student ministry | leadership | parenting | life
Here’s a teaching video we showed a few weeks ago on forgiveness, revenge and poison. We filmed it at my friend Kirk’s house. If you look closely, you can see the William Howard Taft Raft resting safely after it’s legendary maiden voyage. Check it out…
Monster: Forgiveness from Lifeline Student Ministries on Vimeo.
Hey student ministry type people, my church is hiring two full-time positions. Both of these positions are part of the student ministry team my friend Jon and I lead. Here are the job posts:
Female Small Group Coordinator – High School Ministry
Kentwood Campus Middle School Coordinator
If you’re interested, here’s a little background on our church and student ministry…
Ada Bible Church has been around for about 30 years and our senior teaching pastor, Jeff Manion has been leading the church for most of them. When he began, the church met in a living room and now we are a multi-site church of 10,000. We are located in Ada, Michigan which is near Grand Rapids. Feel free to live stream a service or check out our video archives to get a feel for what we’re about. Here’s a link.
Our student ministry team of 13 staff is built around collaboration. We each have our separate areas of expertise and responsibility but whenever possible we work together to create great environments and experiences for our volunteers and students. More than anything else, our student ministry is focused on small groups. We believe that the conversations that happen between volunteer leaders and students are the magic sauce of student ministry. If you’re looking for a strategy of ministry category to put us in, it would be Orange.
If you’re interested in learning a little more about our student ministry, here are two of our websites:
We’re looking for new team members who value collaboration, empowering others and excellence in student ministry. Oh, and we only want people who are fun. We love what we do and we have a lot of fun doing it together. If you’re interested or know of someone who would fit well with our team please apply or have that person apply. I’d also be happy to answer any questions you have through email.
A few weekends ago was our snow camp. We took 11 charter buses to Timberwolf Lake Camp. Our staff and volunteers pulled together to put on an amazing camp. I’m very proud of the Lifeline team. Here are some highlights.
Snow Camp 2014 RECAP from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
We themed our camp around the Olympics and it was pretty awesome. Here’s one of your hosts, “Rob Costas.”
And here’s our torch relay video…
Snow Camp Intro | Torch Relay from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
Here is our latest announcement video. It’s a little something about snow camp…
Announcement: Snow Camp from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
We have incredible small group leaders in LifeLine. Our volunteers are simply the best. One of the things we are doing this year is highlighting our leaders by sharing their stories. I’m a big believer in stories, whether students or leaders. We, as people are captivated and moved by stories. We’ve done our best to leverage this phenomenon in our ministry.
Here’s a story video of Katie Turner who is one of our top notch volunteers. Props to Ryan Humm for shooting, Al Shepard for editing this and Lindsey Bandy’s apartment for uh…hosting the shoot.
Katie Turners Story from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
A few weeks ago we finished up a series on influence that we called Wakes. I loved the imagery that Al, our production coordinator used for this series. We borrowed (with permission) footage from a friend’s wake boarding Vimeo page and added text and music to it. The combination of Johnny Cash and wake boarding ended up being pretty boss. I was really happy with how the entire series turned out.
Wakes Bumper from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
One of my favorite teachings from this series was on love and how the early Christians essentially overthrew a repressive empire without the use of force. Check it out:
Wakes – Love from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
Last week included my worst teaching of the year and also my favorite. The funny thing is that they were supposed to be the same content. Sometimes you write a teaching, you think it’s going to be great and then it falls flat. It’s worse when you are writing not only for yourself but also for other teachers on other campuses.
After teaching our high school students on Sunday night, I went back to the drawing board because, while it wasn’t a terrible teaching, it wasn’t clear or direct enough. It took some hard work and last minute fine tuning but I and was very pleased with what came out on Wednesday night at our middle school event.
This is the second teaching of our Wakes series and it’s all about how other people influence you. Check it out.
For me, it’s been 5 years since I’ve written curriculum and taught on a regular basis. I’m sort of relearning the art. Thankfully, my team and my boss have given me a lot of grace because there is a learning curve for this sort of thing. In my transition back into teaching and writing, I’ve found this model to be helpful:
Last night we kicked off our new teaching series called Wakes. It’s all about influence. I’m pretty pumped about it. Here’s our first teaching video of the series. This is my first attempt in my new role. Let me know what you think.
Wakes – Mission from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.
Last Sunday and Wednesday night I taught on worship at LifeLine. The question is: What blows your mind? For me, it is the vastness of the universe. What if God spoke it into being? What if this incredibly powerful Being knows you and loves you. Worship is responding to this incredible God.
Let me know what you think…
Our student ministry does something that I believe is rather unique. We call it cell family and we stole the idea wholesale from a church across town about a decade ago. They stopped doing it years ago and we’ve been dumb enough to stick with it. And yet, we’ve come to love it and it’s become an indispensable part of who we are as a ministry. What exactly is cell family? I’m glad you asked.
ONE EPIC NIGHT OF AWESOMENESS
Our high school ministry meets on Sunday nights. We built our ministry around small groups and we’re one of those student ministries that attach our small groups to our programming. In other words, we pack everything into Sunday nights: hang out, games, worship, teaching and small groups. We always leave the last 30 minutes of our night to small groups. We believe this is the best model for student ministry for a variety of reasons but we can argue about that in another post.
CELL FAMILY
What makes us unique is that every other week we meet in homes. Instead of meeting all together with all of our students and volunteers, we meet in regional homes based on school. We don’t add another night of programming, we do cell family in place of our regular large group programming. Sound like a logistical nightmare? It is. But to us, it’s worth it.
THREE LEVELS OF CONNECTION
There are a few reasons we believe this model is strategic. First off, we believe that students need to know and be known. Our dream is that students would know be known by ten adult volunteers (each cell family has 10 volunteers in it). These volunteers know each student’s name and basic story.
We also want each student to experience three levels of belonging. We want them to belong to something big. There is something special about worshiping together with hundreds of people. We also want our students to belong to something small. Small groups are the place where they can be vulnerable and real. It’s the environment in which they can be cared for and led by an invested adult.
Lastly, we believe our students need to belong to something midsize. We believe that there is something valuable in 30 or 40 people in a house. It feels a bit like a family reunion. It’s a support network. It’s a place where younger students can observe the faith of older students and where volunteers can show students what healthy relationships look like. It’s a place for students to try out their gifts and talents and it’s a place where they can have a voice.
INTERACTIVE TEACHING
Cell family is also a response to how students learn. We believe that students retain information best when they are able to interact with it as it is presented. In our cell families, we teach through discussion rather than preaching. Instead of a 20 minute presentation, we produce a 7 minute teaching video that leads into a group discussion. We believe this model of communicating better fits how our students learn.
SERVE AS A FAMILY
The last and perhaps most important reason we do cell family is volunteer community. We believe that volunteers are at their best when they are serving as a family. Each cell family is composed of 6-8 small group leaders and two volunteers that oversee the cell family. These “coaches” as we all them have two roles: care for their small group leaders and oversee the cell family programming.
Each time we meet in cell family, the volunteer team meets an hour early and has dinner at the cell family home. Over time, the combination of these meals and serving together leads to fantastic volunteer community. We want our volunteers to feel supported and together and cell family is a huge reason why we’re able to achieve this.
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