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Three Youth Ministry Priorities For Mondays

May 7, 2012 in messages, planning, Review what we do with 6 Comments

For many in youth ministry, Monday is their day off.

For others, Friday is their day off.

For some of us, we ask, “what is a day off?”

For me, Monday is a ministry work day and I usually get my day off on Friday. Since Monday is the first day of my ministry work week, I have found it imperative to start the week by focusing on priorities that are time consuming yet a crucial set up to the rest of the week. It should be a given that my soul care should be an everyday priority, but here are three practical priorities I focus on most Mondays.

1) Message Writing: First thing Monday morning I find my usual spot in Starbucks, plug in my headphones, and start message writing until early afternoon. I am usually working a week ahead in my messages and finishing off my current weekly message. (I often speak twice a week, so it can be a hefty message writing morning).

2) Planning: Monday afternoons are spent planning programs, events, and message series. (I usually am working 3-6 months ahead).

3) Email and Task List: Before my day is done I clear as much email as I can, create new task lists (I use google tasks), and try to create a plan for the rest of the week and the tasks I need to get done. It’s important to ‘clear the decks’ before Tuesday gets here…

You’ll notice that there are no meetings with students, leaders, or other staff members. For me, Mondays are my day to hide away and get great messages written, make good plans, and get caught up on email. The rest of week includes a great deal of contact time where I get to invest in students and leaders.

For me, it’s important to have one day per week when I can hide away and get a large chunk of message writing and planning done.

How about you? Do you have a day like this? What is your day off? What do Mondays look like for you?

Phil <><

TOMORROW and the rest of this week: YOUTH MINISTRY RESOURCE GIVEAWAY! Come back and check out what you could win!!!

5 Ways To Finish Out The School Year Well

April 18, 2012 in healthy ministry, Review what we do with 0 Comments

It’s already April! Most people have returned from their Spring break trips, (I didn’t get away and I wished I had). For most people, their mindset is already looking to the Summer and many of you are already seeing numbers take a dip as the weather warms up or Spring sports hit full speed ahead… As many are looking ahead to the Summer months, I think it’s good not to forget the weeks leading up to Summer. Here are 5 essential elements I have tried to establish as I look to finish the school year well.

1) Survey Your Students and Leaders: Don’t assume you know what worked for your ministry in the last school year, ask your students (and your leaders). I will actually be using a Sunday morning program to survey our students and celebrate the last year. Our survey is pretty detailed, (I’ll post it soon), and gives students a good chance for students to provide us specific feedback. We use this survey as a way to design upcoming Fall and Winter programs and events. Before the summer truly hits, it’s good to reflect and digest on where you have been. I will be sitting down with some of my core leaders to review the school year and plan the Fall.

2) Head For A End Of School Year Event: We always close out our school year with a big event that is promoted heavily and incorporates celebration and fun. It also acts as a beginning of summer event in some ways too. It’s good to have defining events like this that signify a change in schedule or programming.  Continue Reading…

Athletes In Action Speakers = Great Outcomes!

March 8, 2012 in High School, messages, Review what we do with 0 Comments

Last night, as part of our mid-week program we had two athletes from The University of Michigan Athletes in Action come to share their faith with our high school students. Craig Roh (defensive end football player), and Brandi Virgil (softball player), did a brilliant job sharing their faith in a relational and engaging way. It was promoted as a night to bring friends to, and a night where the Gospel would be shared clearly. It was a brilliant evening! Here are some of the outcomes and takeaways I discovered:

  • It was an easy invite for students to bring their friends to: Having a local college athlete share their story is an easy way to get students to bring their friends. We saw a large number of visitors last night who all came with regular students to our ministry.
  • A guest speaker can share the Gospel boldly: It’s not that we do not share the Gospel regularly, but there is something great in having someone else share the Gospel to our students. It’s not the same voice or same style and therefore the students tune in and hear the Gospel clearly. Continue Reading…

Darren’s List: 5 Things I Pray At Every Youth Program

February 16, 2012 in Review what we do with 1 Comment

In Phil’s previous post, he outlined his 5 things he prays at every youth program. Well, here’s Darren’s quick list…

Maybe you can identify with some or all of them? What would you add to this list? What do you regularly pray for at your youth programs?

1. Please don’t let anyone spill their soda on the sanctuary carpet.
2. Please don’t let anyone’s cell phone go off during my message – and if it does, help me not to lose my train of thought.
3. Please let everyone bring their deposits on time.
4. Please don’t let the senior pastor come in here.
5. Please let me survive this night to fight another day.

Go ahead and comment. What would you add to your prayer list?

P.S – This isn’t Darren’s “serious prayer” list, it’s more for fun… well, mostly.

 

5 Things I Pray At Every Youth Program

February 15, 2012 in Leadership, Review what we do with 7 Comments

There are five things I try to make sure I pray almost every time at our youth programs. Not only I am genuinely wanting to pray these things every week, it helps to give our students a prayer focus, I find it also helps to continue to cast the vision of why we meet each week. Prayer is powerful, life changing, and focuses us on the things of God.

Here’s what I pray regularly at our weekly programs: 

“Thanks so much for the new faces here tonight, and thanks for the students who call this place home” – It’s imperative to communicate care to the new students as we pray for them and thank God for them. It’s also imperative that I thank God new people while also reminding our regular students that there are new faces here to look out for.

“Thanks to these incredible youth leaders who show up week after week to love students” – I have some of the most fantastic youth leaders a youth pastor could ask for! I realize this, but students don’t always consider the sacrifice their small group leaders make to show up week after week. In addition, it’s my job to help the small group leaders become ‘ministry heroes’ to the students. Praying for adult leaders every week truly helps students to see how much they are loved by these brilliant people! Continue Reading…

3 Things I am Changing Next Fall

November 10, 2011 in Leadership, Mistakes, Review what we do with 2 Comments

One of the crucial lessons I have learned over the years is the need for regular evaluation of how my ministry is going. There are certain times of the year when it is impossible to get a chance to “come up for air”, but there are some natural breaks in seasons that allow me to pause and evaluate. For me these seasons of pause tend to be:

  • Mid-November prior to Thanksgiving and the Christmas rush, (now). 
  • Mid-March just before Easter and a new Spring season. 
  • Late May / early June as we are slowing down and getting ready for the summer.-
  • Early to mid-August as we evaluate the summer and get ready for the Fall kick off. 
This year in evaluating the Fall, I concluded that there are three things I definitely need to tweak or change for next Fall: 
1) Simplify: This year we had too many things on the calendar as we started out the Fall. It’s not that we did not have the capacity to do all the programs and events, but it was our inability to give any one event a great deal of promotion. When we have too many things on our calendars, students focus will get lost. It’s better to “build” into the Fall rather than have a million things to focus on.
2) Do not make drastic changes in our programs until the Fall is well under way: This year, just 4 weeks into Fall we created an “Other Religions” series in our discipleship environment. It had incredible content and I had different volunteers stepping up to research and create material weeks ahead of their day to present. With this discipleship environment we usually have a 15 minute large group message and then break students into small groups to dig deeper into the passages / study. However, because we had so much content to get through each week, we decided to keep the large group together and have students ask questions and discuss the topic in the large group. Although this series seemed to work well, I believe it would have had greater effectiveness if we scheduled it later in the year. For me, my take away was this: Fall needs to be a time of building relational connections in our small group environments. While content is great in these kind of series, they are better used later in the year once we have established our small groups and students are settled and comfortable. Continue Reading…

Spoon-Feeding or Self-Feeding Youth Ministries? Part 2

July 27, 2011 in healthy ministry, Parents, Review what we do with 2 Comments

In my previous post I talked about the importance of considering he long-term implications of our ministries and whether we help students to truly own their faith through self-feeding. Today, here are a few self-feeding ideas and practices I employ to help ensure that students are learning to develop spiritual habits that will last and bring fruit in their lives.

Here’s some thoughts I have been considering. Feel free to give me more ideas!!!

1) Create Bible Study Opportunities That Will Place The Burden On Students: We are currently doing a summer series Bible study in the 1,2,3 John. At the start of the study we have given students a packet that has questions about the passages we are studying through. We set the expectation that everyone should be reading ahead on a weekly basis and showing up thoughts and ideas about the study. We communicate the excitement of group learning when we all show up with great insights!

2) Use Phrases That Constantly Communicate Self-Feeding Principles: Here are a couple I use: Christians are self-starters and self-feeders. We’re not here to help you become big fat baby Christians who are spoon fed, we are here to help become self-feeders. In many ways, it is about communicating a vision of self-feeding by constantly using key phrases to remind students of the expectation.

3) Give Students Bible Study / Devotion Materials To Take Home: This year I have been creating and adapting simple 30 day devotions for students to take home to use and study. The feedback I have been getting has been fanastic! In fact, when I don’t make these available now, students complain!

