Working Together to Reach EVERY Student

Reach your schools, and you will reach your community!

Your local schools are one of your community's hallmark institutions. No other setting bridges students, adults, families, and businesses like your local schools. Where else can you find a place that on the average school day with just students, teachers, and staff would one find at least twenty percent of your community's population represented?

Too many think it can't happen at their schools and their community. But perhaps the most important question is: "What does God want to do in our schools and our community?" God's heart is that everyone knows Him.

The Apostle Paul echoed this as God's mission became His mission:

"So we tell others about Christ, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all the wisdom God has given us. We want to present them to God, perfect in their relationship to Christ. That's why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ's mighty power that works within me." (Colossians 1:28-29, NLT; emphasis added)

The vision to see every student in your area reached can seem intimidating. However, when God gives you a big vision - a vision bigger than you, you only have two choices. You can retreat and quit, or else team up with others. Working together provides a shared vision, resources, encouragement, people, connections, and influence. Teamwork opens the pathway to reach EVERY!

Some practical ideas for youth workers to team-up together to reach every student!

1. Pray. Individually and together as a team, ask God for His creativity, wisdom, and favor in reaching your local schools. Too often, prayer is overlooked but it should be our first essential action.
   To highlight prayer, you can fast a meal. Or meet with others to pray specifically how, as a team, you can reach every student and every school in your area. Enlist your church to pray with you. Highlight a different school each week in your church bulletin. Prayer Zone Partners is a simple memorable way for adults to pray in an ongoing way for schools; as they drive through a school zone, they make it a prayer zone.

2. Care. In a culture that values actions over words, caring for the needs of your local schools, helps youth leaders build influence and credibility to share the gospel relationally with school officials. Caring in the name of Jesus brings attention to His greatness and demonstrates His compassion for others. Love Your Schools provides a simple blueprint to have conversations with school officials to identify needs and mobilize churches to respond to identified needs.

3. Share. Train students to share the gospel. Network together to train students with practical ideas in starting conversations, such as Salt: Creating Thirst and I Dare You. Additionally, equip students in knowing how to share the gospel message itself. Resources such as Life in 6 Words, Alive in Five, and 3-Story evangelism, among others, are reliable options.

4. Start. Utilize See You at the Pole as a launching pad. See You at the Pole is a great moment that can turn into a movement. Have a pre- or post-SYATP youth event to inspire students to pray for God to use them all year. Cast vision for students to believe God to provide gospel-centered conversations every day throughout the school year. Begin to pray for a prayer group or campus club to be established in every school in the area. By having numerous churches and youth ministries represented at the youth rallies, students can immediately network with other students from different groups and create shared energy to share Christ at school.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin, a vibrant network of youth leaders worked together to connect to the local schools. It was birthed in response to a string of student suicides that impacted the schools in their community. Prayer gave birth to unity. Then unity brought a focus on evangelism, shared events, and a priority to see every student in every school know Jesus Christ. Students began praying for their school and sharing the gospel themselves. Students are working together, just as their youth leaders are working together, on a mission to share the gospel.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted, "All your strength is in your union, all your danger is in discord...and as brothers live together." As youth workers, when we are living the mission to reach EVERY student together, we will have our most influence to advance the gospel cooperatively.

Who are you connecting with to reach the EVERY in your community? Your students and schools in your area await your response.

The first action lies with us.