Besides the obvious items like a Bible and a first aid kit, here are some key pieces of equipment that will definitely get a lot of use this summer.

1. Video Camera. I have the Canon VIXIA HF100, which is great because it records in full 1080p HD quality, has outstanding image reproduction, records to SD cards and is about the size of a soda can. It was relatively cheap when I bought it, but now it costs almost twice as much. Not sure why, especially when the newer Canon VIXIA HF200 is a better camera for a cheaper price. Weird. But anyway, we all love capturing our favorite moments together on video and putting it on Facebook for all to share. Some youth workers swear by the mini Flip HD cameras that’s approximately the size of a deck of cards. For $129, it’s hard to go wrong.

2. iMovie. What good would the video camera be without a very simple, intuitive, user-friendly video editing program to make some quick modifications to make a professional-looking video? Although I have the higher-end Final Cut Express software, I hardly use it because iMovie does pretty much everything I need and more.

3. Digital camera. Video is cool and all, but still images have their place, too. Gotta have a digital camera around to snap quick poses, twisted facial expressions, and capture those unrepeatable moments. Plus, a photo you can hang up around your youth room or put on a bulletin board at church. Can’t quite do that with videos.

4. Swimming suit. Since a lot of people in our community live on lakes, it goes without saying that we’ll need bathing suits. In fact, we often get together to go water skiing, tubing, wake boarding, and more. We do it officially as a youth group one Sunday each month, but it definitely happens more than that on a more spontaneous level.

5. Xbox. For those rainy days when we’re all hanging out and stuck inside, the Xbox comes in handy. I don’t think I’ve met a teenager who wasn’t up for some Halo or Guitar Hero. When we hop on Xbox Live and compete against others, it’s like instant teamwork and comradery.

What equipment is essential for your ministry this summer? I asked this question on Twitter and Facebook and got a bunch of answers from some of you.

• Jeff Greathouse: “air conditioning”
• Tony Myles: “A car trunk full of athletic balls and cones.”
• Sarah Webber: “spaghetti dinners”
• Joshua Treece: “Orange game cones”
• Summer Hamilton Brown: “water balloons”
• Dale Wayman: “patience and tolerance”
• Pastor Robbie: “diet mt dews, macbook, the message bible, megaphone, & college leaders to help hype up the youth”
• Chris Kidd: “water pistol, vit C tablets, team of leaders, BBQ & burgers, minibus keys, sleeping bag, credit card to buy the things you forget”
• Josh Christian: “Sunscreen, deodorant, water balloons, super soakers, and air conditioning. Not really “equipment” but essential!”
• Brit Windel: “Gas in the van, tons of disc golfs, Bible, camcorder, paint…”

How about you? What essential summer equipment do you use for youth ministry during the summer?

After all the comments from last week’s post about Seven Benefits of Shutting Down Youth Ministry Programs for the Summer, I figured I’d add a little clarification about what my summer schedule does look like, rather than only what it does not look like.

“Programs” does not equal “ministry”

First of all, I didn’t mention this in my previous post, but notice that the title was not, Seven Benefits of Shutting Down Youth Ministry for the Summer, with the absence of the word “programs.” In no way am I advocating that we stop ministry, just that was slow down our programming. Remember, programs do not equal ministry. Programs are tools of ministry. They’re here to help us do ministry, but programs are not the ministry.

Programming slows down, not ministry

Second, notice that I said that we don’t stop ministry programming altogether during the summer, we just slow it down. Putting programs on hold does not mean that we put ministry on hold, too. Ministry takes place in a variety of ways outside of programming, like one-on-one time with kids, hangouts at your house, or just stopping to pray for them. Some would say that this kind of ministry is much more effective than the programming aspect of ministry.

