It’s likely that most of your students’ families are in debt with car payments and credit cards. It’s also likely that the children will model the parents. They need an alternative model. Get rid of your debts. Pay cash for a used car—your students will trash it anyway. Reserve your credit line for the day God calls you to minister in the city or overseas; you may need it to cover the shortfall in support.

If you need further encouragement, stand in front of your students and confess that their wise and responsible youth leader keeps his savings in a bank account paying 5 percent interest, then borrows it back from the bank on a credit card that charges him 18 percent.

2. Stop the Stockpile

As kids, we didn’t worry about stockpiling our possessions; we grew out of clothes and broke toys faster than our parents could buy new ones, so closet space was generally available. Well, we’ve stopped growing (vertically, anyway) and we’re a little gentler on our toys now that we pay for them ourselves, so our closets are filling up with new stuff. But we’re not unloading the old; we’re stockpiling.

If your world is filling up with stuff, establish a non-accumulation policy: Whenever you want to get something new, you have to get rid of something like it. If you want a new shirt, you go to your closet and pick out a shirt to give away. A pair of new shoes costs one pair of old shoes, given to Goodwill. Birthdays and Christmas can be tough because you may get lots of clothes as gifts and have to give away as many items.

The biggest payoff with a non-accumulation policy isn’t what it does to your storage space but how it changes your values. Your buying habits will change—getting a new toy will not only cost you money, it’ll cost you an old toy you like as much. It also compels you to attach the act of giving to the act of receiving. If you want something, you must give something. There’s a gospel message in here somewhere: if you try it, you can turn it into a talk.

3. Quit Offering Paid Vacations

Lots of youth mission trips are merely sightseeing vacations in disguise. We bill them as mission trips simply because it’s easier to raise money for a jaunt through Europe when we slip in a couple of days of church-building in southern France (the country that somehow managed to build Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower without us).

Almost any cross-cultural experience will have a positive effect on a student; a trip to Europe will rearrange the way your students think about the world and their places in it. But if it’s not a full-blown mission trip, don’t say that it is just to loosen purse strings.

Save your fund-raising efforts for true missions. The next time a student comes to you for help in writing a fund-raising letter for a vacation-in-disguise, help her write a job résumé instead.