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Open Source Youth Ministry

For the past several years The Bridge leadership team has gone to Youth Specialties‘ National Youth Worker’s Convention for instruction, training, fun, relaxation, and to be ministered to in order that we might be able to provide the youth in our program with the best we can. It’s an amazing time and we look forward to it every year. We’re already planning and excited about going to the Pittsburgh convention this October. The training they provide is amazing and it’s really an incredible feeling being in the room with so many other people who are just as insane as you to willingly be involved with youth ministry.

And so we began to think a year or so ago… The Bridge has been around for about 8 years, with many of its leaders involved in youth ministry for significantly longer. We have a good deal of experiences and have learned a lot over the years… mostly because we have made so many mistakes along the way. Lots and lots of mistakes. We began to feel, I believe it was in the year 2006, that we were (somewhat naturally) moving to a place to not only minister to our youth but to other ministries. It felt like a natural next step that God was leading us in. We had an idea for a program we wanted to start to bring youth ministries together once a month… something that has proven difficult to do in the past. We sat on the idea while other matters took precedence.

Finally this year we decided to take action with these dreams that were brewing. It was time. Things happened in which we were brought together with another youth program, La Patrulla, in Elizabeth. To be honest, La Patrulla is the youth ministry of our spanish church. We always had the goal of working together as one, but it wasn’t until some events, which I won’t go into, that right from the beginning of 2008 we kind of melded into one group - though we still meet separately. The leadership teams help each other, hang out together, work together, etc. And we’ve noticed that we are so much more effective with this new synergy. We are in talks of how to further combine in the second half of 2008. But this merging made us realize that if two groups working together can be so much more effective, what would happen with 5 groups? 10 groups? 20 groups?

And so we came up with the idea for Equip. Equip is what we have called our leadership training classes in the past, but now Equip will evolve into something else. Something bigger. We want to bring youth ministries and youth workers from all around together for one massive day of training and networking. Though The Bridge is hosting it, the teaching, seminars, worship, etc will be shared by youth workers, pastors, business people, etc from around the Union Country area. We’ve already been in talks with some local youth workers, and have several ministries on board.

We call it an “open source youth ministry training project” because that’s just what it is. We realize that we’ll never be Youth Specialties and this will never be the National Youth Worker’s Convention, and that’s not the point of it. YS is, by far, one of the best providers of youth ministry resources out there. NYWC is huge. This will be much smaller, but hopefully will be able to help out the ministries of those who can’t afford the big conference. There’s a lot of poor churches here whose workers can’t afford to make the trip. Or perhaps they’ve never heard of or never thought of attending. The term “open source” fits because it is a collaboration of youth workers from all over coming together to minster to and train each other. Open Source is a style of programming in which the software’s code is part of the public domain. It’s not kept secret or private by the writers. It’s free for others to look at and tinker with and to edit. When the community works directly with the source code of the software, often the ending result is much better than what the original coders had in mind. Perhaps another phrase, maybe even a better phrase, that can be used is a “youth ministry training wiki.” We call it a project because, well, it is a project. We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s exciting, and we’re hopeful. So while YS provides the big, full-featured training conference, we’ll try to have the same feel but on a smaller scale. It’s like comparing Microsoft Office, being the industry standard top-of-the-line suite, to Open Office, being the open source suite.

And so, to summarize this quite long piece, Equip is a project where youth ministers from all over will come to minister to and train youth workers from the area. The conference is free of charge to all who attend. Our purpose is to (1) create a unification and a bonding in the dozens and even hundreds of youth ministries surrounding our home, Elizabeth, NJ, and (2) to equip those who serve along side us to be the best they can so that the youth of the area can have the best that can be offered to them.

Equip is slated to take place June 7, 2008, in Elizabeth, NJ. In addition, we’ll be having an event the night before for the actual youth programs to come to and unite for a night, but I’ll write more about that later.

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