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.
It’s fall. Fall is busy. It’s crazy. Fall is when you put in the work. Because fall is when you’ve got events and curriculum and leader trainings, and this fall will be the season where you figure out how to finally win the war against sports. And in the midst of all that we do […]
Before we talk about youth ministry teaching tips, stick with me for a moment: Have you ever seen those annoying YouTube ads? What the ads are selling probably depends on what you’ve been searching on the Internet lately. Whenever I go on a health and fitness kick, I’ll typically start seeing ads for workout programs […]
PROBLEM OF KEEPING STUDENTS ENGAGED It’s hard keeping students engaged during a whole message, isn’t it? That’s probably part of the reason youth pastors have historically spent so much time on interactive elements and funny videos. Now don’t get me wrong. Incorporating interactive elements into a message is a good and healthy part of communicating […]
It can be difficult to know how to respond when teenagers sin. We want to hyperfocus on their behavior immediately because we love them. But perhaps Finding Nemo and the gospel can cue us to handling it a different way. “He touched the butt.” That is one of my favorite quotes from, not just Finding […]
Failure in ministry has been on my mind recently. Lately, I’ve been engrossed with the reality that in the gospel, your story matters. Like, part of what makes the gospel of Jesus Christ so beautiful and captivating is that it meets you right where you are in your story. Wounded by the absence of your […]
Like most youth workers, the season of COVID youth ministry was a weird one for me. In some ways, I found myself growing as a youth pastor as I learned new ways to innovate in an attempt to keep students connected. But in other ways, I spent that core 15-month period putting work on the […]
During the 2020 presidential election campaign, there was a new face that managed to achieve relative prominence in the world of politics almost out of nowhere. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, burst onto the scene as a (super) long shot to win the Democratic nomination. He even managed to make it onto the debate stage on […]
Keeping students’ attention during the message can be incredibly difficult. This generation is so squirrely, aren’t they? In this blog post, I’ll share something I’ve learned about keeping students’ attention. We Lean Away From The Problem One of the coolest things about growing up in the generation I grew up in has been watching counseling […]
August 9, 2021 — If you’re anything like me, you’ve been a Christian for a fairly long time. I mean…you don’t want to sound like a know-it-all…but you’ve been around the Jesus block a few times. Heck, apparently you’re so good at following Jesus, somebody decided to put you in charge of helping teenagers follow Jesus too!
