Whether you have been in youth ministry for 2 or 20 years, it’s a great time to re-commit your partnership with parents. Parents are the key to a great youth ministry and students’ primary faith influencers. Enjoying good relationships with parents will make your ministry more effective and a lot more fun. As you have a few more free hours this summer think about ways you can partner with parents to help them in their development of their students.
Here is one great idea I got from my youth pastor when I was in high school. He would have a parent meeting with all the usual stuff like calendars and information about upcoming events. When he had finished with the basics he would ask parents to think about their greatest need in terms of parenting their students. He would place signs around the room with subjects that he knew were important to parents. He would then ask parents to more to the sign that best fit the problem they had. He had a monitor at each sign that would lead a discussion about the subject. Parents were asked to share stories of problems or about solutions that they had found. The community that the parents built was priceless; they went from people concerned with van arrival times to real people sharing problems and real world solutions. Parent meetings became the network place for parents and their struggles.
