Books
I love books. The thing is, I'm not a great reader. I read really slow, and don't always grasp everything on the first pass. Maybe that's why I liked math so much in school. But I've grown to love reading because I've grown to love learning. I see the printed word having less and less of an impact on our culture, and this is true in the Church as well. My advice? Read books. As many as you can. Study, whether you have a seminary degree or you're a 20-year-old part-time youth director.
Journals
There are some good youth ministry journals out there. At our church, we subscribe to YouthWorker Journal and Group Magazine, and both come every two months. These magazines are great for keeping up with current issues in youth ministry, and for their book reviews. There are also some good online journals out there (or print journals that also publish material online), but I still classify those as youth ministry blogs (below).
Youth Ministry Blogs
There are a lot of blogs out there, and it's a waste of time to try to read them all on a regular basis (which makes me both surprised and grateful that you're reading this right now). One of the benefits of blogging is that it's easier to respond to current events as they unfold, and as they affect our students. However, youth ministry blogs aren't really all that deep theologically. This isn't necessarily a critique of bloggers, it's just the nature of the medium. When was the last time you read a 3,000 word blog post? It's tough to go too deep in only a few paragraphs, but blogs are great for getting some quick encouragement or hearing someone's quick ideas on a certain topic. To me, the main benefit of blogs in youth ministry is that they begin and foster further discussion--possibly on the spot via comments.
Here's my hope for myself: that of the resources listed above, I would put books at the top of my list. A philosophy professor at my seminary told us that we always needed to "get in the woodshed." Youth ministry is tough work, and we need to think, read, write, pray, and wrestle with tough issues. This doesn't mean that we become full-time academics. It just means that great leaders never stop learning. Unfortunately, this isn't always--or often--expected of youth pastors. But it should be.
Youth workers: be committed to learning about your craft. Sure this takes time, and you need to be committed to carving out time to do this. This can be accomplished by delegating responsibilities, training leaders so that they can take some things off your plate, or by removing unnecessary distractions (read: Facebook). Make time to dig into tough issues, how to be a leader that really equips others to serve, issues of adolescent psychology, or even brushing up (or learning about for the first time) on some apologetics. Sure, it's a tough thing to do when we've got a Wednesday night lesson to teach in two days that we haven't started yet, or a long list of office tasks we need to complete. But it's well worth our time to make the effort.
