wrapping up my thoughts on the NYMC

I had a great time this weekend at Group and Simply Youth Ministry's National Youth Ministry Conference in Columbus (next year it's in Chicago!). It's was great to hang out with excellent and passionate youth workers from all over the country. I hope everyone goes away with something that will ignite their heart for students.

Since the last time I blogged, I got to experience some tremendous seminars. After checking out a couple issue-specific workshops I was interested in earlier, I got back on my original seminar track on Sunday--"Secrets to a Healthy Youth Ministry." Mark DeVries from First Presbyterian Church in Nashville and Youth Ministry Architects basically presented on his recent book, Sustainable Youth Ministry: Why Most Youth Ministry Doesn't Last and What Your Church Can Do About It.

I have to admit, I love these two words when talking about developing a youth ministry--healthy and sustainable. I think they are great ways of thinking about long term goals for what a student ministry should look like... not "big and exciting," but "healthy and sustainable." As Doug Fields likes to put it, "healthy things grow and thrive." I want a ministry that goes beyond this group of students, this group of volunteers, or even me. The sustainability of a youth ministry cannot totally rely on the lead youth pastor, so I'm learning to build a structure for the long haul that will be able to outlast me.

I also got a lot of practical tips for thriving in ministry (which, by the way, I had the foresight to bring a flash drive and download his powerpoint notes to go back and look at). I especially liked the section "monkeys, frogs and balconies," which I'm sure will become starting points for future blog posts. But as far as the frogs part of that section goes, he gives us the advice to do the hard/dreaded task first-thing in order to help us become more effective the rest of the day. Based on the Mark Twain quote, "If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful," DeVries urges us (wisely, I think) to eat the frog so that it doesn't grow and multiply as we procrastinate to do it. Oddly enough, Mark also recommended "planned procrastination" where we intentionally put off other things so that we actually benefit from time constraints. Lots of great stuff there that I hope to see become reality.

My final workshop was this morning, and it was on working with the college-aged ministry, "Preparing Your Teenagers for Life After Youth Group," led by Chuck Bomar (see also collegeleader.org). It was good, and I'm still hoping to get the powerpoint notes from that one, too. Here he spent quite a bit of time on the philosophy of having a college-aged ministry and how to affect the mindset of youth before they leave the youth group, but I was mostly looking for new and transferable ideas to bring back and apply. I was late to this, so I'm sure I would have gotten more out of it had I gotten there earlier (I guess I'll have to read the book that comes out later this year!).

There's not much else to really share about the last few general sessions. They were funny and worshipful and challenging, but that's not what sticks out to me about the conference. Besides Kay Warren's talk and the workshops, what sticks out to me is the word Doug Fields emphasized at the beginning: accessible. It was fun to see the presenters all over the convention center, chatting with Matt and Josh, eating lunch next to the Skit Guys, participating in the live podcast, riding the elevator with Mark DeVries, and following the live twitter feed. I just want to say-- accessible works. It works really well, and I hope they keep it up no matter how big this conference gets over the years. I know it's harder and takes more work to make yourself available like that, but I think it really pays off. I think the Youth Specialties conventions I've been to over the years has sort of lost that, but not here, not this year at least. Thanks guys! Accessible works.