Tag: youth ministry

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Growing Faith Newsletter – a must read for parents & leaders

Youthworks have just launched a monthly newsletter, Growing Faith. This is essential reading for all Christian parents and I think it’s useful for those involved in ministry, youth ministry and children’s ministry. The first issue looks great, including the blue jeans and white t-shirt uniform worn in the header pic below! Go sign up for this great resource | Go read the first issue | Pass it on to others…

Here’s the introductory quote:

We have a vision of parents and carers equipped and energised to fulfil their responsibility to raise their children in ‘the fear and instruction of the Lord’ (Ephesians 6:2).

Our prayer is that families would grow in faith as the Church in Thessalonica did (2 Thessalonians 1:3) ? trusting in the promises of God’s word and living as missional disciples of Jesus to the glory of God.

Each month you will receive useful information, practical tips and helpful resources. Each issue will contain an interesting article on the privilege and responsibility of discipling our children, short tips from other parents and carers with ideas they have found helpful in this task, plus reviews and links to other useful resources.

Please forward this to anyone you know who shares the responsibility and privilege of raising children to know Jesus.

Go sign up for this great resource | Go read the first issue | Pass it on to others…

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Cherrybrook + Dural Combined Youth Camp

Cherrybrook Anglican and Dural Anglican are doing great work in their respective youth ministries. Last weekend I was able to join them both on their annual combined youth camp. This is a brilliant idea!! Rather than having 2 camps of 25 young punks each, they join forces to have a camp for 50 young punks.

Here are 3 benefits of two local youth groups joining up for a camp/special events: 1) Once a room has 50 peeps in it, there is enough of a critical mass to start creating a pretty sweet vibe; 2) 50+ people makes organisational sense, good for booking a camp site, good for sharing the leadership responsibility with both churches; 3) While it doesn’t make you any more or less the people of God, it’s a good thing to unite with brothers and sisters from your broader family.

If you help run a smaller group, why not share some of the love with another smaller and like-minded group of believers? Do it.

Here are the talks from the CH-URAL camp:

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Never Be Destroyed – Talk MP3’s from CMS Camp MMM

I’m not sure what MMM stands for, maybe it had something to do with Mission, Mountains and maybe Magpies? Not sure. Doesn’t matter. Camp MMM is run by Church Missionary Society (CMS). While it got down to zero degrees celsius in Katoomba during camp, it really was a smoking hot camp! Lots of the camps I speak on are very good camps. They all take the Bible seriously and seek to honour Jesus in everything. The thing that made this camp stand out from others was the 1-hour mission spot each day.

The 200 or so peeps on camp were challenged each day to be on board with God’s mission of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. It was such an encouragement to hear from a bunch of different missionaries about the work they are part of in different corners of the world. Check out CMS website: click me.

I spoke from Daniel 1-7 on the topic Never Be Destroyed (read the blog posts here). God is very kind: 4 of the senior campers became Christian; and another 10 or so recommitted themselves to live with Jesus as their King. Yeeeeewww!! Here are the talk MP3’s, right click to download:

Find out more about Christianity here.

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The Joy of Knowing Christ

Cornerstone Youth probably have the most media rich youth group website in Sydney! It’s hot. I joined them for their super-encouraging Praise Night. They filmed the whole night, and have now made available all the content on their website! The talk I gave was from Philippians 3:1-10 on The Joy of Knowing Christ. I was a little dizzy on the night and probably waffled a bit more than normal! But from conversations afterwards, many were encouraged to treasure Jesus more than everything else.

Props to Mikey Nhieu and the incredible team of leaders making CY happen each week.

Check out: the CY website | all the media from the night | all the media from the talk

The Joy of Knowing Christ – Dave Miers – MP3 (right click to save)

The video of the talk is broken into chunks below the jump:

Continue reading “The Joy of Knowing Christ”

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“Young Punks” – you heard it here first!

I’ve recently started referring to high school aged young people as “young punks”. Some friends have even begun to embrace the terminology while blogging, tweeting or speaking. You might think it sounds stupid, but not as stupid as some terms we use.

Here is my ranking of terms for defining this age group:

  1. Young Punks – this is my favourite. It’s a kinda playful and even an endearing description. But if you want to overly allegorise, you could say that the ‘punks’ bit recognises that they are sinners.
  2. Teenagers – I like this. It describes their age.
  3. Students – I like this. It describes their vocation.
  4. Youth – This one is okay. But, it’s also ambiguous. Triple J is a ‘youth’ radio station, which includes many Nirvana-loving 40 year-olds.
  5. Kids – This one is just terrible. Aside from ‘kids’ being junior goats, I think it is patronising and condescending.
  6. Children – This is worse than kids.
  7. Generation XYZ – what the heck is Gen Y or Gen Z or Gen Whatever?!? Too tryhard trendy. Very 2006.

You with me?

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Good times in Tamworth

On Friday night I MC’d the Re-generation youth event with Will Graham in Tamworth. Will preached a great sermon urging people to stop going the wrong way and start following Jesus. There were about 600-700 young punks there with 130 praying to become Christian!! So exciting. I had a really good time hanging out with Will and his buddy Jamey Wooten for lunch on Friday. Great guys and really encouraging hearing their stories and being encouraged by their faith in Jesus.

It was likewise good fun hanging out with the 3 bands: Jonnday; Chasing Bailey; and Compliments of Gus. They were all very good. Highly recommended!! (Keep an eye out for some of them in Free Music Friday)

Props to Dave Buster. He’s 18 and doing a gap year with St Peter’s Tamworth. He did an incredible job organising the night. He’s a young punk doing something.

See below the jump for tweets, pics and some video blogs from the trip:

Continue reading “Good times in Tamworth”