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, praying, or going to church. Sure, these are important spiritual habits, but they’re not the only spiritual habits that matter.
While there’s no definitive list of spiritual habits, we think these four are worth targeting to help your students 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 of the quarterly discipleship activities you’ll find in Volume 7 of Grow Students Curriculum.
THE BIGGER BETTER BEST CHALLENGE
The Bigger Better Best Challenge is a new spin on the classic youth group game, where you trade something small for something bigger and better, alongside friends. In this friendly competition, small groups will spend multiple weeks (or months) working together to trade up, win prizes for their group, and get to know each other better along the way.
THE OVER THE TOP CHALLENGE
With this discipleship activity, we’re providing everything you need to help students support local organizations dedicated to meeting the needs of your community. In this month-long activity, small groups will work together to develop creative ways to express “over-the-top” generosity. They will collect and donate needed items to benefit local community organizations and use their unique gifts to support and make a difference in what those organizations do in your community.
IN THE RHYTHM PRAYER PROMPTS
Prayer can often seem hard to understand and even harder to build into our lives as a daily habit. To help teenagers spend time with God, we’ve created these In The Rhythm Prayer Prompts to encourage teenagers to practice a brand new pattern of prayer this season. We’ve built a deck of 40 prayer prompts that teenagers can take home with them, draw from, and use to talk with God in a new way each day. You can print out these prompts for teenagers to use at home, have a small group leader text them to their teenagers, or post them on your ministry’s social media accounts.
LONG STORY SHORT POP UP
When it comes to sharing their stories of faith, it can sometimes be hard for teenagers to put their stories into words. Long Story Short: The Pop-Up is a one-day event that will give students opportunities to craft their stories through tons of creative outlets! From art, poetry, and music, to videos, photography, technology, and even a little gardening, this event will guide students through a variety of activities, each designed to help teenagers understand and communicate their faith stories in new, powerful, creative, and unique ways. While this event can be done anytime during the year, we suggest pairing it with the teaching series Worth Sharing, which is all about sharing your story of faith with others!
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 of these activities — instructions for each discipleship activity, editable graphics, shopping lists, flyers, debrief guides, handouts, and more!
In this post, here’s what we’ll cover: