Vision
I posed this question to some of our high school students: Out of all five of your senses, which would you absolutely hate to lose? The most common answer? Sight. Why is that? Sight gives us the ability to know where we are, who is around us, and where to go. It gives a sense of comfort and stability, even control. The sense of sight gives us the ability to move forward in the right direction. Casting a vision to your students is like opening their eyes to the great things God can accomplish through them.

Vision is vitally important to any thriving organization. It must be developed, shared, and implemented. There are too many students leaving the church for us as youth pastors to have half hearted, weak visions. We have a great God who can do great things. It is time we develop the purpose in why we exist as a youth ministry.

Developing a Vision
A great place to start is with a dream. What is the dream that you have for your high school or middle school students? What is the dream that you have for reaching students in your city? Developing this dream is found best in prayer. Who better to receive vision from than the one who created everyone and everything?

Once you have a dream, ask the question ‘how can this be accomplished’? This is when you determine goals. These goals act as accountability to keep you on track. They also help in motivation and evaluation. Once you have developed the vision you now get to share it with your leaders and students.

Sharing The Vision
We all have advertised events. You promote it every time you meet, send home flyers, post it on social media, and even email the parents. However, people still forget the date, time, or the event completely. So how much more do we need to communicate our vision?

We’ve become good at painting the mission statement on the walls of our youth rooms, but how often do we communicate it in our teaching? How often do we celebrate reaching established goals? How often do we change our services, activities, or outreach events to align with it? If we do not become outspoken and active on accomplishing our purpose, it will never be accomplished. Even more important than sharing the vision is implementing change that points our students towards the vision.

Implementing The Vision
This is where the goals you set come into play. These goals will be stepping stones that lead you to accomplishing your vision. As your students see each goal come to fruition, it encourages them to accomplish the overall mission.

Whatever the vision God has for your student ministry, it must be developed, shared, and implemented. Our God can work in great and mighty ways. It is time we communicate this truth to our students and guide them towards the abundant life to which God has called them.

RESOURCE
This resource is just like the majority of online youth ministry resources. You have to hunt through some of the cheesy stuff to find something good. However, there is some good stuff here between games, videos (lesson application & funny), and sermon series calendars. CLICK HERE

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