LifeLine: Jonny G: Meet Volunteers Where They Are

Each week, we ask our student ministry small group leaders to accomplish 4 goals in their small group time

1. Connect as a group: give each student the chance to share a little about their week with the rest of the group.

2. Put handles on the teaching: give students the opportunity to dialogue about the teaching, look in God's Word together, and put "handles" on it, so they can carry away a specific idea of how this applies to their lives, and ultimately understand the concept in a deeper way.

3. Create an environment where students feel safe asking questions

4. Pray: model prayer as a faith practice and create a community where students learn to pray for one another throughout the week.

While we don't use a specific curriculum, we do...

1. Devote several leader training sessions to the basics of leading a student small group.

2. Connect each leader with a coach who cares for them, helps them grow as a leader, and occasionally sits in on their group time to evaluate and encourage them.

3. Offer them resources/further training/specific ideas to improve their small group time.

One of the ways we resource leaders is by sending them a lesson summary each week. This consists of a basic outline of the teaching, key scripture, and potential questions for small group time. From there, we leave it up to the leader to mold their small group time into a meaningful experience.

One of our goals is to meet volunteers where they are, in the midst of their busy lives. In attempt to make lesson summaries easily accessible and more memorable, we began sending our volunteers short video summaries each week.

A dual purpose:

We have also been sending these videos to our students' parents...

1. to continue to build relationship with parents

2. to keep parents informed on what we are teaching

3. to facilitate further conversation in the home about spiritual things.

Here is an example of this week's summary.