this summer and pray that the call to a simple process for making disciples will shape the future of you ministry that it has for me.
DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/2
