Why We Work Together #10: Because Our Students Need Inspired and Equipped

I work for a youth ministry network - we facilitate churches working together to reach teenagers for Christ. We assume, hopefully correctly, that students are being discipled in their churches and so the emphasis of our network is on evangelism. We believe that there are two big things that church youth ministries need to do together -

1) equip, inspire, and challenge Christian teenagers to share their faith and
2) provide opportunities for them to do so.

On that first objective, eight youth pastors from various churches in Greensburg, Pennsylvania sponsored a student evangelism conference back on Saturday, August 21st, 2010. They gave students a choice of six out of eight twenty minutes workshops on various aspects of evangelism.

At our first planning meeting for this event, we went around the room and asked the question (inspired by The Nines), "If you could talk to students about one aspect of evangelism in one word, what would that be?" The words that came up were service, love, culture, identity, confidence, dialogue, work, and pary. And those themes became our workshops.

Another fun part of the day was our two Q & A sessions with the youth pastors who were the workshop presenters. We got some great questions like "What is your great witnessing failure/success story?" "How do you witness to a Muslim?" "How do you talk with someone who has been hurt by a church?"

We had students from five school districts come and we ended the day by commissioning them to be missionaries to their friends and schools. Once again, I was amazed to see what great things can happen when youth pastors bring what God has given them to the table. He takes a little and does a lot!