Duffy Robbins > Quotes

“Our opportunities with students are too few, and the time we can devote to ministry is too precious, to waste them with muddled plans, poor communication, and unproductive activity.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Patterns of interaction are transmitted, more or less faithfully, from one generation to another. Thus the inheritance of mental health and of mental ill health through the medium of family microculture is certainly no less important, than is their inheritance through the medium of genes.6”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“We build loyalty not by giving out job descriptions and offices, but by giving ourselves.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“the larger the staff, the more important it becomes to make sure responsibility is owned by individuals and not by the group.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Ministry with volunteer youth workers is not primarily about volunteers bringing refreshment to students, nor about youth pastors bringing refreshment to volunteers. It is about creating a space wherein people can find refreshment from Christ. It’s about creating an upper room—holy ground where disciples can encounter Christ and be washed and refreshed by him.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Pushing a volunteer into a position for which he or she is not spiritually, emotionally, or temperamentally equipped is like trying to build a tree house in a small tree. It’s bad for the tree house, yes, but it also crushes the tree—a tree that in time, with proper nurture and care, might have provided a sturdy and capable support.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Just as “good fences make good neighbors,” clear delineations of responsibility can prevent the kind of turf battles that break down staff relationships.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Youth ministry is not merely a nuts and bolts operation. The difference between efficiency and Ephesiancy is God’s gracious work in our lives.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Beware of any work for God which enables you to avoid concentration on Him. A great many Christian workers worship their work. Jesus told the disciples not to rejoice in successful service, and yet this seems to be the one thing in which most of us do rejoice. One life wholly devoted to God is of more value to God than one hundred lives simply awakened by His Spirit…. So often we mar God’s designed influence through us by our self-conscious effort to be consistent and useful. Jesus says there is only one way to develop spiritually, and that is by concentration on God.”
― Duffy Robbins, Building a Youth Ministry that Builds Disciples: A Small Book About a Big Idea

“What feels like a family to those on the inside can feel like a clique to those on the outside.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties

“Mark DeVries observed that the church had become the place where teenagers “are most segregated from the world of adults.”2 Churches had unwittingly cultivated an environment where teenagers were being cut off from the very adult relationships that would sustain them through the turbulence of the adolescent years and by which they could learn about mature Christian faith. We were, in effect, nurturing in teenagers an appetite for a youth group from which they would soon graduate, while weaning them from involvement in the broader church life that would sustain their spiritual growth as adults.”
― Duffy Robbins, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts, Revised and Updated: Organizing, Leading, and Managing Your Youth Ministry (Youth Specialties