A year’s worth of free lessons, how to talk about school shootings, and Ice breakers of course! This year has been filled with some incredible resources we have offered to you for free! Every one of these is a can’t miss article, make sure you’ve read them all!

8. The Spring Break Problem: 2 Simple Solutions (Meredith Garreau): It happens to all of us- as we get closer and closer to Spring Break, we’re debating how to adapt our lessons and games for a smaller crowd. It can be a little stressful also when you have a church and youth group on the smaller side already, let alone when kids get a week off from school. Meredith’s article will be just what you need when it’s spring break or, maybe, the week after New Year’s

7. From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A Tool to Process with Youth (Andy Millman): This year has been full of hot-button issues in our culture. Choosing to ignore those divisive, heated issues doesn’t help students learn how to process, but just offering a cable news-style free-for-all will end up with a lot of unnecessary pain. This tool by Andy is an incredibly helpful in addressing any heated issue that your youth are dealing with.

6. Seven Months of Quality, Methodist Youth Lessons FREE: Make that 12 months now! We have been releasing weekly youth ministry lessons you can use in your church for free. This article announced our seven month milestone, and blew up when it released. Oh, yeah, and you’re welcome. With a whole year available, you don’t need to worry about writing (or buying) Sunday School material!

5. My Mom Was a Lunch Lady Whose Sloppy Joes Taught me About Grace (Marc Baugh): Seriously. Sloppy Joes and grace, what could be more methodist and youth ministry? This devotion will challenge you, and give you a great metaphor for your next lesson on grace!

4. 15 Killer Questions to Break the Ice in Sunday School (Jeremy Steele): Sometimes the youth aren’t talking and you need to toss a conversation grenade into the room. This handy list of questions will get their mouths moving, and is a perfect tool to keep bookmarked for those desperate moments!

3. 19 Years After Columbine, No Longer a Unique Story: Supporting Youth Who Have Experienced Trauma (Amy McMullen): 20 years after this tragedy, we reflected on the lessons learned and where we have gone since. Amy was 10 when this happened in her hometown and lost a close family friend. Her words are a powerful tool to help us consider how we are responding today.

2. Methodist History in a Bag: Amazing Teaching Tool for Confirmation (Sharon Cook): History can be boring, but this tool will help get students eyes and hands involved as you pull different items out of a bag to share different stories from Methodist History, but why keep it to Confirmation? This would be great in any gathering of Methodist Youth!

1. Responding to a School Shooting: Three Approaches for Youth Workers (Paulo Lopes): This year (as too many others) has been rattled over and over again by the horror of school shootings all over America. Dealing with this complicated, issue can be incredibly difficult as your own personal feelings and perspectives can make it difficult to think through what is best for your students. Paulo walks us through three approaches to help us map out what our students need in these situations so that we can meet them where they are and help them move forward. We also discussed the issue on our Podcast. it was one of the best of the year.