We have attached our eBook, The Personal Life of the Youth Pastor, with our Facebook page. I was noticing that no one was actually downloading it, so I pulled the resource. It’s has been downloaded over 500 times, and has been a resource for youth workers all over the world. I wanted to dust it off and put it in a place where people will actually use it and see it.
6 years ago I was asked to present in a workshop format for a bunch of students working on their Master’s of Christian Studies. It is always a privilege to share the struggles and lessons I have learned in the past few years. It always excites me to teach a new group of up and coming youth workers because I realize how capable and amazing the younger youth workers coming up are!
My friend asked me to present on The Personal Life of the Youth Pastor. It started to make me think about how crazy a life of a youth worker is. Sometimes, if we honest our lives can be pretty unbalanced.
The ebook will cover material from the session I taught. It breaks down the personal life of a youth pastor into 3 different categories.
Here are those categories with a few highlights:
Spiritual Life. Are you too busy to spend time with God? We can come up with every excuse in the book. It’s really simple, you need to spend time daily connecting with God. It’s important to understand the seasons of ministry, and to comprehend when you are busy with the pressures of ministry that you neglect your time with God. You can’t lead your church when you are running on empty. We want the teenagers we work with to spend time with God, and we are the ones who are too busy doing ministry to spend time with God. Our spiritual life matters.
Emotional Life. Are you running on empty? Ministry is a never ending job. The tasks will keep on piling up. Think about the next youth even you need to plan, or the sermon you need to preach, or the people you need to meet up with. Youth pastors need to build into their schedules times of rest.
Physical Life. Why are youth pastors so fat? This was a question a friend asked a few years ago. It caught me off guard. My friend said this blunt statement as a way to protect me, but it was something that stuck with me over the past few years. That isn’t a great question, but a great question is why aren’t we as youth workers careful with the way we care for our own bodies?
