Customer Reviews

What I Wish My Youth Leader Knew about Youth Ministry: A National Survey

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Mike Nappa's book is insightful, comprehensive, and challenging to traditional models of youth ministry. It's a must read for youth leaders and pastors who want to increase the effectiveness of their ministries! This book deals with everything from games to worship to small groups to volunteers and more. Mike lets us know how teens feel about all of these areas of our ministries, what they really don't like, and what they wouldn't want us to change in a million years. How did he find out? He asked them. This book doesn't try to change the message we present, instead it challenges the methods we use to present the message.

This book is written in easy to understand language, and offers good advice for the new or veteran youth leader. It would be excellent material for youth pastors as well as their staff leaders, whether paid or volunteer.

This book contains countless statistics about what teenagers really think about the youth ministries in their churches. Mike doesn't just give you some facts and figures, he tells you what that means for your ministry and drops in some ideas on how to make a teen-friendly ministry.

I really enjoyed reading the youth quotes along the edges of the page and the "Personal Reflections" question section at the end of each chapter.

Reading this book is like picking the brains of your teenagers for what they REALLY think. Just because they're nodding doesn't mean they're impacted by your sermon...ever seen a teenager with a caffine high?

The numbers and percentages are organized by age and gender, instead of grouping all your grade levels together. There's a big difference between seventh graders and tenth graders who want to spend more time in worship. The survey also included youth leaders, and this book compares the two. For example, 75% of youth leaders think kids want mostly praise songs during worship time, but only 49% of the kids want to sing primarily praise.

This is a book I would love for all the youth ministers I know to read.

Now if we could only get one on adult's opinions of "big church"...