Today I was reading Read Ephesians 4:12.

11 So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up

“Equipping” is the translation of a Greek word used in New Testament times for mending nets, setting a bone, and realizing a purpose. It means to “put right”.

As girls ministers, we have all sorts of conversations with girls and leaders. Sometimes you walk away from a conversation encouraging a girl to pursue God or to be all that God is calling her to be. Sometimes you get to help her with some faith questions. (It’s always fun when they ask about “the nephilim” in Genesis 6.)  Then there are the times when you may have to confront an area of immaturity.  These are not easy conversations to have.  I had to have a couple of those conversations this week.  And I was reminded today that I am called to those conversations too.  I’m called to equip as if I were a doctor and I saw a broken bone.  I would not ignore it.  I would not just give pain medicine. I would need to align the bones and set it in a cast so that it mends and grows stronger.  Do not be afraid of those conversations where a student may need you to speak into their life regarding various immaturities. And just like a doctor would be careful with the broken bone, we too must take special care with these students we are entering into equipping conversations with.

A long time ago, I had a group of girls that determined whenever I would say “Can we talk for a second”, that this meant they were getting ready to be disciplined.   I realized it was true and something they were doing may have triggered my “equipping” mode and I didn’t set up the conversation for maximum influence.  There are some things we can do to prepare for a healthy conversation with a student, just like a doctor would prepare for surgery.

1. Set up a time to talk with the girl for a later time. Sometime in the heat of the moment, we may see something that needs to be addressed and we respond right there and then. However, if we’re honest, equipping the student at that moment may not be our initial motivation and oftentimes we miss out on a unique opportunity to truly set up the optimum time to talk with that student.

2. Pray through what it is that you are getting ready to share with the student.

3. Remove the personal hurt feelings out of the conversation. You may have been hurt by the student, but remember they are a teenager. Their prefrontal cortex won’t be fully wired until they are 25. As you address the situation, your feelings expressing hurt may bring guilt and shame on a student that will erase any type of equipping. This is a delicate area which only highlights your need to listen to the Holy Spirit’s leading of what to say and what not to say.

4. Look for ways to build the student up. Your truthful encouraging words can be just like a cast in surrounding the “wound” and supporting the healing.  Remember to speak His truth into the situation.

5. Write out a basic framework of where you are wanting to go with the equipping time. Example:

Heather, I’ve been observing this sarcasm in you during our student leader meetings.  You are truly a hilarious person, but I wanted to talk with you about what is happening around you with our group when you begin being sarcastic during our meetings.

—share some examples of how unity has been affected.

—ask what she thinks sarcasm is intended to do? Share with her what scripture says about sarcasm.

—talk about ways to turn the sarcasm into encouragement.

—What would happen if her words were used to build people up and not tear them down?

—Share how you have seen God using her, and how working together on this area could really make a difference in the unity of our student ministry.

—Make a plan to eliminate sarcasm from the wednesday night meeting.  PRAY.

Here are some areas where you may see ways to “equip” or “set right” or “mend” or “help realize a purpose”:

A student appears to have an agenda for wanting to be involved in a leadership component.

A student flakes out on their responsibilities or commitments with the student ministry.

A girl treats her church family one way, and completely disrespects her biological family.

A student hasn’t seen the way they can use their gifts to connect with service or worship.

What are some other ways you have seen reason to step in and equip?

How does this added understanding of the word “equip” help you in your role as a volunteer, mom, or girls minister?

When He prompts your heart for a bone-setting, net-mending, or purpose realizing conversation, know that He is not leaving you alone in that talk.  After-all, He goes by the name “Immanuel” not just at Christmas time.  “God with us”, is with us 365 days a year.

Facebook has been a helpful tool in communicating with family, friends, students, and parents. Prior to facebook, it was extremely difficult to capture photos from participants of retreats or mission trips. In fact, often you would need to have a photo event to receive copies. You wouldn’t get your photos until days, weeks, months after the event hype had passed. There was documentation lost forever because you didn’t bring your camera to an event. Now however, within minutes or hours, photos from your events are tagged on facebook. Now there are pro’s and con’s to this instant documentation, but for today’s post I want to focus on the pro’s of having all these photos instantly categorized and made available. But what happens if Mark Zuckerburg decides for some reason to commit worldwide social network suicide for everyone? What happens if someone figures out a way to break facebook and all that info is lost? Well I’m not saying that will happen but I do not put trust in putting all my digital content in one basket. That’s where SocialSafe comes in.

I paid $8 for the premium service but you can access this for free.  SocialSafe has only been with me for a day but so far, it’s a great option to make sure I have my photos (both uploaded and tagged) , friends (it only copies their facebook profile pic and their name), and wall posts secure in a desktop digital journal should something ever happen to my facebook account.

Check it out and see if that something you could use as well.

