Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Youth Pastors Anonymous...The Beginning

Last year, several youth pastors in the the Nashville, TN area decided it would be helpful to get together and share about all things youth ministry.

From there, several more have joined in, and now we meet monthly for a few hours and discuss topics related to youth ministry.  We have found that when you get a bunch of youth ministers in the same room with no guidance, not much productive happens, not that we feel we have to get things done, but it is nice to at least have something guiding us.  So each time we meet, we discuss a different topic that one or several of our group want to have discussed.

We had a great first gathering last week!  Amazing stories shared about how we all ended up finding our calling in Youth Ministry!  The Youth Pastors Anonymous came about out of a joke of it feeling like an AA meeting.  "Hi I am Chris and....I am a Youth Pastor," "HI CHRIS"  but it is fun and somewhat true so we'll go with it.

Something amazing happens when youth pastors gather together and learn they are not alone in this crazy, awesome, draining, filling, and everything else calling.

Remember each time we will have a topic of sorts to guide our gathering, if you have ideas on what some of these should be let me know and I will add it to the list, it could be anything relating to youth ministry.

For our October Meeting our topic to ponder and come ready to discuss is "Spiritual Self Care".
We all know that the church is amazing place, but for those in ministry often our own spiritual care is put aside.  Come with your struggles with this and ideas and ways you have found to help work against this. If you have any resources that help you bring those to for show and tell.  For each of us, this will look different in our own journey, but seeing other ideas always helps.  If you feel that you are drained but have no ideas, then you should definitely come!

We meet the first Wednesday of every month.  If you would like more information please email Chris Cummings at Chris@foresthillsumc.org.

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