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.
When college students come back, we get the scary privilege of checking in with them as youth pastors. If you haven’t had this experience yet, you will. Sometimes we discover that our former students have fallen off a bit faith wise as they’ve begun their official transition toward adulthood. Disillusionment. Disengagement. Dissection. Deconstruction. Specifically, faith […]
If you’re reading this blog post the day it comes out, and your Christmas tree is already up in your living room, I want you to know that you are/live with an insane person. It’s way too early! But in the same breath, thank goodness we’re knocking on the door of the Christmas season, because […]
Up until recently, I had worked with the same person side-by-side in full time youth ministry for the past five years. She and I developed a vision for our youth ministry, a framework, and a culture. We decided together what aspects of youth ministry we were going to pay most attention to, and what aspects […]
This post revolves around the mantra “no more excuses” and was originally shared during the COVID era. I caught COVID. I finally caught it on July 29, 2022, and in true youth pastor fashion, I got it at summer camp. As you know, COVID-19’s effect on people or families ranges from medically devastating to mildly […]
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 […]
