t!His Youth Group Blog

Reaching every one of 2766 teens enrolled in DeKalb/Sycamore High Schools might sound like an impossible task, but impossible tasks are exciting!

You see, we follow this guy named Jesus who said in Matthew 19:26, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Jesus knew. He had been there when God formed the Earth. He had been there when God took a murderer-turned outcast-turned itinerant herdsman and transformed him into a leader who would free God’s people from the Egyptians and take them to the promised land. He had been there when a young shepherd boy killed a mighty giant.

So when Jesus says that with God all things are possible, we believe him.

In the ?WHY High School youth group we’ve been praying about these 2766 teens for the past couple months. We knew it was not possible for us to reach every one of them, so we decided that at the very least we could pray for them—pray that God would put people in theirs lives to let them know they are loved and cared for, to help them with their struggles, to encourage them when they fail and to comfort them when they are hurting.

It doesn’t sound like much does it? Just praying for people. Not really doing anything.

But besides praying for the 2766, we also prayed for ourselves—we prayed that God would prepare our hearts and minds so that when opportunities arose, we would be able to to reach out to those 2766 teens and love them and care about them without judging or condemning them. We wanted to be prepared to meet them the way Jesus met people—just as they are with all their imperfections and pain and sorrow. And we wanted God to show us how to love them the way Jesus loved them—unconditionally.

We also prayed that God would provide opportunities for us to meet at least some of these 2766 teens in a way that He could use us to touch their lives. We didn’t want to preach to them or try to make them come to church; we didn’t want to add to their pain by judging them. Instead, we wanted simply to have opportunities to show them we care.

So last week some guy started following me on Twitter. I took a look at his profile to see if he was someone I might want to follow (I have found a lot of inspirational ministries this way). As I scanned down his profile I came to his most recent tweet and read it. It said something like, “Would you want to put God’s Word into the hands of every high school student in your area?”

Of course I followed the link and found https://www.thelifebook.com. What an amazing find it was!

The Life Book organization was founded by the Gideons International. I’ll let you (and strongly encourage you to) read about this organization for yourself at https://www.thelifebook.com/about.php, but this is a brief excerpt form their “About” page:

“The Life Book Project is a ministry led by President and CEO Carl Blunt. We are a non-profit organization with the goal of providing God’s Word to 17.5 million high school students in the United States. Supported solely by donations, we offer The Life Book at no cost to churches and students so that every high school student in the United States and beyond can be introduced to Jesus Christ through God’s Word.”

With the approval of our Senior Pastor and the support of the teens in the ?WHY High School youth group, we have decided to do The Life Book Project here and reach every one of the 2766 teens enrolled in DeKalb/Sycamore High Schools.

We can’t do this alone! It needs to be a multi-church effort to get all of our local Christian teens involved in give the gift of The Life Book to their peers during a one-week “Saturation” period this spring. Download and read The Life Book here http://www.thelifebook-digital.com/thelifebook/2009?sub_id=gIXPHG1IPEgW#pg1 (online/offline digital format) or here http://www.thelifebook.com/jdowDQ45Hke8WFlle/the-life-book.pdf (.pdf format). Go to the site above to see other formats available for download.

Read it and pray about it and decide if you can support the project to get it into the hands of every one of 2766 high school age teens.

We will need youth groups in as many area churches as possible to step up and join in this effort. We need youth ministers and youth leaders to help encourage and organize their own teens to be ready for the project. We need members of area churches to bring this to the attention of youth ministers and youth leaders who haven’t yet heard.

Are you willing to help? Here are a few things you can do:

• Pray for the teens in DeKalb/Sycamore High Schools—those who need to be reached and those who will do the reaching
• Bring this to the attention of your Senior Pastors, youth ministers and youth leaders—let them know you are excited about it and want your church to get involved
• Get in touch with me (David Vollstedt). the easiest way to find me and my contact info is to go to our contact page here: http://hccwhy.com/blog/why-contact-info/
• Show your support for the project by posting comments on this post and sharing this post via email, Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking site you might use