by Chase | Kid Min, Leadership, Student Min
Staying connected to great thinkers is essential for church leaders. Church and ministry hashtags allow you to build a tribe of thinkers.
In the olden days, the only opportunities you had to glean from respected leaders was to read books, have meetings, or enroll in classes. Conferences were few. Communication was expensive. Opportunities were limited.
For today’s church leaders, social media has opened opportunities that were never possible before the internet. Now church leaders can stay connect with their tribe for encouragement, ideas, and development. While sitting down at a coffee shop with leaders is necessary, utilizing twitter list, Pinterest boards, and connecting with leaders on Facebook bring relevant conversations straight to your phone with little effort or energy.
To aide in your search for a tribe, here are the top ministry hashtags.
Top Ministry Hashtags:
Ministry
Children’s Ministry
#ThinkOrange (The Orange group is awesome! This is a great hashtag for all family ministries.)
Student Ministry
Pastors
Church Technology/Media
Discipleship
Missions
Trying to search for each of these hashtags would be a major undertaking. My suggestion would be to follow some key leaders in each of these areas and add them to a custom made twitter list. That way, you will see the activity on your timeline without having so search through hundreds of tweets.
What other hashtags would you add to this list?
by Chase | Kid Min, Leadership, Student Min
In the hustle of getting things done in ministry, it’s easy to overlook one of the most important tasks: encouraging volunteers.
As a leader, the tasks at hand will want to consume every second of your attention. There are always more customers to please, more products to sell, more deals to close, and more people to reach. Being successful directly depends on how effectively you lead.
Without encouragement you will not develop your team.
Without a robust team, you will not succeed.
Everyone needs vision, hope, and empowerment. Taking time to encourage your team, volunteers, co-workers or employees develops confidence and energy.
I have found that the best encouragement is three-dimensional.
- Individual – Encouragement is gentle and up-lifting. Make sure that you are praising individuals in unique ways. An all-call “Thank-You” after an event is ok, but make sure your leaders are getting personal encouragements.
- Public – Praising someone in front of others has a lasting impact. When you see quality work, creative ideas, or longevity of service, publicly praise those people. It will encourage them to continue in the ministry and also provide an example that others can follow.
- Habitual – Once a year or once a quarter when crunch time hits isn’t enough. You have to create a habit of regularly sending cards, posts, and recognizing great workers. While some encouragements can creative, it is hard to beat a phone call and handwritten card.
So take some time to encourage those around you who are laboring with you or for you.
How you encourage is up to you, but make sure everyone feels appreciated for the energy and effort that they have given to help you out.
What are some ways you encourage your leaders and volunteers?
by Chase | How To, Student Min
Trying something new pushes you outside of your comfort zone. Some experiences are great (riding a roller coaster). While others are miserable (riding a roller coaster after eating Taco Bell).
For youth leaders, we often forget that visiting a church is a huge deal for a middle or high school student. While many of us have welcome centers, visitor card, and free t-shirts for new students, the culture of our ministries can overlook the simple ways a student needs to feel connected.
Here are two essential experiences that every visiting student needs:
1. Students Want to Be Noticed
Nothing says, “You don’t matter to us or Jesus” better than when a student is not spoken to within the first five minutes of their arrival. They want to be noticed by the adults and other students. They want to share their name, their grade in school, and their hobbies. Both introverts and extroverts desire to be seen and spoken to. This goes beyond a non-personal greeting time during the service (many of us are in a unannounced competition to see how many hands you can shake…) to creating a hospitable culture where students are noticed.
What systems do you have in place to ensure your adult leaders and students are engaging first time visitors?
2. Students Want to Be Known
How many times have you walked up to a student, who you are positive is a visitor, and found out that you have met him before and have forgotten your entire encounter with this person?
Nothing says, “You aren’t important to us or Jesus” quite like forgetting who the student is. After you meet a student and learn her name and school, it is imperative that you remember that information for the next time you see her.
Greeting a first-time student isn’t enough — we must remember his name when he is a second-time visitor.
I know this is near impossible when you have a large amount of visitors, but your leadership team must find several ways to ensure students are known when they attend your group for a second time.
by Chase | Student Min
As our summer student ministry schedule started an elderly man in our church approached me and said, “I hope you enjoy all of the vacations the church is paying for you to take this summer.”
How do you respond to this one!?
The only thing I could say is, “I will enjoy every minute of it! I’m praying that none of your grandchildren try to make out with another student while we are at the beach.”
Being a student pastor means you have a crazy schedule. Between the tags for events, retreats, emergencies, your own family schedule, and your church responsibilities your Google calendar looks like a rainbow threw up on it.
We would be naive to think this busyness is isolated to ministers – everyone is searching for a few more minutes to get things done.
In an effort to simplify our student and kid ministry calendars, I have re-visioned our key events – and dropped some of the non-essentials.
If we say our church wants to create environments for families to win, but expect them to spend every extra minute serving someone else’s kids, our families lose.
Doing less events often translates into more spiritual and numerical growth.
How we simplified our retreat/camp schedule
Our church said that the student ministry schedule was accomplishing a variety of ministry purposes, but when I took a closer look, I discovered that we over purposed each event. If a retreat was established to focus on fellowship we would also add in aspects to serve, evangelize, disciple, and leadership development. While all of these are needed in student ministry, they are not all needed in the same weekend! The event’s identity is lost, the students are confused, and the leaders are busying trying to make 20 things happen. But in the end, we were not doing many things well.
So, we asked 2 questions for each event:
- What is it’s purpose?
- Does it fit in our vision/mission?
This helped us to refocus, re-evaluate, and reschedule our student ministry calendar.
After many conversations we decided to implement the below schedule into our ministry. While this schedule works for our church and context, this might not work for you. Before you cut your schedule in half, make sure you are asking plenty of questions — you might be surprised which events need to stay on your calendar.
3 (Overnight) Camps Per Year
Spring – Discipleship Now
Purpose: Evangelism
Duration: 3 days/2 nights
(This is high energy and extremely welcoming for outsiders. This is by far our biggest event of the year.)
Summer – Summer Camp
Purpose: Discipleship
Duration: 5 days/4 nights
(Our summer camp schedule is divided into a beach camp for high schoolers and an adventure camp for middle schoolers.)
Fall – Fall Retreat
Purpose: Fellowship
Duration: 3 days/2 nights
(We have simplified even further and created a middle school only retreat while high schoolers attend a big one-day event in the fall.)
Bonus: International Mission Trip
Purpose: Mission/Service
Duration: 8 days/7 nights
(This is for middle and high school students. Typically limited to 25 total people. Because of the expense and distance, I tend to view this as a separate type of event.)
Every month we will add in a theme night, kickball tournament, or free food to keep momentum between events. This event schedule has allowed us to maximize our budget to create bigger, more focused events.
How do you organize your student ministry calendar?