Some critics of my previous post say that Jesus never stopped his ministry and neither should we. I totally agree. If you want to use Jesus as an example, though, I’d also point out that He never ran any programs from his church/synagogue either. That’s not to say that programs are bad or that they’re not found elsewhere in scripture, just that there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing different tools during the summer than the highly programmatic ones. We’ll be going on bike rides, having kids over to play Xbox, spontaneously meeting at the bowling ally, grabbing ice cream at Dairy Queen, playing Ultimate Frisbee, going to the movies, taking road trips, swimming in the lakes, etc. None of it is scheduled, we just wake up one morning, call up a couple people and go for it. And while we’re together, us adults model Christlikeness and speak Truth into teens’ lives through our normal conversations. That kinda sounds more like Jesus’ style of ministry to me anyway.

For the programmatic people…

That said, here’s what the programming side of our youth ministry will look like this summer:

Weekly Jr. High Bible studies at my house: My wife and I lead these together. Attendance is typically pretty low with about 5-8 teens, but that’s the way we like it. The kids who comes are sometimes different kids each week, too, depending on their family’s vacation schedules and what else is going on in their lives. The Bible study is pretty laid-back and relaxed.

Weekly Sr. High Bible studies at someone else’s house: One of the high school groups has opted to continue throughout the summer meeting in someone’s house. The group will be open to any 9th-12th grader who wants to participate.

Monthly Wake ‘n Ski: As I mentioned in a comment on my previous post, our community has a lot of lakes, so many of our church members have boats and big-boy water toys. One Sunday a month our group gets together to spend the afternoon out on a lake water skiing, wake boarding, tubing, wake surfing, etc. We stop for dinner to have burgers while I or another leader shares a short faith story with everyone.

CHIC: This is our denomination’s tri-annual international high school student conference in Knoxville, TN. I won’t be going this year since my wife is due with our first baby two weeks later, but a full busload of our high school kids are attending the week-long conference in July with an outstanding team of adult youth leaders.

MUUUCE: Every August we take a busload of jr. highers away for a three-day retreat. We meet up with many other denominational jr. high youth groups and have a blast together. We go to a baseball game, a water park, amusement park, play on inflatables, and just have an incredible time bonding. It’s perfect for the incoming 7th graders to connect with us, get to know us, feel comfortable with us, and be super energized for the school year of jr. high ministry.

Two Parent Dinners: I blogged about this back in March, so check out that post for more details, but basically we have two open-house dinners planned at my house for parents to come hang out with me and Dana. We get to listen to them, answer questions, and also challenge them.

Monthly Worship Experiences: The youth ministry is not in charge of this, but we do partner with our church’s worship director to pull it off. Every month we have a night of worship at church that’s intended to be highly participatory and experiential. It’s open to the entire church and our community at large, so I really like the inter-generational mix that shows up to worship. Our teens do a fabulous job leading different aspects of the experience.

One Outdoor Movie Night on the BIG screen: We hang a big white sheet on the side of our house and setup a projector and sound system from church in the driveway. Kids to come over at dusk and watch a movie on the BIG screen with their own lawn chairs, blankets, bug spray and snacks. Here’s a picture of my setup I posted on Twitter last year. Always fun!

Canoe Trips: There is also one jr. high canoe trip and one sr. high canoe trip this summer. We all car pool to a river, rent a couple canoes, they drive us upstream and we paddle back. Another great time to bond, talk, and help kids transition into jr. high or high school ministries.

Rock The River Tour: A couple kids and parents thought the Billy Graham’s Rock The River Tour fit well with our strategy to take kids deep and wide, and since one high school student was willing to head it up, I let her go for it. That will happen in August.

One Parent Information Meeting: Before the school year starts up again, we have our big annual parent meeting where we recap last year’s ministry, talk about what we learned, and, based on that, what’s changing for next year. We give an overview of the calendar, answer questions, introduce the other youth leaders, and do a whole lot of vision casting.

Youth Leader meetings: I usually don’t do too many of these during the summer, but a couple years ago we made some significant changes to certain aspects of our ministry and the fruition of that starts next year. So, we need to have a couple youth leader meetings to make sure the train’s momentum keeps moving in the right direction. We also have a mini youth leader training conference with a couple of other churches in our community.