One of the  things I have most enjoyed using in 2010 was this real-time group communications tool via my phone called GROUPME.  It’s free and it has been amazing with many different uses.  Our student ministry staff no longer uses text messaging as our means of communicating with each other because this has been so helpful.  We utilize this so that instantly we all receive the message and in real time we can all view each person’s response.  The downside with text messaging is even if your phone can send a message to multiple recipients, the recipients don’t know who else received the message and they can only respond back to you.  With GROUPME, this is not the case. It’s like a little text conversation for a group. It has brought our team even closer as we can celebrate with each other, joke with each other, grieve with each other over bad news, pray with each other, and instantly alert each other so that no one is left out of important information.  We have even used this tool with our leaders for events.  For example, I’ve set up a groupme text group for a pre-teen retreat and our fall retreat.  I’ve entered in all of the volunteers numbers and instantly we have communication in text that links us all together even when we are spread out across a campus.  It is a time saver when we are doing cabin checks or passing out the student meds or getting bible study supplies to students.  It is really handy because someone in bible study group can quickly use groupme to alert us all that a student has yet to show up. We were quickly able to identify that a cabin had overslept and missed their wake-up call instead of having to run all over campus trying to see where the group was.

You can then terminate the group at the end of retreat so that volunteers don’t get annoyed with the ongoing dialogue.  The only downside is that there are only 25 people allowed to a groupme number.  I had to set up 2 groups for our fall retreat.  They also have a feature if you use the GROUPME iphone app to make a conference call and get everyone on the line.  And now you can upload images that all the group can see and respond to.  Very cool.  So how do you get started?  Just go to groupme.com and you’re ready to start.  But before you do, check out some ways we’re using groupme.

Here are some ways I think you could utilize GROUPME in your ministry to girls:

-Use GROUPME with the girls you are discipling.  Just make sure you create some digital boundaries to mute the conversation after a certain hour.  You might also want to bring in another adult onto the GROUPME just for accountability.

-Use GROUPME for a volunteer checkin with your smallgroups and for announcements for the evening or Sunday AM.

-Use GROUPME for your student staff like we have been doing.

What are some other ways you could utilize GROUPME? Share below.

One of the things that I have really enjoyed over the years is using a lead team for our girls event. I briefly mentioned it in a previous post about the prayer experience in a bag. I’ve recruited girls to serve on the lead team differently over the years.  Now granted, sometimes there are groups that initially I wondered if we would ever accomplish what we were setting out to do.  Sometimes I have thought that this whole lead team thing is for the birds.  But I keep coming back to the end of the event and the teamwork that comes from working with other volunteers and these wonderful teen girls. So today I’m giving you some of the tips I use for putting together a lead team.

In the past, before we had a Student Lead team that served on Sunday mornings, I would ask Sunday school teachers and lifegroup leaders to submit names of girls they felt should serve on the Snowball lead team.  This way, it helped keep me from appearing like I was “picking” favorites.  Now we have a snowball application that we put online.  We use wufoo forms and post it on a posterous site.  Then we release the link to the Student Lead team and tell them they have a deadline to get their application submitted. Once it’s submitted, then they will be notified that they are on the team if they meet the necessary requirements.

I have found that it’s best to have a team of 10-12th grade girls.  This year, we’re utilizing girls who have already shown a level of commitment by serving every sunday morning as a Student Peer Group table leader.  That means that the girls who apply for Snowball lead team this year are weekly involved with God’s word and help to lead their peers to dig into His word on a weekly basis.   As we gear up for our Snowball lead team planning event, we’ll divide up the team into 3 teams:  Logistics,  Worship, and Fellowship    Each group will be responsible for working on a small group lesson as well.

We’ve done the brainstorming event differently as well. Sometimes we’ve spent the night in a hotel brainstorming and fellowshipping from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning.  Other times we’ve just taken a Sunday afternoon to brainstorm. It sometimes seems like it would be easier to just do it yourself, but I guarantee that in the end, it will be extremely rewarding to everyone involved if you do a little more work on the front end to release the details to teams of students.  You will be amazed at what God does in and through those teams of girls.  What have you seen work when you do a lead team?

I stumbled across a jewel of a resource in my office this week that I absolutely love and wish was re-published.  It’s called:

Spiritual Journey Notebook.  (wow crazy creative title)  It’s truly a great resource though for discipleship and has some very helpful tools called Theographs, and charts, and —GOSH I love this journal!  (I hear the chants of my elementary friends saying, “Well why don’t you marry it?!) Well I’ve gushed about it enough, but it is a tool that can help in your very important covenant with your Saviour.  It can be legalistic if you allow it to become a checklist instead of a tool, but the theographs are a great guide for discipleship.  If you can find one…get it!

It was written by Milt Hughes.  Here is the information you can use to look for it on the internet.

But the main reason I am passing this along to you is because of the theograph that discusses the level of responses to Scripture.

It’s a great reminder of why we need to journey with scripture continually so that we literally  are moved into action and not just stopping at receiving.

1. HEAR: Romans 10:17  Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.

2. READ:  Luke 4:16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read,

3. STUDY: Acts 17:11 Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

4. MEMORIZE: Psalm 119:11,13 I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.   With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.

5. MEDITATE: Psalm 119:148 My eyes stay open through the watches of the night,
that I may meditate on your promises.

6. DO: James 1:22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

I love that each response is more of a taste of God’s word than the response before.  I love that we see that once you start sampling God’s word, you can’t stop yourself from getting more.

I think if we looked at this more and stopped long enough to get a bite of God’s word, we would find ourselves truly longing to saturate our lives with it.  Surely if more of our students and families followed this, we’d have different stats than Barna’s book: Index of leading Spiritual indicators which says—34% of U.S. adults claim to open the bible once a week outside of church.  7.5% claim to read it daily.