We’ve learned over the years that the weekend we choose for this event is hugely important.  For example, don’t schedule it on a Prom or musical weekends.  We fancy ourselves at being highly skilled at picking the right weekend.  However, sometimes things surprise us.  As it turns out, one year we inadvertently scheduled our retreat for Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day weekend.  Call me boring, but I don’t really pay attention to St. Patty’s so it was completely off my radar.

The funny thing about Chicago on St. Patrick’s day weekend is that it gets nutty.  Actually, it gets really nutty.  They dye the river green and then proceed to party down.  In the words of Dr. Seuss, they “drink, drink, drink, drink, DRINK!”  This is what I mean by learning from experience and observation.  We essentially provided our students with a front row seat of first semester frat parties.  On a side note, how do they dye the river green?  Is it just a whole lot of green Kool-Aid?

Although there were quite a few awkward moments as we walked through the city, the weekend ended up being a great experience for our small group leaders and students.  All the partying around us provided context for great conversations about boundaries, balance and the partying scene.  Sometimes youth groups and churches are guilty of ignoring the realities of the “real world.”  One way or another, we need to make sure that our students aren’t surprised by what they encounter.  They ought to be prepared to face reality.

I don’t know that I would recommend taking your students to Chicago for St. Patrick’s Day but I do recommend getting your seniors away with their small group leaders for strategic conversations about their upcoming freshman year of college.  Are they ready to face the pressures, challenges and opportunities?  Now is the time to talk about it.

I’d be happy to share the playbook for our Senior Sneak weekend if you’re interested.  And if you have a recipe for green dye please let me know.

One of the ways we work toward this goal is hosting a reunion event over Christmas break.  Basically we’ve invited all of our 2013 graduates and their small group leaders back for an event. I’m so pumped for this event that I’ve come up with 7 reasons why you should do it too.

1. Reconnect Students and Mentors

The best reason for putting on a reunion event is to reconnect students with their mentors.  Our graduates, even though they are freshmen in college, still need quality adults in their lives to mentor them.  And, truthfully our adult mentors need students in their life too.  Mentoring brings life to both sides.  Anyone who has ever mentored a student knows this is true.  You always get more out of it than you give.

Relationships are the key to growth.  Rekindling the relationship between students and mentors is reason enough to do a reunion event.

2. Evaluate Your Ministry

Getting graduates together for a reunion event is a great opportunity to listen.  We are very intentional about creating a curriculum for our senior class that will help them transition.  Did the curriculum work?  A reunion event is a chance to ask our graduates, “What surprised you?  What do you wish you would have known?  How could we have prepared you better?”

If many of your graduates are struggling in their faith maybe it’s time to rethink how you are doing student ministry.  But, you’ll never know unless you ask students who have graduated out of your ministry.

3. Reorient Your Graduates

A reunion event is a great opportunity to speak truth to your graduates.   Getting them together over Christmas is like speaking to students at Winter Retreat.  They are out of their normal environment.  They are more open to truth.  They are evaluating their first semester choices.  Take advantage of this to remind your graduates of what is important.

4. You Still Belong

It’s terribly disorienting to go off to college.  Even after only one semester, your hometown feels different.  Church doesn’t quite feel like home anymore.  You’re not really welcome in the student ministry and your old friendships have changed.  A reunion event is a great way to tell your graduates that they are still a valued member of the community.  They still belong.  Their small group leaders and mentors still care about them.

5. Evaluate Your Church/Ministry Recommendations

One of the things we do in our student ministry is connect each of our graduates with a church or ministry wherever they are going after high school.  Our goal is that the church or ministry would connect with them before they arrive on campus.

A reunion event is a great time to ask about these recommendations.  Were a few of your recommendations duds?  It would be good to know.  I love it when a student falls in love with a new church in their college town.  That is a great feeling!

6.  Encourage Your Graduates to Plug In

So maybe a few of your recommendations were duds.  Or, maybe you didn’t make any recommendations.  Get on it for next year!

We know how crucial community is to growth.  A reunion event is a good opportunity to remind our graduates of how important community is.  Encourage them to plug in.  Maybe Christmas break is new opportunity to help them find a good ministry.

7.  Remind Yourself of the Goal of Student Ministry

Hanging out with graduates of your student ministry will force you to grapple with the outcome of your work.  It isn’t about numbers.  It isn’t about great bands, environments or talks.  It’s about students pursuing Jesus after leaving your ministry.

