A New Kind of Youth Ministry Guiding Students Into Spiritual Formation for the Mission of God

Story Training…

Yesterday I spent the morning over at Youthfront South (our HS camp) training our college staff (some of them pictured below) in the art of storytelling and facilitating conversations. Much of what I have come to understand about the art of storytelling has come from Mike and Caesar over at Echo The Story.

Originally we had Mike Novelli coming in to do the training but schedules got complicated as they tend to do and so we weren't able to have him. I enjoyed doing the training but it would have been great to have Mike with us.

At Youthfront we are experimenting with and implementing the concepts that I am writing about in my upcoming book, Story, Signs and Sacred Rhythms at camp this year (and for years to come we hope). Actually, we are bringing the concepts into all that we are doing in our training of youth workers, at our ministry site in Mexico and in all of our other local ministry expressions here in Kansas City.

The book has been extremely fun to work on. I am nearly finished with it. The manuscript is due later in the summer so I am thinking about it and writing a bit almost every hour of the day.

The basic idea of the book is to resource those of us (paid youth workers, volunteers, teachers, coaches, parents, etc.) who are consistently creating environments of spiritual transformation with 1) an understanding of what constitutes healthy, valuable environments, 2) a framework or approach to spiritually guiding students within the environments that we create (using a process that begins with helping students engage with God’s story and ultimately ends with helping students develop behaviors and expressions that live out God’s intended ways) and 3) practical tools to help us “environmentalists” implement the proposed approach.

I look forward to interacting with you on the ideas and concepts in the book. I will be doing a seminar at each of the YS conventions this coming fall around many of the ideas in the book so maybe we can connect there to chat about it too…

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