Other summer ideas

Looking for other summer youth event ideas? Check out my blog post from last year on the top 5 summer youth events that cost under $5 total.

When I first came to this church two years ago, all Christian Education pretty much came to a halt during the summer — no Sunday school, no small groups, no large-groups, no regular youth meetings at all. I had never heard of a church that did that before and thought, “Why in the world would you stop youth ministry programs during the summer? Don’t teenagers need Jesus just as much during the summer as they do during the school year?” My church’s response was that most people are gone during the summer and have such irregular schedules that it is very difficult to run any programs. Attendance is low and it’s difficult to get adult leaders on board. Although it made me raise an eyebrow a bit, I went along with the tradition as the newbie at the church.

Since then we’ve added weekly summer Bible studies at my house that my wife and I lead without the help of other adult leaders, so at least there’s something regular for kids throughout the season, but that’s about it except for a couple big trips (one for sr. high, one for jr. high). Still no Sunday School or traditional youth group meetings.

I actually converted to being a strong supporter of slowing down and even ending youth ministry programs during the summer for several reasons besides low attendance and irregular schedules.

1. It provides time for me to pull back to a birds-eye view and refocus on the big picture. All year long I’m staring at the ministry from so close-up that I get cross-eyed and don’t always remember the big picture of our ministry. It’s easy to get bogged down in running individual programs and loose sight of the overall direction of our ministry as a whole. When you drive at full-throttle for so long, it’s hard to notice subtle shifts in direction until you stop to widen your perspective and take a look at the map.

2. It gives me time to properly evaluate the ministry. It’s hard to work in an annual evaluation of the entire ministry when there’s no real break for doing so. It’s even harder to think objectively, pray and talk through necessary adjustments and changes when the programs just keep running and running without a pause. You don’t fix a car without first shutting it off.

3. It gives adult leaders a well-deserved break so they’re rested and energized for the fall. There’s no substitute for a team of rested and energized youth leaders! They all work so hard during the school year, they serve so sacrificially, and give so much of themselves to teens that the summer is a great time for them to just relax and recharge. They tend to stay on the youth team longer and avoid burnout when they have the summer break. And anyone who works in youth ministry knows that longevity for youth workers is essential to life-change.

4. It allows me to do a lot of vision-casting for the fall. After proper evaluations have been conducted and we have a plan for improvement to take kids deeper and wider, I have most of July and August left to cast that vision, communicate it with parents, teens and leaders. It’s a time for everyone else zoom out to a birds-eye view of the ministry, too.

5. It provides a natural transition when we re-launch in the fall. It kind of provides us with a clean slate for when normal ministry programs do start up again. We can make changes, cut things and add other things to the ministry without a lot of complaints because everything is new again. Plus, when we launch everything in the fall, there’s always much more excitement and energy. Momentum builds very quickly.

6. It provides sufficient time to hang out with kids while they’re not in school. You could say, “Kids aren’t in school during the summer, so that’s the time to rev up your youth ministry!” That may be true in your community, but here in Alexandria, Minnesota, it doesn’t really work that way. So instead I see it as a goldmine of opportunities to spend one-on-one time with kids every day. Instead of trying to keep kids busy with programs that may or may not be spiritually influential, I’d rather focus on relationship building with individuals and in ways I know will be spiritually influential.

7. It’s my time to read, self-educate, and do miscellaneous projects. The school year is so busy that I tend to put “continuing education” off to the side. Youth and adolescence changes so rapidly that it’s different almost every 6 months! What I learned about youth ministry back in Bible college years ago hardly applies to today anymore. It’s very important that I continue to read, study, learn and don’t become an obsolete youth leader. It’s also a great time to jump on those projects that otherwise would always be on back burner (like rebuilding our group’s website, organizing the office and cleaning out storage closets).

Do your youth ministry programs slow down or pause completely during the summer? We’d all love to hear why in the comments below.

[ UPDATE: To add some clarification to this post, read the follow-up of what our summer youth schedule DOES look like. ]