Harvest Students

Youth ministry is more than fun events, silly games, and bonfires.

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Harvest’s Wednesday night youth ministry for 7th-12th grade students, is packed with great content and relationships to help our teens develop a strong foundation on Jesus.

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If you aren’t familiar with youth ministry at Harvest, here are five things you should know.

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1. We don’t do it alone. Our youth pastor has a big role, but he doesn’t do it alone. We rely heavily on volunteers to serve as group leaders and fill a variety of other roles. This focus of building up more leaders not only frees up our youth pastor to lead the ministry at a higher level, but we’ve found that building up volunteer leaders helps the students feel more loved and cared for.
    

2. We build relationships. Relationships are vital to a thriving youth ministry. Youth leaders take time to get to know their students and even connect with them outside of church by attending sporting events and showing an interest in their families and activities.
   
   Through these relationships, our youth leaders focus on the three M's: model, meddle, and motivate.
   
   Model: show them how to live like Jesus
   Meddle: ask questions to learn, listen, and care
   Motivate: encourage them to be greater and do more
    

3. We lead students to lead. We know our student ministry is effective if our students are leading themselves and others. Do they read their Bible on their own? Invite people to church? Do they serve in the church during the weekend? If students are leading themselves and others, they’re growing in their faith with Jesus.
    

4. We want students to have FOMO. Have you ever went to an event or watch a TV show because you knew others would be talking about it and you didn’t want to miss out? That’s FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out, and it’s very real. At Harvest, there’s a lot of variety in student messages—in length, in topics, and in style—and it’s all designed to keep kids guessing, interested, and coming back. We’re ratcheting up the relevance, quality, and relational elements of the messages because we want young people to want to see each new week.
    

5. We don’t shy away from hard topics. In our curriculum we cover some heavy topics because that’s real life for students.