Recently I was asked to describe our student ministry’s strategy for helping students develop faith beyond high school. This is one of my life’s passions so I’m glad to share. Yesterday I blogged about what I believe is the culture necessary for promoting faith beyond high school. You can read the post here.
Today I’m writing about the specific practices we employ to help our students’ faith stand in life beyond our student ministry. Here they are:
Preparation
Students are often ambushed by the complexity of life after high school. One of the best ways we can help our students is through education and conversation. We created a supplemental curriculum for our seniors that covers topics like these:
- Calling
- Money and Debt
- God’s Will
- How to pick the right college and major
- How to be awesome at being married
We use two books as well. I developed a few teachings from Andy Stanley’s The Principle of the Path and we build the entire first semester around Donald Miller’s Storyline. I find the concepts in these books to be extremely helpful for seniors. The main point is that we gather ours seniors regularly and talk specifically about the transition they are entering. By doing this we also retain our seniors very well because, well…they don’t have to hang out with freshmen. And, the topics are relevant to where they are at.
Capstone
Every year we invite our seniors on a retreat we call senior sneak. This event is designed to challenge and equip our students to continue pursuing Jesus in life after high school. It’s also an incredible bonding experience for our students and their mentors. Our goal is to cement these relationship because the students will need their mentors in the year to come.
This event is also our most extravagant event. We spend a little extra money to provide our students with a special experiences. It’s another way for us to retain our upperclassmen. We’ve built enough buzz over this event through the years that most of our students really look forward to the experience.
Hand Off
We have sworn off the graduation cliff. A handshake and a graduation book isn’t good enough. We believe that it’s our responsibility to connect our students with a new ministry or church and to check in on them. We also vision and train our volunteer mentors to maintain relationships with their students for at least the first year of college. Often, these relationship become lifelong friendships.
Support
One of the simplest and most effective things we do is send a care package to our graduates during their first month of college. The first semester of college is incredibly disorienting. Our goal is to remind our graduates that we still care about them and that they still belong. We send them food, LifeLine gear, a Starbucks card, digital bible studies and letters from volunteers and staff. The feedback we get from these packages is incredible.
In addition to the care packages, we assign one of our staff members to support our graduates throughout the year with regular text messages, and social media check ins. It’s a small time commitment that pays incredible dividends in encouragement.
Reconnect
The last thing we do is invite our graduates to two different events during their first year of college. The first is a reunion event for all graduates and their small group leaders. The goal of this event is to first remind our graduates that we still care about them and their faith development and second to reconnect graduates with their mentors. This relationship is the most important thing we can offer them.
The other event is a special night at our senior gathering where graduates come and share about what they’ve learned in life beyond high school. They offer advice to our current seniors and answer questions about what college is really like. This is a huge win for both our graduates and our current seniors.
So there are some of the practices that we employ to help promote lifelong faith in our students. I hope you found something helpful. I’d love to hear some of your genius ideas as well.
image credited to Xiaobo Song
