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Just to make it a little easier – here’s the complete 30-Second 3-Minute Conversation Concept.

Part 1: Opening Question
When each youth walks into the church, they are greeted and engaged with at least one 30-second conversation. This 30-second conversation is designed to be an open-ended conversation with the youth. The adults ask questions like, “How is your week going?” or “How has your summer been?” or “What have you been doing for fun lately?” The questions are designed to let the youth talk about themselves and give the adults the opportunity to learn about the youth.

The 3-minute conversation is essentially taking the time to learn one story from the youth. The conversation may be longer or shorter than 3-minutes and that’s okay. The intent is to learn one story so that our adults can begin developing a relationship with our youth.

The final piece of this concept is this. If during the course of the 30-second and the 3-minute conversations the adult discovers that a longer conversation needs to take place, the next step is to invite and engage the youth in a Coke or Coffee date sometime later in the week. This allows the adult to continue to engage the other youth that are attending and allows the youth to be valued outside of the Wednesday Night worship experience.

Part 2: Learning the Language

• Listening. In a 30-second conversation, there’s not much time for conversation. The focus is on listening to what the student is sharing and using that as a wedge to build a bridge between the adult volunteers and the students world. If our adult volunteers can craft the initial question effectively, then the student will fill the rest of the time with the conversation. This allows the adult volunteer to listen and find a commonality that can lead to a 3-minute conversation.
• Observing. In the 30-second conversation, observing how the student chooses to interact with the adult volunteer is absolutely vital to the success of the youth ministry. If our adult volunteers are careless in our observation skills, then we will miss the physical cues that the student is sending out.
• Hearing. I realize this seems a little repetitive, but listening is far different than hearing. Listening infers that you recognize the audible sounds and interpret them as words. Hearing infers that while you recognize the audible sounds and interpret them as words, you also hear through the words to decipher the intent and mood of the words. When our adult volunteers move from simply listening to our students to actually hearing our students, a bond takes place between the adult volunteer and student that is very difficult to break.
• Reading. Again – this is very similar to observing our students, the difference is that as our adult volunteers become better at observing our students we become better at reading our students. By knowing how to read our students, our adult volunteers can quickly and easily move into a 30-second or 3-minute conversation, depending on each student.

Part 3: Replication
You use the information you’ve learned about the students from listening, observing, hearing, and reading in the 30 Second and 3 Minute conversations to approach other students.

You continually replicate what you have learned over and over again until it becomes second nature and until you speak the language of our students natively.

You use your initial 30 second and 3 minute conversation to springboard you into your next conversation. It’s a catalytic concept that should provide more and more energy to your volunteers to reach out to the students.

That’s it! So – what’s your thoughts on this?