Reinventing your Youth Room on a $0 Budget

If you ever stop and look at your youth room and inwardly groan or if you are ready for a change in the New Year this is the blog for you!

Even if you have $0 to spend you can still give your room a fresh new feel. Something as simple as putting the chairs in a circle instead of rows can have a tremendous effect on the look and feel of the room.

Where do you begin when you are looking to revamp your space and you have zero, zilch, absolutely no money to spend? 

You start with a plan.

It is always a wise idea to start with a plan when looking to reinvent a space. For some of you when you look at your room all you see is what is currently there and only 1% of your creative juices are flowing. How many of you have moved couches back and forth a hundred times before realizing you liked it right where it started?

Balloons Are Meant to Be Popped


We just got done celebrating Christmas with my family and one of the first presents my son wanted to play with after he got done unwrapping his gifts was the game “Boom Boom Balloon.” He had seen commercials and videos about the game and couldn’t wait to try it for himself. The point of the game is to poke the balloon with different sticks without it popping. The person who pops it loses. it’s a pretty fun game and can get intense towards the end. 

It is pretty crazy to watch the balloon be put under so much pressure, to be poked and poked. Just when you think the balloon is going to break, someone pokes it 3 more times and it withstands the pressure just a little bit longer.  

But alas, it finally does pop. At some point someone pushes in one of the rods a bit too much and the balloon does what it’s made to do - POP! Actually, more times than not it’s a slow, high pitched whistle, but you get the point. Balloons are not meant to last forever. At some point they pop. Balloons that never pop turn into shriveled up pieces of thin rubber and you almost feel bad for them. Balloons are not made to withstand a whole lot of pressure or poking. They’re not meant to last forever. This game is a great analogy for us humans. We as humans are not made to withstand pressure forever either. 

Is This Really Our New Norm?

Last week I wrapped Christmas presents in my living room while watching the footage unfold from San Bernardino, California where “two people barged into a holiday party and opened fire, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17+ others.”

Wait, what? Shouldn’t I be wrapping while drinking egg nog and listening to my Charlie Brown Christmas cd? Shouldn’t Rudolph or Frosty or The Grinch be on my television to add to the festive spirit while wrapping Christmas gifts? 

It certainly wasn’t how I intended to spend my evening. It definitely was not the way I’d normally tag team my Christmas wrapping. But it’s what was happening, and I was glued to the story. At the time it was unfolding, nobody knew the cause, but watching it surely left a sinking, sickening feeling in my heart. Fear was at the door.

For some reason it brought me back to 911. I’ll never forget sitting in my living room the evening everything went down. I was just out of college, my parents were out of town, my brother lived in NYC, my good friends were on their NYSUM internship in NYC, and it was just my younger sister and I at home. We watched 911 footage all night long with the window curtains drawn, as I wondered if my friends and brother in NYC were ok. There was such fear that night, and truly in the days that followed. I even remember feeling like evil was lurking just outside my house and would snag me if I let anyone see inside.

That same fear tried creeping in Wednesday night as what happened in San Bernardino was said to be the “new norm” for us.

Discovering Security in an Insecure World

Paul writes some incredibly comforting words in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That one little word “in”, could not come at a better time for many of us.  With things unfolding as they are on the world scene and from the dialogue we hear in the political arena, more and more people are struggling with feeling secure. 

Meditating upon this truth, is the first step in helping ourselves and others find security and confidence in our standing before God because of Jesus Christ. Understanding this truth and helping teens understand this precious truth is a noble and worthy endeavor. Teens often wrestle with insecurity and identity. They may never voice it that way, but we need to understand that every one of us deal with these issues at some level. Therefore it is paramount that we learn how to deal with them.

It could be difficulties with our relationships, or eating disorders, or depression, or burst of anger and frustration, or voicing demands that people meet my needs. Bottom line, we all struggle and wrestle with the issue of insecurity. Here are just a few examples and categories to think through:

Take Care of Yourself

I was recently talking with a Youth Pastor friend. He told me a story about someone who felt called to full time Youth Ministry work and wanted to intern with him. My buddy took on the young man for about two months. At the end of two months the intern shared a couple observations. 1) He knew he wasn’t called to full-time youth ministry. 2) In his estimation Christian youth ministry work is some of the most emotionally challenging work on the planet.

