The other day I was catching up with ministry resources people had posted at PlugRug.com and came across this great one from Chris Bowditch, the youth minister at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Australia. He posted a lesson called, “Just Going Out? Issues of Dating,” where he tackles topics like:

• Purity
• True love
• Who to go out with
• How to behave physically, socially, and spiritually
• Establishing accountability in your dating relationships
• And more

Of course, you’ll want to tailor the lesson to the values and experiences you hold from scripture, but it still makes for a great skeleton of what to talk with your teenagers about and a springboard for starting those conversations.

Just Going Out? Issues of Dating [ via PlugRug ]

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Right on the heels of yesterday’s post on, “Ideas for using txt messaging in youth ministry,” comes a great FREE resource.

North Park University and the people in the Department of Christian Formation in the Evangelical Covenant denomination have partnered to bring you FREE txt devotions you can send to your youth group kids every day using a service like Txtsignal.com.

Right now there are 3 months available, each addressing a different topic:

• Risk
• Loving God
• Loving Others

Each devotional includes a scripture reference and a couple reflection questions. For example:

Luke 7:36-50 What prompted this woman’s extravagant actions? Has God’s forgiveness caused you to love him extravagantly? How? If not, what’s holding you back?

These txt devotions are available for download from the Evangelical Covenant’s website:

3 months of free txt devotions to send to your teens

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Russell Martin is the worship director at my father-in-law’s church and has a heart for resourcing worship leaders online in ways similar to what I do here for youth workers. Although he spends thousands of dollars to record albums, he loves to just give his music away, a model unlike any other recording artist I know of.

From time to time he rips one of his tracks to mp3 and gives it away on his blog along with a lyric and chord chart so you can learn new worship songs and easily use them with your church or youth group. Great idea! People tend to go on autopilot and ignore the words they sing lyrics they’re very familiar with, so introducing new music on a regular basis is a great way to keep the worship fresh and meaningful.

Last week he did it again. Use the link below to visit his site and get the download completely free.

Free worship song mp3 download and chord chart

Also check out the song he gave away earlier this year. He plans to start doing this on a regular basis, so subscribe to his blog while you’re there to keep up with all the new music giveaways.

Hear more of his music for free on his Facebook Page or at Indieheaven.com. If you like one of his other songs and want the chord chart for it, email him and he’ll gladly send it your way.

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

I really hope I’m not violating someone’s copyrighted material here, but I honestly cannot figure out where I got these documents from nor can I find any sort of license or author that might go along with them, so I’m going to assume they’re open source. I found them sitting on my computer from January 2005. Who knows how they got there.

As we gear up for the fall, some of us may have college students returning to our churches who want to do internships in our youth ministries. This packet includes 4 documents to help you plan an excellent and meaningful internship both for the intern and for your ministry. The documents are:

• Developing an intern job description
• Intern reference letter
• Intern self-evaluation form
• Intern’s supervisor evaluation

Obviously your ministry may not require all the formality found in these documents, but the job description form includes a lot of great questions you should think through before bringing on a new intern. At the very least, as you would with any adult volunteer, make sure you’re comfortable with the intern’s spiritual and emotional maturity before putting them in a position of a role model for the teenagers.

Download the Youth Ministry Internship Packet

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Youth Specialties has a free Bible lesson based on Pixar’s latest movie, Wall-E. I haven’t used it myself, but it looks like it could spark some good small group discussions. You could use it now or save it to use later once Wall-E comes out on DVD.

Wall-E Bible lesson by Youth Specialties

(Thanks to Justin Ross for the tip via Twitter.)

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Kevin Twombly, youth pastor at Grace Capital Church in Pembroke, NH, contributes today’s Freebie Friday. It’s his youth ministry’s volunteer application packet and info packet. He says, “Seeing how others handle communicating the needs they have for volunteers has been helpful to me to solidify our approach. Here is our info pack as well as the application that we use for potential volunteers.”

The packet that I use is very similar to Kevin’s. I made it available about a year ago for Freebie Friday #36. Between the two of them, you should be able to make a pretty solid screening process and introduction process for adults to enter your youth ministry.

Impact Info Packet
Impact Volunteer Application

Be sure to stop by Kevin’s blog and say thanks!

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Last year one of my church’s high school small groups went through Andy Braner’s book, Love This!: Learning to Make It a Way of Life, Not Just a Word. At their request, I wrote a small group curriculum to go along with each chapter in the book to help guide their discussions. With Andy’s permission, I’m now sharing it freely with you!

The book is about loving people who we might typically have a hard time loving: our enemies, homeless, other races, etc., and how we should and can love them as our neighbor, as Christ commanded and exemplified. It’s a pretty convicting book. Our teenagers took a lot from it.

I wrote this small group curriculum for Love This! assuming each student had a copy of the book. It might possibly work if only the leader has a copy, but it’s best if you pick up a copy for each teenager to read during the week. Grab it here on Amazon.

You’ll notice that I didn’t write anything for the last couple chapters in the book. That’s because our high school small group went through those chapters on their own without anything from me. The first 12 chapters are covered in this curriculum, though.

Download “Love This Small Group Curriculum”

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Almost a year ago Steve Blanchard of YouthMinistryIdeas.net posted a free Bible lesson he wrote called Faith Factor. He says, “Although I’m not even sure they have Fear Factor showing, for quite awhile it was very popular on TV. I wasn’t quite handsome enough to make it on the show, but I did come up with a lesson using Faith Factor. Download it for free from his website.

Faith Factor youth bible lesson

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Sorry this didn’t post last Friday! I’m out of the country on a missions trip with the youth group and it was supposed to post automatically for you all. Got into an Internet cafe here and found out it didn’t. Doh! Sorry guys. Here’s last week’s Freebie Friday. (Follow our missions trip experience here for updates and pictures if you want.)

Lifeway is offering a resource for you to offer parents called Living With Teenagers. It’s a magazine you’d normally have to pay to subscribe and distribute, but you can give them this issue for free. Get it here:

FREE copy of Living With Teens from Lifeway

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

Some ministries introduce new youth leaders at the beginning of every summer and at the beginning of every school year. Whenever I introduce them to the group, I like to play a little “get to know you” game with the leaders in front of all the teens. Give your new leaders (and even your old ones) a copy of this survey to fill out and return to you. Then, in front of the group, have all the leaders stand up front with you while you read various statements about each one. Let the students guess who it applies to. For example, “This leader’s favorite song is America the Beautiful.” Answers can be serious or funny. It’s a fun way to introduce leaders and help identify some common ground for the leaders and students to talk about later.

Download “Leader Introductions” survey

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

“Open Mic” Skypecast today

As usual, the Life In Student Ministry Skypecast is today at 1:00 PM central time. It’ll again be an “open mic” time for you to discuss whatever is on your heart and mind concerning youth ministry. We’ll kick it off with a discussion on our dreams for youth ministry and possibly ideas for how we get parents involved in the spiritual lives of their kids. I’ll see you there! More Skypecast info here.