Tag Archives: Girls Ministry

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Helping Girls Experience Prayer

One of the opportunities you have as a girls minister is helping girls and leaders develop their prayer times with Jesus whether corporately or personally.

One of the things I loved about being a girls minister was offering these unique prayer experiences that taught girls how to pray with scripture in different postures, groups, and environments.

And in doing so, I have loved watching girls create these unique experiences for and with their peers. There of course are guard rails that I would put in place. Here are two that are regular guard rails:

  1. Prayer Times have us anchored in His Word first. Whatever we are doing, we use His Word to help direct our praise, our thanksgiving, our petitions, our confession…etc.
  2. We do not force people to participate in any guided activity. If a student or adult would rather remain seated—that is fine.

Below is an example of a prayer experience that is guided from the stage with slides. I call this prayer experience: 1 to many prayer experience

How do you write your own prayer experience?

THE ANCHOR OF THE PRAYER EXPERIENCE: THE WHAT

First consider what scripture your experience will be anchored in. I do this, because if not, students or leaders get distracted by the logistics of the experience and forget what it was they were wanting to guide people to pray about. Start with the “WHAT”. What are we praying about? What are we guiding people to talk to Jesus about?

THE PRAYER ITSELF

  • Silent prayer
  • One-word prayer
  • Sentence or popcorn prayer
  • Written prayers
  • Prayers that you sing
  • Using biblical prayers where you pray someone else’s prayer
  • Prayer that is represented by a symbol (such as taking a rock and writing something on it and laying it down to symbolize a burden left at the altar) . . .

Above is a list of the delivery of the prayer experience.

THE CONTENT OF THE PRAYER

  • Prayers to Jesus about Thanksgiving
  • Prayers to Jesus about requests
  • Prayers to Jesus on behalf of others (intercessory prayer)
  • Prayers of repentance/confession
  • Prayers offering praise to Jesus
  • Prayers offering obedience or commitment

Above is a list of the content of the prayer.

GUIDED RESPONSE OR ACTIVITY IN THE PRAYER TIME

  • Solitary prayer
  • Group prayer
  • Prayer chain
  • Praying at the same time out loud.
  • Praying with a group but on my own
  • Praying with a group with all of us praying out loud one-at-a-time or all at once
  • Praying on a journey through various stations
  • Praying for people groups
  • praying with your eyes open.
  • praying through different postures…Stand up, sit down, raise your hand, place your hand on your heart, place your hand on the shoulder of the person on your right, stand up and pray a certain verse if you are a certain grade…etc.

These are just a few directions that help guide these experiences. I have a whole bunch of these if you need help or need ideas.

I’ll leave you with some prayer prompts I just did this week:

For a prayer prompt video go to: http://flow.page/amyjo

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7 proven ways to empower girls to lead

One of the ways to develop a girls understanding of her purpose is to have her serve in a leadership position within the student ministry. For the past 15 years, we have created a girls ministry lead team. The team consisted of girls from high school and adult female leaders.

We will have a vision casting for the girls retreat where I will share the direction of the weekend retreat. Then through various brain storming, prayer times, and team meetings, the girls will be responsible to come up with the entire worship production, the bible studies, the fellowship activities, and 1 prayer experience.

It has been a blessing to watch girls come awake to their giftings and also recognize the giftings of other individuals. Is it easy to release the retreat to teenaged girls? No. There are times when I could get the retreat done so much quicker, but I have seen God do some amazing things through allowing these girls and leaders to work together to put together the retreat. They come up with ideas I wouldn’t have thought of.

Sometimes, I have to release the ideas I would have wanted them to do, because it’s not all about me. There are times I would have been more apt to put a retreat together in my own power, but through sharing the responsibility with these girls and leaders, we are equipping them for the leadership NOW and seeing how God will move when I release the task to Him.

Creating clear boundaries and a compass for them to follow:

Now there are some clear boundaries. The first meeting it is clear what they cannot change and what they can change. It is clear what are preferences that they can tweak and what they cannot tweak. And then when we make the teams, we make sure there are various girls from different personalities and different grades.

We also use the main event compass to help guide their dreams. I always tell the leaders, use this compass to help make or break the dreams. Girls need to begin how to implement what they are dreaming up and then see it come alive at the event. Below is the main event compass that we equip our leaders to use as they facilitate a team of girls on the lead team.

The “WHY” at the center of the compass is a key question. When we are picking worship songs, or sharing testimonies…how does this answer why we are doing this? Making sure that you have scripture as your foundation for your theme, ultimately helps to answer the why.

Here are the 7 proven ways we empowered our girls to lead at this year’s retreat:

So what happened as we empowered girls to lead at our retreat? They planned fellowships that brought girls intentionally together to create memories. They created unique food experiences that enhanced moments girls were getting connected. They selected bible study curriculum that had girls digging into tough questions about friendships and God’s purpose of friendships. These poured over into the worship services that were stitched together to reiterate what they were studying in small groups. Here are 7 specific plans they came up with and implemented:

1. a community graded reflection time after the end of the event. As a result, our leaders grouped up as well and we got a chance to hear what God had done in their small group times and personal lives.

2. A popcorn bar that accompanied a lip dub contest that had every cabin put together a routine during their free time to perform for our late night activity. Every group received a paper plate award so it was super fun.

3. A prayer experience that had girls praying for each other and eventually praying as an entire group. Very special time.

4. An 80’s ZUMBA for our recreation…girls all got a scrunchie. (see this is one I wouldn’t have even thought to do. Who knew scrunchies were back? ) But look how fun this was:

Clearly a leader was secretly videoing us but we didn’t care 🙂

5. We had a nacho bar that was brilliantly executed with a series of crockpots and plastic bags in the crockpots so we didn’t have to clean up nacho cheese! And the girls played a giant game of TWISTER….all this to help support our theme of UNITE.

6. We did an amazing “stand up for a sister” which was a live poll where we got to see anonymous answers as to some specific questions before we started. It was eye opening.

7. We brought in a special speaker in the morning to help girls discover their spiritual gifts and see how God had wired them.

And to see the girls LEAD out on these things is always a gift. So PLEASE in your ministry with girls…give them a SPACE to lead. They have to lead now…and as you walk alongside of them, you may be amazed that God awakens within them a calling to be the next girls minister. Hebrews 13:7 says: Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

Don’t forget that younger girls need to see older girls as those leaders. So give them space to be those kind of leaders and you will see them leading in ways that are immeasurably more than you could ever ask or imagine.

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Girls Minister on the road: The Twilight Episode


Girls Minister on the Road: The Twilight edition pt 1 from Amy Jo Girardier on Vimeo.
This is a brief and not complete synopsis of the twilight book 1 for dads, youth ministers, and moms that don’t have time to read the book. I do encourage you to read the book so you can talk with your daughter or girls in your ministry about it because I think it will allow for some awesome conversations. If you need some insight, go to our twilight discussion guide post and read the post about the twilight discussion for moms and daughters I posted on there to go along with this video. This will just tell you the main plot. I have left out the ushy gushy love scenes and just cut to the meat of the story. Enjoy!