When it comes to helping teenagers grow in their faith, we believe there are four spiritual habits to target. These habits are the decisions, behaviors, and rhythms that help us grow spiritually over time. If you’re like most people, when you hear “spiritual habit,” you start to think about reading the Bible, prayer, or going to church. These are important spiritual habits, but they’re not the only ones that matter.
While there’s no definitive list of spiritual habits, we think these four are worth targeting to help your teenagers grow:
- Spending time with God
- Spending time with others
- Using your gifts
- Sharing your story
These four habits sit at the core of our discipleship strategy (and if you don’t have a discipleship strategy yet, steal ours!). We believe spiritual growth should be the lens through which we see everything else we do in our ministries. So, each quarter, we focus on one of these four spiritual habits with a specific discipleship activity.
Here’s each quarterly discipleship activity you’ll find in Volume 8 of Grow Students Curriculum.
SMALL GROUP PARTY KITS
With teenagers, we’re convinced the spiritual habit of Spending Time with Others is most important to cover at the beginning of every school year. It’s the time when students build new friendships and begin a new year with their small groups. If we want teenagers to continue to grow during this transition, they need space to grow in their relationships with each other, like in their small groups. Small Group Party Kits will help group leaders easily create a fun and welcoming environment for their group. We’ve made it easy for small group leaders to choose a kit and create an event that gives teenagers a chance to spend quality time together.
SPIRITUAL GIFTS ASSESSMENT
The holiday season is a perfect time to move teenagers to serve others. Before they can use their gifts to serve, they need to know what their gifts actually are. So, how can you inspire them to discover and use their gifts? That’s where this Spiritual Gifts Assessment tool comes in. Students can complete the Spiritual Gifts Assessment individually on their own time or with their small groups. Either way, it’s designed to help teenagers identify who they were created to be and what they were created to do.
BIBLE JOURNALING PAGES
While you are already encouraging teenagers to spend time with God all year long, the Easter season may be one of the best opportunities each year to help them engage with God on their own. That’s where these Bible Journaling Pages come into play. You can use these devotional templates to guide teenagers through the Bible on their own or with their small groups. In this activity, teenagers will build their own journals using a variety of modules we’ve provided for you to help them experiment with a variety of methods of reflection.
THE WHAT IF PROJECT
In The What If Project, we provide everything you need to help your group make a difference by partnering with a local organization that is making wrong things right in the world. First, students will serve alongside that organization to share the good news of Jesus with their actions. Then, they will debrief and use their creativity to share their stories of what God taught them through this one-day event. While this event can be done anytime during the year, we suggest pairing it with the teaching series What If…, which is all about partnering with God to make wrong things right in the world.
Those are each of the four quarterly discipleship activities you can find inside of Grow Students Curriculum. And if you’re already using Grow Students, we’ve given you everything you need for each activity—instructions for each discipleship activity, editable graphics, shopping lists, flyers, debrief guides, handouts, and more!
In this post, here’s what we’ll cover: