So, yes, I watched about half of the just-completed season of The Bachelor. My embarrassment compels me to quickly explain—my 17-year-old daughter started watching this notorious (and wildly popular) show only this year, a permission that came with a price. Namely, that my wife and I would need to watch the show with her. …
We have a global warming problem, but some struggle to acknowledge its source and implications. Meanwhile, we have a “global freezing” problem in the youth ministry world, and some in the church are struggling to acknowledge its source and implications. The “freeze” is driven by a church in decline (a 20 percentage-point decline since 1999)—stagnant youth ministry salaries and shrinking career possibilities are the results… So, it’s been four years since we asked youth pastors all over the U.S.…
Almost 50 million people attempt to diet every year—as we all know, most never reach their goal. The reason has less to do with willpower and more to do with our brain’s stubborn dictatorship. Neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt says: “Whenever your weight changes too much, your brain will intervene to push it back to what it thinks is the correct weight for you.…
By Rick Lawrence I was driving home from a writing retreat, where I’d been off the grid for four days—no Wi-Fi, no cell service. I called my wife to let her know I was on the road, and I heard that edge in her voice that I know all too well… “Rick, there’s an active shooter situation happening right now, at the STEM school that’s 10 minutes from us.…
A couple of mornings every week, I walk my middle-school daughter and my cabin-fever dog to the bus stop on the corner before I head off to work. We live in Denver, and during the winter months it’s as cold as you think it’s supposed to be in the “Mountain” time zone.…
Discipleship is the endgame for youth ministry. So how do we help teenagers break free from the gravitational pull of a conventional life? How do we “achieve orbit” in a life defined by a passion for Jesus? Well, I know from three decades of youth ministry experience, and from in-depth research projects, that nothing in our ministry toolbox has more “rocket power” than a mission trip.…
Revisiting a Whiteboard Wednesday experiment, Rick explores five crucial practices that make it possible to “go into the cave” on behalf of students or their parents—five things that give us the foundation to offer real help in times of great trauma, tragedy, or challenge.…
Yesterday hundreds of thousands of teenagers decided to take a stand by participating in the National School Walkout, a coordinated protest conceived and implemented by student activists from Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. These young leaders, all of them survivors of one of the worst school shootings in American history, have been articulate, determined, and shrewd as they try to leverage an adult-controlled political apparatus into doing something to stop the carnage.…
You’d be hard-pressed to find a youth ministry of any size that does not prioritize service as a bread-and-butter strategy for reaching and impacting teenagers. We know firsthand that service trips have a powerful ability to crack open the door to trajectory-changing moments in kids’ lives.…
The heart is the symbol for Valentine’s Day, which makes what happened Wednesday, in a southern Florida high school, all the more shattering—our hearts are broken and broken again by what feels like an endless parade of violence. I was with youth workers and survivors of the Columbine massacre hours after this cycle of copycat destruction was kicked off in our culture, and four years ago I was trying to help my own daughter recover from the trauma she experienced in her own school shooting.…