Listening to graduates talk about the joys and struggles of life after high school will help you better understand what topics you need to address while they are still in high school.  It will remind you of the importance of mentors.  It will remind you of how powerful inter-generational church is.  It will remind you of the goal of all we do and will help you reorient your practices around these goals.

So, schedule a student ministry reunion event.  There’s still time and your graduates will be bored over Christmas break anyway.  It doesn’t have to be fancy.  Bring together your graduates and their small group leaders.  Encourage them, listen to them and reorient them.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it went.

We’ve all seen the doomsday statistics about how many students are walking away from church and faith when the get into college.  If you’re like me you probably have a few names and faces that represent the numbers in those statistics.  What’s difficult is that while you’re spinning on the hamster wheel of weekly student ministry it can be difficult to think strategically about college transition.

The temptation is to become paralyzed by the hugeness of the problem.  Guilt and fear tells us that we need to restructure our entire ministry because everything we are doing apparently sucks.  This is a dirty lie.  The truth is most of what we are doing in student ministry is great for the long-term faith development of our students.  Instead of scrapping your entire structure consider tweaking your ministry.  What is one thing we can do differently to improve college transition?  Here are 3 suggestions of ways to tweak your approach to college transition.

Who am I?

Perhaps the biggest issue our students face as they graduate from our ministries is that they don’t know who they are.  They don’t have a cear picture of how God has designed them or what He might be calling them to.  Helping them make progress in this area can be a huge service to your students and maybe even save them a few thousand dollars in college tuition.

Maybe the way to tweak your ministry is to help your seniors discover a little about how God has wired them.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to helping students understand who they are.  Currently, we are using Donald Miller’s Storyline as a template for our discussions.  Jon Acuff’s Start may be more geared for adults but it’s hilarious and insightful.  Finding Your Way is also another great resource that is specifically designed with this purpose in mind.

Senior Retreat

Maybe you don’t have time to create an additional program just for seniors but I bet you do have a weekend available somewhere during the year.  A retreat just for seniors is a great first step toward improving college transition.  It doesn’t have to be fancy.  Find a cabin or a lake house and spend the weekend helping them build a strategy for how to grow spiritually during their first year of college.  Our version of this is called Senior Sneak.  See what we did there with the two “S”s?  Genius.

Transition Mentors

Programs will never compare to relationships.  An entire year’s worth of transition curriculum isn’t worth much unless caring adults are pouring into the lives of your students.  Without mentoring relationships students will have trouble implementing the principles you are teaching.

Perhaps you’re too busy for either of my previous two suggestions.  That’s fine.  Delegate it.  Recruit other people to do it.  Find mature and caring adults who are willing to mentor students and turn them loose.  Even if you do have the time and resources to develop a college transition ministry, you should still pull in quality adults as mentors.  Inter-generational mentoring relationships are like a magic bullet against faith abandonment in college.

Faith abandonment in college is a huge problem but don’t let it paralyze you.  Instead of restructuring everything, simply take a step in the right direction.  For now, pick whatever suggestion sounds best.  If none of them sound good then invent your own.  Just take a step.

KICKOFF

We play a trivia game about college.  My slideshow is as basic as they come but the point is to get students thinking about the next phase of their life.  After playing the trivia game we set the stage for the year–talking through our topics and generally getting the students amped about their senior year.  Here’s the slideshow:

FIRST SEMESTER

Our entire first semester is devoted to Donald Miller’s Storyline workbook.  It’s a great journey for graduating seniors.  The book generates a ton of great conversation and helps the students think through their gifting, God’s mission and what a meaningful life looks like.

JANUARY

We’ll spend January going through a few key concepts from Andy Stanley’s The Principle of the Path.  I think this book is perfect for helping students understand how the decisions they make over the next few years will be connected to the rest of their lives.

FEBRUARY

1. Leaders Share:  Our small group leaders share their post high school experiences, offering advice on colleges, majors, partying, money, friends and whatever else they feel like talking about.

2.  Money, School Loans and Debt:  My approach is to help students understand what their lives will actually be like if they take on a heavy debt load.  My goal is that anyone who is paying for school on their own would think seriously about cheaper options.

MARCH

1. Graduates Share:  Recent graduates return to LifeLine to talk about what their college experiences have been like.  I ask them to talk about money, finding a new church or campus ministry, partying and whatever advice they have for our current seniors.

2.  Senior Sneak:  This is our retreat designed for seniors.  It includes a whole lot of fun and 3 senior specific teachings.  Sorry, the content and location are secret.

