2026 Seminar titles and description will continue being finalized and added over the next couple weeks. Keep checking back for more updates!
Mental health challenges among teenagers continue to be a significant concern, and their effects are deeply felt in both youth ministry and the church more broadly. In this preconference workshop, join Danny Kwon and Monica Kim—co-authors of Teenagers and Mental Health: A Handbook for Parents, Pastors, and Youth Leaders—who have served in youth ministry for three decades, as well as Monica as a biblical counselor and psychologist. Together, they will share practical insights on how churches and youth ministries can walk alongside teenagers and their families by fostering partnerships in care, connecting with helpful mental health resources, and better serving families and teenagers navigating these struggles.
In this seminar, Doug Franklin will help you construct a healthy youth ministry. Connecting mission, strategy, and programming with results. An effective youth ministry that builds momentum has everyone on the same page, and going in the same direction. Come learn how to construct and communicate how to lead an effective youth ministry.
Because the culture is changing at breakneck speed, all youth workers, regardless of age, find themselves ministering to kids growing up in a culture far different from the one they experienced when they were teenagers themselves. As a result, we are all cross-cultural missionaries. In this practical opening intensive, Walt will show you how to accurately read and understand the many elements of today’s youth culture, along with teaching you how to apply God’s Word to current cultural trends in ways that equip students and their families to live counter-culturally to the glory of God. This seminar will be more of a workshop, incorporating lots of hands-on small-group practice of the skills taught.
The greatest command makes clear that we are called to love God with our whole selves — all our thoughts, attitudes, affections, and actions. We’ll carefully unpack this eternal truth, first reflecting on what it means to be primarily a head, heart, or hands person, then considering how we move from splintered selves to integrated souls, then assessing the full process from foundations to formation to fruition, and finally discussing how all of this impacts not just our own lives of discipleship but also our ministries, our teams, and our students. Head people: we will learn.
Tuesday Morning: Even as we endeavor to see ourselves and our students progress in our discipleship and sanctification, we all continue to swim in a cultural soup that can derail us consciously and unconsciously from letting the light of Gospel illuminate and transform every nook and cranny of our lives. Let’s be honest: there are areas – known and unknown – that we hold back from our King. What are the roadblocks we face as we pursue whole-life discipleship for ourselves and our students? How can we recognize and overcome our tendency to slip and slide into idolatry? Finding answers to these questions is a necessary step to living every square inch of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In this plenary session we will pause to examine our world, ourselves, and our students as a step in the direction of becoming pilgrims making progress.
Wednesday Morning: We’ll look at how true life in Christ envelops and embraces paradoxes that would otherwise be impossible, transforming them into truth and beauty. But because paradoxes become possible, beautiful and true in God’s Kingdom, they are perhaps the most deadly tool of the enemy. He discards the true paradoxes of God (and claims they are impossible) and introduces his own paradoxes that are insidious lies in order to jumble our thoughts and topple our foundations. How can we embrace God’s possibilities while battling against the lies of the enemy?
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Evening: Our evening studies in the Word will take us to three pivotal chapters from the Book of Acts where we’ll have the chance to see (Abraham) Kuyper’s “every inch” vision played out vividly, powerfully, and practically in real-world ministry.
Many in the church learn to use language to “lead someone to Christ” or “tell their faith story” but never learn how to easily and comfortably talk about their everyday experiences of God’s presence, power, love, correction, and compassion. Yet that is where our discipleship matters most — in the trenches of day-in-day-out life. We’ll talk briefly about the formational power of speech (how what we say forms who we are) and will then workshop how to articulate personal faith experiences using simple templates. Until we learn the practice, we can’t model it for our students. And until our students learn it, their hearts will not be fully formed for Jesus.
Description forthcoming.
With screen time taking up an increasingly greater and greater segment of our lives, how does the Bible inform how we and our students can develop social media/tech habits and practices that advance God’s Kingdom in our lives and world, rather than engaging in ways that undermine and destroy our human flourishing?
This breakout will explore some of the more recent research informing education and discuss what we can glean for the purpose of teaching God’s Word well to young people in our churches.
All of our students have gone, are going, and will most likely continue going to school. At the very least, every minute of every day offers an opportunity for learning. How can we best teach and train-up a generation who engages with their academic pursuits in ways where they consciously pursue learning as an act of worship? How can we train them to see their education not as a hoop to jump through, but as a time to be equipped for faithful service to God and neighbor? How can we inspire them to integrate faith in Christ into all aspects of life in the real world? In this seminar, a life-long educator will teach you a paradigm for helping your students engage in faithful learning.
Move young people you serve from passive to passionate, from consumer to contributor, from Hippos to Honeybees! With the best intentions, youth ministry efforts across the country invite rising generations to fill chairs when youth are capable of leading change. Is your youth ministry an incubator of impact or a Hippo factory? Grasp what it takes to make the Hippos to Honeybees transition with the youth in your church.
Together we will explore how to invite students to see their everyday lives as part of God’s global story. Exploring what it means to live as the Church right where they are—on campus, in their city, and in their community—while actively supporting the work of the Church around the world. Together, we’ll discover how local faithfulness fuels global impact, and how every follower of Jesus is called to join in His mission—through prayer, service, giving, and going. It’s about being rooted here and reaching there.
Description forthcoming.
Moving Students from Participants to Leaders
Join Doug Franklin as he shares a simple, practical, and straightforward approach to developing student leaders. This method will help you train and equip student leaders, guiding them from being participants to becoming leaders. You will learn about the five steps of the Leadership Pathway: Invite, Discover, Equip, Risk, and Sharpen. The Leadership Pathway serves as a tool to assist you in answering the question, “How can I develop leaders in my youth ministry?”
Young people ask the greatest questions. Seminary prepared us for some of them, but what about the ones that set us on our heels? What about the ones that are incredibly personal, or the ones on topics we haven’t fully formed an opinion on ourselves? What do we do then? In this workshop, we’ll talk about how Jesus used questions, how he responded to questions, and how we can engage in shepherding students’ hearts in the very midst of their hardest questions.
Each of us will struggle at some point in ministry with challenges, even challenges and decisions that can crash our lives and ministry. How can you equip yourself to endure these inevitable hardships and remain resilient during such times? This session will be an overview of the NGM four session cohort of the same name. We will look into having:
Whether they realize it or not, adolescents are being shaped by the fallen cultural narratives of this world. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the ministry of the Church to emerging generations is to help them identify the stories that shape their identity and purpose, and, at the same, time helping them to find their place in the one true story: God´s story.
Description forthcoming.
Let’s reframe the way youth workers view sports. It can be really frustrating when it feels like you are always competing against sports schedules as a youth worker, so how can you view sports as a discipleship tool, not as a hindrance to what you’re trying to accomplish? We’ll aim to develop a theology of sport. What is the “why” for Christian athletes? We’ll also paint a picture of what a Christian athlete should look like. What does Christlike character look like on the field, court, etc.? Finally, this seminar will help youth workers to see that the sports teams their students play on are a field ripe for harvest. How can we train and commission our student-athletes to carry out the Great Commission on their teams and campuses?
When we look back on our years spent in youth ministry, all of us can point out the things we would do the same, along with the things we would do differently. In this tag team seminar featuring several members of the CPYU Research Fellows Team, you will glean youth ministry wisdom from several combined decades of youth ministry experience. Hearing from those who are older and more experienced helps us all to focus in on ministry aspects and practices we must pursue, while learning what to avoid. Yes, some of the best lessons are learned the hard way! This seminar will fill your youth ministry toolbox with loads of take-home wisdom and resources.
The registration link above will open a new window and re-direct you to a registration form on the website of The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.