Every season has their own distinct feeling, and—maybe it’s because I’ve been a public school teach for nine years—summer seems to be a great time to self-evaluate and make changes.
It’s true for school teachers, and it’s just as true for your pastors and youth workers. Summer can be an incredibly busy time for youth ministries when you think about camps, outings, missions trips, etc., and yet, if we were honest, we’d probably admit that our actually youth meetings are surprisingly low-attended in the summer due to sports camps, vacations, and other frustrating momentum-killers.
While you could get frustrated at the dozens of extra kids who show up for the Friday night pizza party of the Saturday morning water war who never seem to actually make it church, you could also chose to use this time for some serious changes, renovations, innovations, and the inherent risk of failure that all of these bring with them. (I mean, if you’re going to take a misstep, might as well be when they’re are less thirteen-year olds around to mock you.)
So, let’s turn our attention to what needs changed and to what degree.