Now the experience of one intern doesn’t make a hard fast rule, but I suspect that the intern’s observation resonates with you. I know that my own experience of youth ministry has left me feeling exhausted, hurt, burdened, lost, and ready to quit on more than one occasion. Within youth ministry there are tons of opportunities to encounter personal failure and discouragement. It can be hard to discern the value of our efforts and see their impact. Carrying love in your hearts for teens and then seeing many of them run toward sin brings a heartache and discouragement that is hard to avoid. 

In 2 Corinthians chapter 11 the Apostle Paul writes about his many trials and burdens. He lists imprisonment, whippings, stoning, hunger, nakedness, and shipwreck. Then to his many physical sufferings Paul adds the emotional burden and pain of caring for people who are wayward and struggling. If you’re like me, you haven’t experienced the whippings and imprisonment, but that emotional toll of pastoral ministry that Paul talks about is very familiar. 

Orphans and Widows

Josh. I had a kid in my youth ministry named Josh. He came from a broken home, he didn’t do very well in school. He was horrible at sports. He loved to draw, loved to play video games, and pretty much anything he could do by himself. He was the kind of kid that if you wanted to find out what was going on in his life, you had to ask about 1001 questions. He would never really be the superstar of a club at school, a sports team, and certainly not a youth group (Don’t get all pious on me, we all know we have our superstars in our youth ministry). 

Josh was the kind of kid that when you didn’t completely forget that he was even at youth group, and you tried to pour into him, it seemed like he would fight you every step of the way. Kids at Josh’s school nicknamed him wallpaper, because he always seemed to blend into the wall. I would try with Josh, I would try really hard. I would take Josh out to lunch, I would seek Josh out at our weekly gatherings, I would text him, Facebook him, the whole nine.

I would sometimes wonder why I put so much time into Josh, because I wasn’t seeing much return of investment. Josh wasn’t really growing, wasn’t coming out of his shell, wasn’t always consistent in attending. There was no tangible fruit, pouring into him didn’t help my youth group in a large way. There was no obvious or substantial reason for me to pour into him. 

The Gap Year

What is “The Gap Year?” This is a term that I recently heard and I asked myself the same question. Simply put, a gap year is when a student graduates high school and then takes a year to collect their thoughts and make their plans before catapulting themselves into the great beyond. See, that’s what the future feels like for many high school graduates; this great mysterious, ominous, abyss that used to loom beyond them but now looks them in the face and honestly, scares the crap out of them. The great, scary, beyond. Things like college majors and/or careers feel like permanent decisions that will set them in place for the rest of their lives; and to an extent they are. It’s probably wise for graduates who are unsettled or unsure about the course they want their life to take to step back, slow down, and take a breather. Take a gap year.
 
As a fellow youth leader, I know that once a student graduates and we go to their party and eat their cake, they technically become no longer our responsibility. But after years of pouring into their lives the burden that we have for them doesn’t go away. We still want to see their relationship with God grow deeper and for them to pursue His will for their futures.

My Identity Crisis

A few years ago I went through a minor identity crisis. I was just finishing up school at Elim Bible Institute and College with a minor in Youth Ministry, as had been the plan for the last 9 years of my life, but there was a problem: I felt absolutely no draw to getting a job working in youth ministry… and I felt like God was ok with it. In fact, He was seemingly leading me in the opposite direction, into technology and computers, and to volunteer on the side at my church youth group.

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was a complete departure from “normal” for me. I got saved as a young teenager and around the same time I heard God speak to me for the first time and He told me to go to Bible school for Youth Ministry. For me, being a youth pastor was life! There was no Plan B…until God told me to take Plan B. So, here I am 2 years later working for Elim Gospel Church as their Tech and IT Coordinator. In less fancy language, I train volunteers to make Sunday morning sound good and keep viruses off computers… And I love it! 

A Good Coach Is Like A Spotter – Are You A Good Coach?

The whole point of lifting weights is to build muscles.

What if the spotter felt sorry for the lifter and grabbed the bar to help out… it would be a complete mission fail!

How about faith muscles? How are they built?

When someone we care about is  going through something hard all to often we want to be able to help out. We think surely there is a way to rescue the person from what they are dealing with.

Now don’t get me wrong. Some times there is a legit need for being rescued and God comes through, but more often people are just experiencing a natural consequence of building faith muscles.

Faith only counts if there is risk!

If there is no risk, there is no real need for faith. Most of the visions God gives people to pursue are God sized. If they were easy people wouldn’t really be building any new muscles.