Joanna Cummings serves as the Director of Children's Ministries at Forest Hills United Methodist Church in Brentwood, Tenn. I was drawn to CYMT because I had been experiencing a deep desire to learn more about how I could serve God ...
Exciting things are afoot at the Center for Youth Ministry Training. We just celebrated our fifth birthday so I wanted to share five dreams that God has made a reality through our program over the past few years: Masters Degree ...
In May 2011, the Center for Youth Ministry Training hired Kris Konsowitz as the Memphis Regional Director. Serving in this role, Kris will be able to make better connections and stronger relationships with churches in the West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, ...
The Center for Youth Ministry Training's Board of Directors is excited to announce a collaborative partnership with Memphis Theological Seminary. Our partnership with MTS will help us more effectively accomplish the CYMT's vision of training youth ministers. CYMT receives three ...
God continues to do amazing things in and through the Center for Youth Ministry Training. We commissioned our third class of students on August 1. On August 2, we welcomed eleven new students to our program. We will be working ...
The Center for Youth Ministry Training is excited to announce the Lilly Foundations decision to fund our Lilly Laboratory for Youth Ministry grant for two more years. This grant will provide $530,000 in support to further develop the CYMT program, ...
CYMT Academic Director, Andrew Zirschky, started his new position July 1, 2010, and lead his first retreat with our students on August 2, 2010. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his new role. ...
Forest Hills United Methodist Church is a model church for how the CYMT program has impacted their congregation. Forest Hills United Methodist Church in Brentwood, Tenn., became a partner church with CYMT in 2009 when the Youth and Children’s Ministry ...
Courtney serves on the Youth Ministry staff at First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee and is in her second year at CYMT. What drew you to the CYMT program? CYMT's focus on education and practice was very alluring. Upon graduating ...
“During my senior year of college, finishing my bachelors degree in Commercial Art: Graphic Design, more strongly than ever before, God was calling me into ministry. I was scared at the thought because I didn’t exactly know where God was ...
Emma Loane likes a challenge. She has faced a few in following God's plan for her life. Emma is a new student in the CMYT program. She had known that God was calling her to mission and ministry for awhile, ...
Tell us about your experience with CYMT so far: I joined the Center for Youth Ministry Training because I wanted to work in youth ministry, but had little experience actually running a youth program. I really enjoy the support of ...
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you locked youth ministry thought leaders, academics, and practicioners in a room and asked them, "What will be the big issues in youth ministry five to 10 years from now? And what should we ...
Human flourishing and theology of the body Currently, the trend we see in both youth ministry and the church at large in regards to issues of physical behaviors (especially, but not exclusively, sexual) is one of policing said behaviors in ...
The church faces the same issue as many public schools: Who helps with the homework when the student goes home? How much of it gets lost or forgotten by the next day of school because there is no reinforcement within ...
The changing possibilities for the profession of youth ministry "In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." (1) The ...
What would it mean to envision youth ministry as healing and restoration—to see youth ministry as grounded in a theology of restoration between oneself and God, others, and even the cosmos? The youth worker in this understanding would accept the ...
When the Christian story no longer seems compelling The looming crisis in youth ministry is that young people have examined the church and judged it to be inauthentic and irrelevant. In spite of our best efforts, young people in our ...
Radically local but intentionally global Our understanding of mission within youth ministry should be highly contextualized at the local level but also open to learning from the global context. The challenge within this approach is to practice co-mission: seeing ourselves ...
Finding ourselves and one another in God's story We have domesticated the Bible. We are teaching a one-dimensional Bible. We've left out the lament, the trouble, the danger, the conflict, and the drama, and along with it the beauty, the ...
