We had a great discussion last Monday answering some of the recent questions and debates that were posted to MinistryQuestions.com. Unfortunately, the service we use to hold the conversations, TalkShoe, was plagued with issues once again, forcing us to switch to Blog Talk Radio for next week’s talk.

Nonetheless, the phone part worked without many hitches, so we were able to discuss a couple topics before our time ran out.

Some of the things we talked about:

• Simply Youth Ministry Conference or National Youth Workers Convention this year?
• Should the ministry’s vision be shared with students?
• Reaching the punk teens versus the preppy teens
• A boy who dates YG girls and causes them to stop coming to youth group
• Online systems for scheduling volunteers
• Knowing how and when to leave a church
• And a whole lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Play this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next Monday’s discussion

January 19: Join us for LIVE YM Talk again this Monday! We’re discussing, “What every youth worker can learn from urban youth ministry.” Our guest will be Eric Iverson, the Multi-Cultural Integrity Director for YouthWorks. We’d love to have you join us! The live conversation starts at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

Last week my sr. high youth group finished up a 5 week series on evangelism that was loosely based on Brett Heatherington’s free Evangelism For My Life series. A good friend of mine, Greg Stier of Dare 2 Share Ministries, agreed to do a live evangelism Q&A with my youth group via a video feed, but our Sunday night didn’t quite work out for him, so the teens wrote down their questions ahead of time and I did the Q&A video with Greg during the week instead. Here’s a list of the questions they asked:

1. What are some icebreakers to start the conversation?
2. What are a couple of passages that shows God’s love toward us?
3. What would you say to someone if they ask a question like, “How do you know the Bible is right?” or “How do you know God exists?” or “What if you’re wrong?”
4. How do you prepare for an “encounter?”
5. What are some resources that you would recommend for someone who is going along with what you are saying?
6. Give me an example of bringing Christ up through music? Sports? Recent events? School?
7. What is a good way to explain the trinity to unbelievers?
8. How can you explain that having faith is different than religion? Like, a relationship with God?
9. How do we share our faith with people who don’t care about God and don’t want to learn more?
10. How do we approach people with a different religion?
11. How can we know when to be more persistent with someone and when to back off?
12. How do I share my faith with someone who wants nothing to do with me?
13. How do you go about pursuing someone who you and others may presume is “fine” but there is something that may lead you to be uncertain about their faith and if they know Jesus?
14. How do you help a Christian come back to Jesus after an emotional crises/breakdown?
15. How do you share your faith with a close friend?
16. What do you say when an unbeliever asks you to prove what you’re saying?
17. How do you prove the Bible using the Bible? How do you prove the Bible NOT using the Bible?
18. What’s the way of evangelism that seems to be received best by unbelievers?

You’re welcome to download this 41 minute video conversation between me and Greg Stier and use it with your youth groups, too. However, since it’s just shy of 700 MB, I’m going to let you guys download it directly from Vimeo. Use the link below to view the video. In the bottom-right corner of the page you can download the original source file (requires site registration).

View the Evangelism Q&A video with Greg Stier and Tim Schmoyer

Download the small group discussion questions

———————————————————————-
Remember, there is no LIVE YM Talk today or any other Friday in the future. LIVE YM Talks have switched to Mondays. Our next LIVE YM Talk is this Monday, October 26, with featured guest, Dennis Poulette, who will lead us in a discussion on working with cross-cultural students and minorities at youth group.

Yesterday I wrote about why I’m abandoning outreach events and gave several reasons why “outreach campaigns” may be a more effective solution.

For several months now I’ve been planning an outreach campaign for my own youth group and am excited to have other youth groups join us! The best part is that it’s completely FREE! We’ll be going all over the world, sharing the gospel with friends both in our local neighborhoods and friends far away. It’s an online missions trip, a “missions trip to Facebook,” if you will.

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online about things that don’t really matter in light of eternity, let’s train them to share their faith and push them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January whatever-31, 2009

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

February 1-14, 2009

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 15-whenever, 2009

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, a Facebook app you can use, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, join the OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Group and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you in February.

———————————————————————————

Thanks to YouthBytes, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and Xtreme Youth Alliance for their support, promotion, and free resources for the Online Missions Trip! Thank you Brian Ford and Michael Rothermel for all your help in creating content and tools for this missions trip that will bring teenagers to Christ! And thanks Janelle Painter for designing the Online Mission Trip logo!

For many churches and youth groups, the typical approach to evangelism is to host a big event that will be attractive to unbelievers who are invited by their Christian friends. A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post about my problem with outreach events like this. Back then I didn’t really have any answers for my frustrations, but now I do. I’ve officially decided to ditch outreach events altogether for a couple of reasons.

1. They end up being “Christian entertainment.”

Regardless of how much I push an outreach lock-in, publicize it, and encourage kids to bring their unsaved friends, it’s rare that students actually do so. Out of 20 kids, maybe 1 or 2 of them are unchurched. The rest are all youth group kids or Christian kids from other youth groups.

2. Low conversion rate.

If there actually are any pre-saved teens there, the percentage of those who give their lives to Christ seems to be pretty low. Maybe because it feels intimidating, maybe because there’s no interaction or avenue for asking questions, or maybe because they have no relationship with the person who is presenting the gospel.

3. Teens’ evangelism becomes dependent on an adult leader.

Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing a disservice to my teens by unintentionally teaching them to outsource their evangelism efforts to someone on a stage. What happens when they grow into adults and still feel that evangelism is the church’s job?

A better approach

Instead, I’m forming what I call “outreach campaigns.” An outreach campaign is when teens are trained and held accountable to share their faith with their friends on an on-going basis. If teens start doing this at a young age, they’ll have the confidence to continue it for the rest of their lives. Otherwise, they might always rely on the church to get their unbelieving friends onto Christian turff where someone else will talk to them about Christ instead.

If teens develop the confidence and experience of sharing Christ with their friends outside the church, the conversion rate will be much higher than events. For the unbeliever, the feeling of being outnumbered and intimidated by a Christian group disappears, ongoing interaction and questions is natural, and a relationship with the trusted friend is obviously already established.

For several months now I’ve been working hard to put together such an outreach campaign, not only for my own group, but for anyone else who wants to participate in it with us. Stay tuned tomorrow for how you can join my youth group on a FREE missions trip!

(A couple weeks ago in our LIVE YM Talk we discussed the question, “Are youth events still working?” Some of what I mentioned here I talked about in more depth during that conversation. Listen to it here.)