APRIL

1.  Understanding God’s Will:  How do you make decisions based on God’s design, plans and calling?

2.  Dating, Marriage and Divorce:  How exactly to you end up happily married?

Well that’s my curriculum for this year.  I firmly believe that helping students transition well begins with helping them ask the right questions and engage in the right conversations.  This curriculum is designed to spur on these conversations.  In the context of small groups that have been together for 4-7 years and an invested adult mentor, these conversations can be very powerful.

Transition is my passion so if you have ideas I’d love to hear them!

I think many student ministries assume they are doing well in this area simply because they put adults in proximity with students.  Personally, I do not believe that quality mentoring relationships will naturally grow out of proximity.  It takes intentionality.  Here are 3 ways we intentionally promote intergenerational mentoring.

1.       VISION VOLUNTEERS

First, we INSPIRE our volunteers to become mentors.  Before every Sunday or Wednesday night we hold an hour long leader meeting and one of the things we do in these meetings is tell stories of great mentoring.  We talk about how our volunteers have made a difference in the past and how each person investing in the lives of students today is altering the trajectory of a student’s life.

We EQUIP our volunteers to become mentors.  We teach them how to pursue students, how to manage and effectively lead a small group, how to interact with the parents of their students, and how to handle crisis conversations.  We don’t hold quarterly or even monthly training meetings; we train our volunteers every time we meet for large group.

We EXPECT our volunteers to become mentors.  We believe so deeply in intergenerational mentoring that we create standards.  I understand that it is impossible to quantify mentoring but we do our best to do it anyway.  We require a certain amount of small group activities, one-on-ones with students and parent interactions.

Although our mentors are volunteers, we still hold them accountable to their role.  If they aren’t performing, we carefully confront them.  If after a few more weeks they still aren’t performing, we fire them and find someone else who can mentor our students.  Yes, you can fire a volunteer.  This is how deeply we believe in intergenerational mentoring.

2.       STRUCTURE FOR MENTORING

We happen to believe that over time, small groups are a great place for mentoring relationships to develop.  Because of this we don’t ask students to opt into a small group.  We simply place EVERY STUDENT IN A SMALL GROUP and leave 30 minutes at the end of every LifeLine night for small groups.

Mentoring relationships take time to develop so we leave our small groups intact for all three years of middle school and all four years of high school.  Particularly in high school, we believe that SMALL GROUPS TAKE 1-2 YEARS TO BUILD TRUST.  The next 2 years are fertile soil for mentoring relationships.   

3.        SIMPLIFY PROGRAMMING

We believe that faith is best learned outside of the church building.  Students need to see faith lived out in action.   Because of this belief we require our volunteers to get on their students turf and to interact with them outside of our student ministry programming.

We know that volunteers only have so much time to devote to ministry.  Because mentoring outside the church building’s walls is a premium, we simply cut our programming to make space and time for our volunteers.  WE DON’T DO EVENTS.  Our senior high ministry literally has no events other than our Sunday night programming, snow camp and mission trips.  We simplify so that our volunteers can commit to pursuing their students outside the walls of the church building.

“No events!” You say?  Are you crazy?  Well, I guess that was a lie.  We have all sorts of events but we don’t schedule them—our small groups do, organically.  They are better and more strategically targeted than anything our staff could ever dream up.

So there you have it.  3 simple ways to promote mentoring in your ministry.  How have you promoted mentoring relationships in your setting?

One of our former students and current volunteers shared this article with me and I think it is worth the read.  The article is written by Larry Alex Taunton who is the executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation.  Honestly, I know nothing about him or his organization but the study intrigued me because it offered “members of Secular Student Alliances (SSA) or Freethought Societies (FS)s” an opportunity to share “your journey to unbelief“.  Here were some of Larry Alex Taunton’s observations:

1. “They had attended church”

2. “The mission and message of their churches was vague”

3.  “They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions”

4.  “They expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously”

5.  “Ages 14-17 were decisive”

6.  “The decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one”

7.  “The internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism”

Personally, I believe we are losing students to irrelevant faith and atheism because they don’t find Christianity compelling which is ridiculous because the mission of the Gospel is insanely compelling.  But, this is on us–not them.  Students want to be part of a mission bigger than themselves and if we aren’t connecting them to it they will go elsewhere for meaning.

Also, research shows that many students are walking away because they didn’t have a safe place to wrestle with doubts.  We MUST become churches where it is not only OK but also encouraged to openly wrestle with doubts.

The article is definitely worth a read.  Click here to check it out.