The Need for youth Ministry

Here’s an excerpt of a video I’m making about the need for youth ministry training in Mexico City.

If you don’t speak Spanish, make sure you have the little CC clicked in the bottom right hand corner of the video.

Practical Youth Ministry

My favorite assignments that I give to my students are the ones where they have to go out and have real life interaction with young people. I feel that these experiences give them more learning opportunities than when they just create something on paper.

One of my all-time favorite assignment of all of the curriculum that we teach as Youth Ministry International is the one where the students break into small groups and have to study a sub-culture. They are basically doing ethnographic research to identify the culture to use it the culture, to reach the culture.

This past bimester I was teaching Youth Culture, and my students have had to go out and do cultural research. One of the groups was studying skaters in Mexico City (one of my all time favorite sub-cultures that brings me back to my days as youth pastor at North Dunedin Baptist Church).

As they were doing their research, my students met a skateboarding young man from Honduras. They asked him, “What could the church do for you?” He responded, “Give me food to eat and help me get off of drugs.”

This is youth ministry. There are thousands of young people just like this guy who need someone to come alongside him and help him practically and spiritually.

The other day in class, they were talking about bringing him a blanket and helping him more. I pray that this is one Seminary assignment that they continue following through with.

An Interview with Some of Our Master’s Students

In January 2014, Youth Ministry International started an initiative to train professors for youth ministry in Mexico. The Master’s in Youth Ministry has 10 students. After one year of classes, we asked three of them to talk about how the program has helped their youth ministry at their local church.

What really makes me most excited about this video is seeing how they have come together as a team to really minister to the young people of their church and not just plan activities for them.

The plan for the Master’s program is to train those who can train others. Yuri already taught a youth ministry workshop at a National Youth Conference that I was invited to but couldn’t attend because of our YMI Summit in Athens.

Our strategy for Master’s programs is taken from the idea of 2 Timothy 2:2, which says, “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

We want to see young men and women trained to be able to train others in the ministry. I think we’re off to a great start with these three.

Beginning of the 10th Year of Youth Ministry Training

The Center for Youth Ministry at the Mexican Baptist Theological Seminary just started its 10th year of training youth workers. That’s right. Last week, Janell and I celebrated our 11th year of living in Mexico, and Randy Smith, the President of Youth Ministry International, was here to help us begin the new year at the Seminary.

Randy came to speak at the convocation service at the Seminary and stayed to co-teach a youth ministry class at the Seminary. It was a good class, and we are excited about what this year holds for us as a family and for the youth ministry program here in Mexico. We have three new students studying youth ministry at the Seminary, and they are really good guys. I’ll post a picture of them soon. The three new students matches the size of our largest group of new students. That may not sound like a lot, but in a culture where youth ministry is not common, it is a great new group. They also make up 25% of the incoming freshmen, so the number is good.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 10th year of classes at this institution. That means I have been teaching youth ministry for a decade. We have seen some advances, and I believe that youth ministry is growing faster than ever in Latin America.

Maybe sometime this year we will be able to officially celebrate the 10 years of training we have been doing, inviting all of the alumni back to celebrate with us would be fun.

Semi Formal Youth Ministry Training in Mexico

We have been training youth workers in Mexico for more than 10 years, and the Bachelor’s degree program has been met with a lot of excitement but at the same time difficulty because of the fact that it is a full time program that requires studies from 7 AM until 3 PM ever weekday (except Monday).


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Training Trainers to Train Trainers

Last January we started a Master’s in Youth Ministry degree program at the Seminary here. We had two visiting professors come and teach for two weeks. Last week, we had the next two classes in the series, and it went great.

The visiting professor is a pastor from Cuba that graduated from the MA there a few years ago. He is now studying a Doctorate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. The goal of Youth Ministry International is to train trainers, and this is exactly the kind of ministry multiplication we are constantly seeking to develop as an organization.

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