Saturday was a special day
for one seminary grad and for the church. You see Saturday the ELCA hosted another ordination, publicly calling another M.Div. graduate into Word and sacrament ministry. He will serve a particular congregation, as he also serves the whole church.
For people who don’t hang out in seminaries, this seems like an odd thing to do on a nice summer Saturday afternoon. But for folks who spend days, weeks and years immersed in seminary life, this event is a reminder
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Here's another contribution from one of our CYF graduates thesis. This one, by Joshua Feala, addresses the issue of youth ministry and congregational leadership. Enjoy!
Closing The Ministry Gap
actually began years ago when I was a youth in the church. I noticed there was this distance between the pastor and my fellow youth. Our interactions were limited mainly to confirmation instruction and the awkward greeting on Sunday morning. As years passed, I noticed the same pattern happening in other
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By Derek Tronsgard
There's well-known saying by Edmund Burke that says “those who don't know history are destined to repeat it”.
How well do you know your congregation's history?
Earlier this month my congregation started a visioning process for our youth ministry to map out the next 3-4 years, and one of the most helpful things we did was to write a complete, exhaustive history of the youth ministry in our congregation, stretching all the way back to our church's beginning in
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By Andy Sahl
There are many areas of our leadership as youth and children’s ministers where we have a LOT of freedom. In many congregations, the youth and children’s ministries are allowed to experiment and fail in a way that other ministries are not.
Experimenting and dreaming up new ideas for our little silos can be fun. But the world of youth and children’s ministry has changed over the years we’ve come to understand that most effective youth and children’s
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By Dr. Nancy Going, Director of the CYF Distributed Learning Program at Luther Seminary
Anyone in ministry will tell you that it's all about relationships. And while there have been great correctives in recent years about the nature of those relationships (
thank you, Andy Root!
), the fact remains that relationships in ministry are what matter most. So what would it mean to spend most of your ministry time in relationships?
It doesn't mean spending your every working hour with people
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By Julie Hagen
I’m done with winter, but according to the forecast, it looks like Mother Nature has a different opinion. I may be stuck in the cold for a little bit (or more) longer, but my church calendar is looking like summer! Summer registrations are open and we’re busy finalizing details and looking to the fall.
Over the past few months, we’ve been blogging about the role of youth minister. I’d like to add the youth minister as equipper. Ministry with young
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By Dr. Terri Martinson Elton, Director of the Center for First Third Ministry at Luther Seminary
Each year our country takes a day to “honor” past presidents. Mostly we honor them by getting the day off from school, or work if we are lucky, giving little or no attention to presidents at all. But on this president’s day I got thinking about
presidents and leadership
. Every four years we, the people, offer our voice regarding
who
should be the leader of our country. We do this based
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By Neil Christians
I was sitting in our new member class eating, eating lunch and talking to some new families when the question came up.
“So, what do you do for the church?”
“Well, I work with children, youth, young adults and families. Pretty much from birth through 30 years old; the first third of life.”
“What do you do with all the different age groups? What is your primary area of responsibility?”
What is it that we do? How do you explain this
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By Derek Tronsgard
A funny thing happened this fall. My wife and I were on our way to the Minnesota Golden Gophers homecoming football game against Purdue. We had parked our car in the street several blocks away and had to walk right through the main row of fraternity houses to get to the stadium.
As we walked down frat row it was pretty obvious that the college kids were celebrating homecoming weekend with gusto. It was 10:30 in the morning, but there were young kids out on their
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By Dr. Nancy Going, Director of the CYF Distributed Learning Program at Luther Seminary
Here is how the job that many Youth ministers or pastors find themselves doing asks them to spend their time. Is this true for you?
Events planning (even if the event is a small group system), event recruitment, curriculum assessment, curriculum writing, marketing (finding goals and language to attract people to the programs) and then recruiting other adults as chaperones at the minimum, or ministry partners
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