Community-Building Ideas for Ministry with Young Teens

I am not easily swayed. It takes a lot for a book or series to make me say the following: If you want to make the most of your resource budget this year, be sure that you add the HELP Series from Saint Mary's Press to your library. Most of you know me from my work with the Center, but I am also involved in a full-time ministry to seventh- to twelfth-grade teens. I am always looking for materials that motivate my volunteer teachers to design their own programs and processes. The HELP (Heads up, Easy, Low cost, Purposeful) series does just that. Many volunteers are hesitant to design events because they believe that they don't have enough ideas. Well, with this new collection they have a brand-new pool from which to draw. For our most recent day-long junior high retreat, I loosed on the teachers the books from the series that were available: "Family," "Community Building," "Holiday and Seasonal," "Justice and Service" and "Prayer" ideas. I requested that they design a retreat using these resources and any of the other books in our youth ministry library. An hour later, they had the basic layout of the retreat, solely using ideas from the HELP series. Volunteers loved digging through the well-documented, easy-reading ideas that gave them the freedom to understand, choose and adapt the activities that would best fit our group and enhance the theme of the retreat. The HELP book series contains a broad range of activities. They are great filler material for a current curriculum or, better yet, use them as my teachers did to create your own meetings, classes and retreats. There is plenty of commentary and advice on creating prayer and community in each book. For those of you who are veterans of youth ministry, you may find that some of the materials, especially in the "Community Building" book, are standard types of activities reset especially for young teens. However, I think most volunteers will find fresh projects in this book. Even the most experienced among us will probably find some surprises as they dive into these books. In the "Prayer" book our teachers found the creative and inexpensive "God Can" prayer, which was a fine closing service. What a great use for all those empty aluminum cans we had collected after lunch at the retreat. And for my older teens I will be using the "Post Card Journals" found in the same book. The series is a fine investment.