…somewhere around the 10 year point in my own youth ministry experience, I began to realize that I was teaching on some of the same topics over and over again, and there was really no plan guiding me. Looking over the messages I had delivered over the previous three years, I discovered that we spent almost six times as much time in the New Testament as we did in the Old Testament; that we spent more time studying general topics than we spent studying specific biblical texts; and that our teaching curriculum was more a reflection of my training and biases than it was a reflection of the whole counsel of God.
I took my concerns to our volunteers and we began with the basic premise that we might have a student in our ministry for three years. On the basis of that assumption, and with input from our pastor and some members of our Youth Advisory Team, we developed a curriculum plan of topics and texts that we wanted our teenagers to be exposed to prior to graduation. For students who were in our youth group from grades 7-12, we decided there was no harm in their repeating the cycle a second time as long as we used different lesson plans.
Perhaps somewhat tangentially related to this, but [url=http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/02/aggie-catholic-renaissance]George Weigel has a good article on college campus ministry over at First Things[/url]. He describes the Catholic Campus Ministry at Texas A&M University. The average Sunday attendance is 4,000-5,000. It is working to expand its church seating capacity to 1400 because 850 is not enough. He describes the principles that contribute to such success:
Catholic campus ministry at Texas A&M is a striking example of “If you build it, they will come.†The program is unapologetically orthodox. There is no fudging the demands of the faith. And yet they come, and come, and come, because Aggie Catholicism shows the campus a dynamic orthodoxy that is not a retreat into the past but a way of seizing the future and bending it in a more humane direction. The premise that informed John Paul II’s approach to students his entire life—that young people want to be challenged to lead lives of heroic virtue, in which the search for love is the search for a pure and noble love—is the premise that guides Catholic campus ministry at College Station.
Such principles should guide high school as well as college youth ministries.