Girls Ministry

On the importance of teaching adolescent girls their identity in Christ...

What the heck is film for? Most folks see mainstream Hollywood movies as a form of entertainment or escape. For them, seven bucks is a small price to pay for 90 minutes of silly jokes, noisy chase scenes, pumped up action heroes or hot sex.Others, including a growing number of youth workers and pastors,...

It was a typical day at the Christian middle school where I work, and I was witnessing yet another incident of girls being mean to each other. Maria, who was having a bad morning, broke down in class and cried. Jessica looked in the window of the classroom and saw Maria break down. Jessica is one of...

The phone rang at 12:30 a.m. It was 17-year-old Maggie. She’d cut herself again and thought she needed stitches. Because she lives more than a thousand miles away, I didn’t know how to help her. Finally, she woke her mom to take her to the hospital. I was worried, because I intimately knew the pain Maggie...

Bump, set, spike. The game was over. As I thanked her for the invitation, she asked me a question. Her parents couldn’t make it, and she was wondering if I could take her home. I panicked! The warning signs began flashing in my mind. I knew it wasn’t a good situation. In a perfect ministry, in a perfect...

After extensive research, I have discovered that about half of all humans are dudes and the other half are ladies. In a lot of communities that ratio has not held true among Christian youth workers. In our north Texas ‘burb, for instance, there are more than 40 professional church and parachurch youth...

See Jane. See Jane become a teenager. See Jane deal with her body. See Jane struggle. Adolescence has always been a time of physical (and all kinds of other) changes. The ways teenage girls experience those changes today is radically different than it was in the 1930s, when the Dick and Jane books first...

Being a teenage girl today is tough. Every day, girls encounter a multitude of conflicting messages about their identity, sexuality and worth that they struggle to process. In the midst of this chaos, youth ministries can provide a safe haven for girls to discover who they are and experience genuine...