Mike Haynes is a youth ministry veteran and the creator of G Shades. A vibrant contributor to the youth ministry landscape, Mike’s passion is to help students and youth pastors alike see life through the lens of the gospel. He and his wife Anna have five kids spanning elementary, middle, and high school, and he serves as the high school pastor at Christian Fellowship Church in Ashburn, Virginia.
There are an endless supply of curriculums on the market. How do you evaluate which one is the best fit for your ministry? Check out this podcast episode from Student Ministry Conversations to learn some best practices for evaluating and utilizing youth ministry curriculum in your ministry! The entire podcast episode is fantastic, but in […]
I recently had a conversation with a teenager where I was asking them to explain a certain behavior pattern they’d been exhibiting recently. Their face went blank—almost dead-eyed—and they didn’t speak for a long time. After a painfully silent two minutes, I asked again, “What’s going on? What are you feeling that’s leading you to […]
Let’s talk for a few minutes about mentoring in youth ministry. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Brent Aiken on the Student Ministry Conversations podcast the other day (the episode releases in a few weeks). The conversation was around evaluating curriculum in the world of youth ministry. It was a really amazing […]
I’m going to be honest. I hate fundraising. It’s probably my least favorite aspect of youth ministry. But I think that’s actually why my perspective on fundraising may be helpful for you—especially if you hate fundraising too. For a long time, I thought I hated fundraising because it’s a lot of work. Fundraising events are […]
This might feel like a weird starting place for a conversation about a healthy culture of worship for youth groups, but when was the last time you went to a concert? If you’re me, it’s been a while. I just don’t value the experience enough for the financial and time investment required. But I can […]
This time of year four years ago, we were just beginning to discover that what we initially thought would be a few weeks of the world shutting down was actually going to drag on for much, much longer. None of us had ever experienced anything like COVID, and the rate of innovation on how to […]
We’ve all been there in youth ministry where a student asks a question or poses a doubt to Christianity that we’re not totally prepared to answer off the top of the dome. That’s a hard place to be because, let’s face it, none of us likes to look stumped in front of a group of […]
If you’ve been doing occupational youth ministry for longer than five minutes, you understand that we have no shot at doing this well without a team of amazing volunteers. It’s just too much. It involves too many details. It’s too many students—even for those of us with ministries that don’t have that many students! But […]
Before we jump into fostering authentic faith in teenagers, let me share why this topic is top of mind for me. My wife and I recently went from parenting three kids to parenting five. No, we didn’t have twin babies! We brought in two teenage siblings we already knew and loved from around the neighborhood. […]
If it wasn’t the new normal before, COVID ensured it had to be: Digital Youth Ministry. With technology continuing to rapidly progress and shift the world we live in, it becomes even more important that we have a lens for navigating youth ministry in the digital world. To that end, I’m not here to suggest […]
