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Your role as a ministry manager isn’t just to plan programs and teach students. Successful ministry largely lies in your ability to properly manage a group of volunteers.
Take five minutes and identify which category each of your volunteers is happiest in:
What are some ways you can vary what each volunteer contributes to reflect how God has gifted them?
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A couple weeks ago I shared a post about discipleship that raised some questions about how we do things in our student ministry. Most of the comments were affirmative. Some of the more critical questions which arose required some follow-up.
With that in mind, I grabbed a few moments with Chris and Kathy, our staff members who run the New Heights Project to drill down into some of the questions that came up.
One additional thought. The thing that freaked most people out was the concept of intentionally hiring a mix of Christian and non-Christian students as interns. Every church I’ve ever done ministry with had students help in ministry areas who weren’t Christians. Any ministry leader is fully aware of that same fact. The only thing that is different here is that we’ve made it part of our strategy. Typically, ministry leaders know it but don’t acknowledge it because we’re talking about children of church members.
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A few weeks ago I mentioned something our youth ministry does over the summer. We hire a group of high school students to run our children’s ministry outreach program. Here’s a highlight video they showed in church at the end of their experience.
I’m so thankful for the impact these students had on our community! Of course, they didn’t do it alone. The whole staff of Harbor was fully engaged as well as a big crew of adults from the church as well as some other missionaries from InterVarsity’s urban project.
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Photo by ekai via Flickr (Creative Commons)
About 10 months ago a group of people sat on Chris’ back porch talking about starting a youth ministry for our church, Harbor Mid-City. As we chatted, dreamt, and prayed about this ministry one of the things that came out was… “We want it to be a safe place for students to explore a relationship with Jesus.”
That phrase stuck. It actually became a part of our ministry description which we recite during every meeting. “IOB is a safe place for students to explore a relationship with Jesus.”
That phrase got tested a bit last night.
Stephen, our teaching/senior pastor, came to youth group last night to teach on and invite students to participate in baptism. His teaching was pretty simple… this is what baptism is, this is what it symbolizes, this is who should get baptized, this is how our church does it, we’d love it if you would consider getting baptized. He did a great job.
I could tell during his teaching time that some students were uneasy about this whole thing. They didn’t feel safe. It wasn’t that Stephen was teaching anything bad or that they were intimidated in any way or even that he was manipulating them to make a decision they didn’t want to make– there was just something about the truths of Scripture that Stephen was saying that gave the room a funny, rare vibe.
You could see it in their posture. You could see it in the way they looked at him. You could see it in the way they listened to his talk.
To follow-up, we broke up into small groups and the leaders were asked to dig a little deeper with the students and ask if any of them would like to be baptized.
Three responses from my circle that tested me in my response.
Mince no words. These were questions that pushed me back to that discussion 10 months before. Was IOB really a safe place to explore Jesus? If so, how I responded either validated that statement or invalidated it.
Open questions for readers:
What would be answers to these responses which would communicate that IOB isn’t a safe place?
What would be some “this is a safe place” answers to these questions?
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