What Jr. Higher’s NEED to hear

In a recent conversation with Kurt Johnston who is the Jr. High pastor at Saddleback I asked him a question that I’ve been thinking about recently.   How can I continue to develop and grow in my teaching gifts when I am teaching Jr. High students weekly who sometimes can’t cognitively grasp complex and abstract ideas?

Through his years of experience he said that this is a huge issue with many Jr. High ministries are facing today.  Youth pastors get bored teaching fundamental basic theology and they see that their leaders might be bored so they begin to teach in a way that isn’t relevant to the audience they have.   It isn’t what you WANT to teach but it’s what the Jr. Higher’s NEED to hear.

There are a few things i’ve thought about over my 8 years of full time youth ministry that I’ve found helpful to guide and direct what we teach our Jr. High youth.

1. Plan – Plan – Plan
This is an area that I struggled with in my beginning years of youth ministry.  I’m a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type guy!  In my first full time church ministry experience I would write and plan the week of most things we would do.  Because of this I lacked the ability to objectively stand back and think about a teaching plan.   I would teach whatever I was learning which was obviously way beyond the ability of Jr. High students to comprehend.    I learned the most effective way to communicate what Jr. High students need to hear is to plan out my teaching plan for the whole year at the beginning of the school year.   I map out where I feel our group is spiritually and what mix of theological basics and everyday life stuff we needed to teach on.   This year I have my 4^th group of Jr. High students which means I’ve rotated through an entire generation of Jr. Higher’s.   After some prayer at the beginning of the year I felt that I needed to teach this year on very basic theological stuff before we could touch felt need issues.
In short – plan out your teaching for the year, sketch out your ideas and topics and during the year when you see some great video clips or stories that fit you can save those.
Study your audience

2.You must be a student of the generation you lead and teach.  You have to learn what makes Jr. High students tick and how they learn at this stage of life.  You must be a student of the culture in which your students live.  Without understanding the context you risk being ineffective as a communicator and leader. They are changing day by day and the culture they find themselves in is changing minute by minute.  In order to be effective you must understand them cognitively. This is basic stuff for any leader but especially when you pastor the Jr. High years.

3. Join a small group
To be honest I’ve been off and on with this idea but the main point here is you need people around you who are your own age that you can wrestle with some of your ideas with.  You need people around you who can push you spiritually and give you an outlet to talk through some of the things you’ve been thinking.   I have a number of people im surrounded with that give me this outlet.

4.  Vision/Passion – the more clear your vision and mission is to reach Jr. Higher’s for Christ the easier it will be to communicate God’s truth to them.   If you lose this vision and passion your teaching will suffer and so will the spiritual development of the students in your ministry.

I’m almost certain that a youth pastor who can communicate clearly and succinctly with Jr. High students can communicate well in almost any setting.