How to talk to young people about ghosts
For people of faith and miracles, we can be surprisingly blasé about other people’s beliefs. It’s not uncommon for a youth worker to respond to a question about aliens, ghosts, mediums, telepathy etc. with some variation of ‘well that’s all just nonsense!’ This can be especially hard for a young person to swallow when in […]
What are primary issues? And have you made your secondary issue into one?
‘No, this is important!’ I said over the breakfast table to a small audience that was slowly losing interest. ‘You can’t sit on the fence about it, you need to make a decision – don’t you think that Oasis was a more commercially successful band than Supergrass?’ Perhaps the breakfast table at my very middle […]
Reconsidering street preaching
Let’s talk about street preaching. Every town that I lived in has contained at least one well-known street preacher. Invariably that’s been someone stood in a busy street, reading aloud bits of Scripture, interspersed with their commentary. Usually passers-by catch no more than a soundbite, and it can be the luck of the draw whether […]
We need to rethink how we do apologetics
At Bible College, apologetics was the module that everybody wanted to take. It was uncomfortably alluring in that it always left you feeling really good about what you believed. With just a sprinkling of smug self-righteousness, you often left class thinking, “Wow. We really do have all the answers, don’t we!” And that’s a nice […]
Three things I’d tell myself if I was just starting out as a youth worker today
If I was beginning my youth work journey all over again, here are three practical things that I’d want my excitable young self to know. Full disclosure – I’m sure that I would have ignored all of this, even if I was told! Anyhoo… 1. Learn how to have an argument I’ve spent a huge […]
How do you deal with failure as a youth worker?
In my last post I wrote an open letter to the church asking all of us, myself included, to spend more time caring for the lost and isolated than we do grumbling about each other and the ‘state of affairs’ online. I led that with it’s not ok to not be ok. Today I want […]
It’s not ok to be not ok. Well it is, but it isn’t. A letter to the church.
It’s certainly ok to be not ok. There has been too heavy a stigma on mental health, and too much of a silly ‘just-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps’ hyper-masculine narrative for far too long. Of course, it’s ok to be not ok! However, we’re not meant to remain helpless, wounded, struggling people – alone and isolated – without care […]
I’m called to teach – not to make more people think like me.
Teachers need to make a distinction between ‘what I want to say’ and ‘what people need to hear’. It’s not always as obvious as we think. A few weeks ago, I came across a passage on biblegateway’s verse for the day. It said, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in […]
Youth Ministry is in my blood…
I don’t blog on Sundays as a rule, but I’m making a rare exception in the hope someone might read this and pray for me today. In that vein, this is perhaps more of a personal journal entry, than an instructional blog. (The very poor cover picture, btw, is from a club I ran in […]
Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of his White House had a big block of cheese…
If you clicked on this link it can only mean one thing, you are a fan of The West Wing! Two days ago was #WestWingDay, which marked the anniversary of when the show premiered in 1999 with it’s untitled pilot episode. Opening in a hotel bar, Sam Seaborn and the reporter ‘Billy’ are locked in […]
Why I prefer talking to young people than adults
An afternoon spent scrolling through twitter, is usually a year lost from my life. I think it’s important for Christians to engage in public discourse, but one begins to wonder how realistic that is when the phrase ‘discourse’ has been reduced to almost anything shy of throwing our own faeces. At some point during these […]
Have we made an idol out of “telling our story?”
My name is Tim and I am a Kindle addict. I love my Kindle. Carrying hundreds of books around with me with an easy-on-the-eye screen, and a hyper-long battery life in one little package is just awesome. Being a ‘book purist’ I avoided getting one for years, but once I took the plunge, I never […]
Should the youth pastor have a ‘pulpit’?
So I was checking out an American Facebook group the other day and came across a post discussing pulpits in youth rooms. There was a monstrous bar that one youth worker was using as a pulpit and was looking for advice and inspiration about what to replace it with. In the comments which followed was […]
A youth ministry SELF-CARE checklist
I’m coaching this morning and preparing a series of lecture videos on youth work leadership – which has bought me back again to this document I put out a few years ago. Please spend some time with it – I really believe it’s valuable. All the best. t. Please answer as many questions you can […]
The most important lesson I’ve learned in nearly 15 years of youth ministry.
I’m not really a hater. I don’t ‘hate’ a lot of things and certainly not people. I find the feeling of hate pretty soiling, so I’ve always been really wary of it manifesting itself in me. Frankly, I’m far more inclined to fear than hate. There is something, however, that I hate. Truly hate with […]