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Levels of Ministry: Level One
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If you have done youth ministry for over a year, you can begin to evuate what is working and what is not. You will also be able to evaluate what your limitations are.
Hopefully you have prayed about and come up with a plan of attack (philosophy of ministry) which is good. Have you thought about levels of ministry? Obviously we all want to have life changing youth ministries, but how exactly can that happen unless you move from a level one ministry to a level three ministry?
Let’s start with what a level one ministry looks like using the purpose driven model. I’m going to use the term, “ORBIT” for the 5 purposes. Here’s the plan:
Overtake=Evangelism
Relate=Fellowship
Broaden=Discipleship
Indulge=Ministry
Treasure=Worship
Okay, so the plan is to cycle your students through the plan and do it over and over again, however if you are doing a level one ministry it looks something similar to this:
- Overtake - You teach students how to “pray the prayer” with the students while they are at youth group
- Relate - Holding a 3 week series on how to relate to one another
- Broaden - Sunday School Program, Bible Studies
- Indulge - Teaching Examples on how to minister
- Treasure - Lessons on worshiping God
Level one ministry are not bad things, but rather has the following limitations:
- You can learn the rules and play the game
- Limited connection
- Arms length intimacy
- Limited disclosure
- Doesn’t produce real change
The reason that level one ministry is limited is because it is based on a “truth only” model and that is usually in the form of teaching via lessons.
You find yourself in a level one ministry when you feel like you just don’t have enough time with the students. Your contribution to youth ministry is basically giving a lesson. You have a desire to get to know the students, but realize that you don’t know the students!
Level one ministry is a great place to start, but it’s got to move to level 2 and eventually a level 3 ministry which will be discussed in other posts.
- click the smilee to see why it’s there!
8 Comments on this post
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Terry K. Moore said:
Yeah $5~!
Interesting post though. I’ve been posting about similar stuff recently.
February 18th, 2008 at 5:26 am -
Dj said:
I’m really anticipating the other upcoming additions to this series! Looking forward to it!
February 18th, 2008 at 8:32 am -
mike said:
being the simplest level it is the one that is the fastest to do and can become easy to stay at. Its a very surface level type of ministry.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am -
Brian Kirk said:
I think it’s a temptation at any stage or level of experience in youth ministry to get stuck in the teaching model and forget the importance of the relational model. This is probably particularly true for ministers who do youth work as only a portion of their ministry responsibilities. In some programs I’ve worked on, the teaching has been left to me and the relational ministry has been primarily the job of the adult volunteers. Ultimately, this doesn’t work because in order to teach and mentor youth, you have to know them!
February 18th, 2008 at 6:52 pm -
Mike said:
“…in order to teach and mentor youth, you have to know them!” This is so true. But if our students (the ones we do know) are growing in their faith, they’re pretty likely to be bringing students we don’t know around. I’m not sure exactly how you’re defining your level 1/2/3 ministry, but maybe this juxtaposition of known students and unknown students indicates that we need to be functioning on all 3 levels simultaneously…?
February 19th, 2008 at 5:16 pm -
Steve Blanchard said:
The winner is Mike of theoquest.blogspot.com! Mike will receive $5.00 sent to his paypal account.
Congrats Mike!
February 24th, 2008 at 8:14 am -
antjuan said:
I think this is the level that I find to be the frustrating one, due to the surface level of communication you get from students. But I’m understanding that things take time and that if you continue pushing at something long enough, it will break.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
[...] I love reading, listening, and pondering the philosophy of youth ministry. In an earlier post, I wrote about a level one ministry. [...]