4) Have Self-Feeding Students Promote Self-Feeding: Here’s what I mean by this: There’s always students who are already reaping the benefits of being a self-feeder. They are growing in faith and experiencing a closer relationship with God as a result of self-feeding. My job is to find opportunities to get them in front of the rest of our students to talk about how, why, and the benefits of being a self-feeder. Recently, we did a series called “Slice of Life” where we interviewed students who shared how God has been working in their lives. In each video interview I asked every student what habits they practice to feed and fuel their faith. It was great to hear the many different and great ways that students are fueling their faith…

5) Involve Parents: Part of my ministry should be to partner with parents. One of the ways I try to help students become self-feeders is to involve their parents in the process. This involves casting vision for expectations that their kids should be benefiting from daily habits. It also will mean great communication with parents about resources we are providing their kids to help developing self-feeding habits as well as letting them know what we are teaching their kids on a weekly basis.

These are just a few methods I employ currently. What do you do? What ideas do you have? What should we be looking ahead to do? I would love to get your ideas on this. I truly believe that this is one of the most crucial elements of the ministries we oversee…

Phil <><

 

The Lesson I Learned When My Laptop Crashed During Sermon Prep

July 15, 2011 in messages, Mistakes, planning, Review what we do with 5 Comments

Today my Macbook Pro crashed!

It was a BIG crash! The good people at the Apple store told me my hard drive is not recoverable. Ever have that happen? Believe it or not, this is the first time I have ever had a computer crash in this way… But here’s the bigger problem:

I AM PREACHING IN CHURCH THIS SUNDAY AND I JUST FINISHED WRITING MY SERMON ON THAT LAPTOP.  No back up, just some notes I had gathered on Evernote.

So, apart from backing up my sermon as I wrote, or writing it on a web-based application like Evernote, here is my BIG lesson I have learned:

“Owning” The Message And Preparing Well Is Helping Me Now:  It’s a pain to have to write it again, but ownership of the message will make it easier to write again.  In Communicating for a Change,  Andy Stanley talks about the importance of “owning” a message and internalizing the core of the message. He even goes so far as to say, why should people listen to us if we don’t own it ourselves? Since reading the book I have tried to ensure that I prepare in such a way, I could preach without notes if needed.

So, even though I have to write my sermon again. And even though I am crammed for time to do it before Sunday, I am thankful that I feel fairly confident that I own the message and have the big idea (and most of the points) in my head… Owning the message is imperative for our audience, but I found out today how helpful it is to write the same sermon again!

For now, here are 5 simple things I do in my writing process to help me “own” the message:

1) Pray: Obvious, yes. Crucial, for sure! Good prayer time saves time!  It’s easier to discern what God is wanting me to say. So often it’s easy to jump into research or even writing without considering what direction The Holy Spirit might want me to look in.  

2) Prepare: Lots of reading of commentaries around the passage or topic. (This really helps to solidify what I own and know). I use Logos for Mac.

3) Plan a Map: This is where I outline a starting and ending point for my message. In many ways, we take people on a journey with us. It’s important that we consider how to get them on the journey, how to keep them on the journey, and how they land at their destination.

4) Put it Together: I don’t write every word, I write an outline that is a detailed version of my map. (This is the part that is lost on my hard drive at the Apple Store).

5) Practice: This is perhaps my best way to own the message and internalize God’s Truth for myself as I preach. It also helps me to iron out transitions and make tweaks as I go. When I practice, I actually talk out the whole message from start to finish. I particularly focus on the take off and landing…

So, there you go. Not rocket science, but perhaps you have struggled in putting sermons together in the past. These 5 points really help me a great deal. Hope they can help you too in case you don’t backup your sermon as you write it!

Phil <><

UPDATE:

  • My Macbook Pro will be in repair for a few days getting a new hard drive
  • I backed up my Macbook 3 weeks ago…
  • I started using a our student ministry Macbook Pro to finish my sermon… It crashed. Not kidding. Can’t get the thing to work!
  • I wrote this post on my lovely wife’s laptop. Unfortunately the laptop is not very lovely. I need to buy her a new one!

What is Youth Ministry?

July 7, 2011 in Review what we do with 2 Comments

A couple of days ago my good Canadian friend Andy Disher asked the question on Facebook: “What is Youth Ministry? What isn’t Youth Ministry?” Great question Andy! A number of us gave our responses and you can see some of them over at Andy’s blog: AndyDisher.com. In addition, you might want to check out Andy Blanks post over at YM360.com and a post by Paul Martin over at BeingMinistry.com . Great reads!

