Our new-look website was launched just over 14 months ago and has been getting good monthly viewing figures from the start, and is growing every month. Thank you for using it and I hope you find it useful. I thought it would be interesting to review what have been the most popular blog posts, viewed over the last 12 months.
One of the issues we discovered with the blog was that it was quite difficult to find older articles to read unless you were prepared to scroll through them all or you knew the article you were looking for. Just before Christmas, our wonderful web designer tweaked the blog so you can now jump through the archive quickly and also you can search by sub-categories (just view underneath the title of a blog post). Hopefully this will make reading the blog easier for you.
I have compiled this list of the most visited blog posts of 2014 for two reasons: firstly it shows the range of posts that have been written and secondly to hopefully point you to one or two posts that might have missed when they were published. If you find any useful, please do circulate around your youth leaders!
Here are the top ten most visited blog posts on our leadership blog in 2014:
1. Firm Foundation 3: Individual Attention
Our most popular blog post was part of a series of posts looking at what are the firm foundations for a growing youth group. It is interesting that giving attention to each individual who attends our groups was the most viewed of the series. If you want to view the whole series you can find them here: Firm foundations for a growing youth group.
2. All you need to host your own youth prayer night
This is a downloadable ready-to-use resource from Jenni Norris, youth minister at St John’s Church, Hartley Wintney. Jenni is one of my mentees and a wonderfully gifted youth minister. She created a fantastic night of prayer for her teenage group and I asked if we could share it on the website. It has proved to be exceedingly popular!
3. Don’t look down on young people, look up!
This was a musing of mine on how easy it is for adults to patronise young people rather than learn from them.
4. Use technology to read the Bible regularly
This post came out of a session I prepared for our teenage youth group. I wanted to help them connect with God’s Word in as easy a way as possible. In this post, I recommend websites, apps, twitter feeds and podcasts which can all help you go deeper with Scripture.
5. 10 ways to keep your leadership passion alive
I often speak with leaders who are running full pelt for too long and start to see their leadership passion wane. This post gives 10 practical ways to keep stoking your fire for leadership.
6. Firm Foundation 5: The Word of God
The final blog post in the series on Firm foundations for a growing youth group focused on how we can make the Bible a priority in our youth work.
7. Are you growing in these areas as a leader?
Most leaders are naturally focused on investing in the lives of those they lead. This article challenges leaders to make sure they are also investing in their own growth.
8. Seeing God in the school corridors
Here are five ways youth leaders can help prepare their young people for showing God’s love in their schools.
9. How to get a young person to open up
This was a fantastic guest post, the only guest post we’ve had so far, from Kate Wallis, youth minister at St Paul’s Leamington. Kate shared ten ways to help a young person open up when you are talking with them, particularly in a one-to-one situation.
10. Dealing with difficult and disruptive behaviour
A practical post looking at how leaders can work with young people who display difficult behaviour.
Which was your favourite post? I would love to hear! You may also notice that we have updated, and hopefully improved, the comments section on this blog. I would love it if you could leave a comment or question on the posts you read so we can make it more of a conversation. Go on – leave a comment now!