Personal Spiritual Growth Plan

By Doug Franklin May 21, 2012

All of our students are busy. So busy they can’t come to youth group and if they can come their time is very limited. I’ve written before about how we need to change the way we think about youth ministry programing. We can’t just ask students to come to us, we need to go to them. One of the ways this works is by preparing a personal spiritual growth plan for each student. This growth plan must include where they are now spiritually and where we think they should move towards. This plan can be developed with students and parents if they are available and want to participate but you don’t need their involvement. This plan should be prepared with the adult volunteer who is going to mentor the student. The purpose of the plan is to move us away from a one-size fits all thinking in youth ministry. It also moves us away from thinking that spiritual growth happens because a student came to a youth group meeting.  A personal plan gets us thinking about how we can challenge each student. It’s also very easy to measure our impact. It can also be scary because it’s easy to measure. If we really want to impact students we need to get one-on-one and with all of the students busyness it may be the only way we can reach students.