For now, I think I could be thinking and writing about this question for a couple of weeks. I don’t think I can channel all my ADD thoughts into one post. Therefore, here’s a snapshot of some of the big chunks I have written about before that I consider youth ministry to be about. Let me know what you think?

1) Jesus Centered - Without Jesus being our center for all we do, we might as well be a club. I am sure that we all say that we are Jesus centered, but let’s be honest… It only takes a short while to get back to “what we know” and depend on our methods and skills. Soon, Jesus is taking a back seat. Numbers can increase, accolades can be given, but Jesus is the only one who will bring lasting change to our students lives.

2) Student Focused - Being student focused means taking a lot of time to get into their world and listen. Again, so often, it is easy to resort back to what we know and what has worked in the past. However, I find that God moves best when I listen to the heart of my students and what God is saying through them. In many ways, it’s similar to what Rick Warren says and how we should be catching the wave of what God is doing, rather than trying to create the wave. Some of our best events, service projects, and Bible studies have been a part of, have come from students.

3) A Greenhouse for Self-Feeders – I have a series coming up in a couple of weeks to talk about this more, but for now let me say this: Unless we are helping students to learn to become self-feeders who spend time with God when they are not with us, we are missing the point. Are we helping students to develop life-long habits to help them feed on God’s love, truth, and wisdom, or are they dependent on a weekly youth group meeting? If students are consumed with our weekly meeting but are spiritually starving during the week, we have missed the point… Just my opinion of course. More to come in a couple of weeks on this…

4) Parent Partnered – Parents spend so much more time with their kids than I do. So many parents under estimate their impact on their kids too. I firmly believe that I should do all I can to make parents the hero to their kids, not me. The more that I can encourage, support, and equip parents at home, should result in greater growth and impact for our students. If I am honest, this is one component I see to lacking in so many ministries. Personally, I am not happy with how much we currently do… It is a goal of mine this year to partner with parents in greater ways…

What is Youth Ministry to you? What did I miss? There’s a whole lot, I know! For now, these are my big chunks… What are yours? Post your comments!

Phil <><

5 Things I am Doing After A Missions Trip

June 28, 2011 in Leadership, Review what we do with 4 Comments

At the weekend I returned from a week-long mission trip to Eastern Tennessee with an incredible team of students and leaders. It was a fantastic trip and our debrief on Friday saw students and leaders share some powerful God moments! Now that I am home, here are 5 things I am doing:

1) Spending Quality Time With My Family: I am off for two days,  which also means my phone is off, my Facebook is closed, and my email has not been touched. I was away from my family for a week and I was busy prior to the trip. Therefore it’s imperative they get the best of me now that I am home. (As I write this, my kids are in bed, and my wife is working, which means no time away from them, just in case you wondered :-) . Giving my family my best and complete attention is imperative. While I was away doing exciting things in Tennessee, they were back home missing me. Therefore, they should not have to “miss” me now that I am home…

2) Rest: Working everyday for 16 hours over a week can take its toll… I loved every minute, but I was beat when I returned home. Leading a large team of students and leaders meant being “on call” continuously. My goal this week is to spend time “calling on Him” and rejuvenating.

3) Thank You Notes: So many incredible people gave so much to make this trip happen, especially a dedicated team of volunteers who took time off work and their own families for the week. It’s imperative that I let them know how much I appreciate them! When I get back into the office, this is a priority for me.

4) Making Videos, Sharing Photos, Telling the Stories: After the trip is over, it’s imperative that parents and supporters continue to hear the stories of what was achieved on the trip. Again, once I get back in the office, I will be working on sharing videos, photos and stories. We have a Facebook page and mission trip blog for this type of stuff and we will also have an opportunity to share with the whole church at later date.

5) Reviewing: This week I will be writing notes about the trip and ensuring that key learning’s are noted while they are still fresh for me. So often this is something that is missed in the mission trip process. However, this is a crucial step that can ensure a more effective mission trip for the future.

UPDATED:

Well, there is one very important thing I missed out of this list that my wife has reminded me of… Today, I am finishing up my laundry and getting my bags all unpacked. The last thing my lovely wife needs when I get home is a huge load of stinky, bug infested laundry, (we had a lot of bugs in our cabins… a Daddy Long Legs walked across my face one night… nice)!

What are priorities for you when you return from a mission trip?

Phil <><

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