If Only There Was a Manual on Youth Ministry

 

Have you ever had a student come to with a problem in school?  What about a family conflict?  How about gender identity?  Or even when they were contemplating suicide?  Some of those are obviously easier to deal with than others.  I have had a student that we knew had suicidal thoughts.  They even had a time and a place and a method.  We had to do something really hard.  We had to call their parents to have them committed or we were going to.

These subjects and more can be tough to deal with if you never have had to deal with them before.  They are tough to deal with even if you have dealt with them before.  Group has a little handbook called Group's Emergency Response Handbook for Youth Ministry.  In it, they cover twelve subjects that are not foreign to teenagers.  It is a handy little book I have passed out to my youth leaders in case they encounter a teenager that needs advice.  It gives them a little support from a tool on what to say, what not to say, where to go in the Bible for help, what to do as a youth group and what to do as a youth leader.  I even passed it out to my teens one year, because what I was noticing is the teens knew way before we did as youth leaders what was going on in the other teens' lives.  I wanted to give them a tool to help them know what to do when their friend was going through a difficult time.

More importantly, I wanted them to know when to refer to an adult or to a professional.  Teens shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of what to do when a fellow teenager is contemplating suicide.  But they do and they were.  They are on the front lines of youth ministry because they talk to their friends on a daily basis.  They know when someone is struggling before we do as adults.  This gave us quicker response times to dealing with some really tough issues.  Anyway, I just wanted to pass along a great tool from one youth leader to another.  God bless you in your ministry to youth!