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?
Somewhere along the way ministry became a desk jockey job.
When I read the book of Acts and even the pastoral epistles I get the idea that being a pastor was action packed.
Even if you go back 50 years the pastoral staff wasn’t all about programs and project managing. They were out in the commnity visiting elderly, the sick, and doing house calls. If the staff had an office it was for study. If the staff met it was for prayer. There was an administrative staff that did admin work and project management. Not pastors. Pastors were out doing, not sitting behind a desk.
But somewhere between there and here all ministry jobs became something else. If we’re honest the ministry job became 75% administrative and 25% ministry on a good day. New people in a church always say the same thing... this isn’t what I thought it would be.
At least once per week someone will ask me if I miss working in the local church. The truth of the matter is that I have the same level of contact with high school students today as I had in nearly a decade of full-time church ministry as a youth pastor. I’m not in a rush to go from actually doing ministry to riding a desk in the office and talking about ministry. If I ever accepted a call to a church again, the role would be radically different… or else I’d go insane.
But for many people the jobs that pay are boring.
Too many meetings and not enough ministry. Office hours and office gossip and office meetings and trying to look busy.
The goal is all jacked up. Where does the desk jockey model lead too? More desk jockeys running more complicated programs. We need to rebel against it because we know where this leads. With less than 10% of the population actively engaged in a local church… seriously, we know the current way of doing things doesn’t work!
Stop it.
Radical change is required in the way church staff operates to reverse the trend.
We don’t need a revival. We need full-time ministers to do full-time ministry.
Exceptions: No doubt, there are objectors to my generalization. That’s the nature of hyperbole, isn’t it? But at the same time compare the hours per week that your own church spends in the office vs. the amount of time the New Testament church did. They didn’t even have an office! So it was 0%. The biblical model is 0%. God’s Word is true, right? God is unchanging and unchangeable? Did I miss the memo in my Bible? How can we justify 50%, 75%, or 90% of our hours doing office work?
Church, we have an office problem. (Misappropriation of funds if you ask me.) And if we want to reach more than the 10% we currently reach, we need to change or watch that 10% shrink to 5%. We know where this leads.
Stop what you are doing and think about a new way.
Follow the church planters. That’s where the growth happens, right?
Close the church office. Morph your ministry staff into field agents. Tell your team to go out and visit the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, teach the Bible “out there,” and minister to the widows and orphans. The pastoral epistles give us a pretty good vision for what to do. The reality is that we don’t want to do the job laid out there.
Remove the office temptation and lease the office space. Pastors who are lazy will just set up offices in coffee shops or their homes. Fire them. If the church is to change, we will need agents of change and not desk jockeys.
Church planters do it every day. It’s funny that they come up with all sorts of fancy statistics as to why they think their new plants stop growing after 12-18 months. Maybe it’s not the movement that slows, missiologically. Maybe it’s the staff that stops trying and starts with office hours?
As I mentioned last week, our garden severely over-produced yellow cherry tomatoes, leading to the great tomato apocalpyse of 2010. With more than 5 lbs of tomatoes and no one willing to eat them in sight, we decided to get creative about preserving them.
Here’s how we made sun-dried tomatoes.
This is a pretty simple project. You’ll just need a clean workspace and a sharp knife. We also found a window screen in the garage, which we hosed off the night before to get it ready.
If you are working with cherry tomatoes, cutting them in half worked just fine. If you are working with Roma or any other full sized tomato, I’d recommend cutting them into 1 inch wide chunks. (Keep them even, you’ll be cooking with these later, and even sizes will help.)
We had about 5 lbs to cut and it took us 10 minutes with 2 people. If you are using full-sized tomatoes go ahead and remove the seeds as they’ll just slow the drying process. But with smaller ones we didn’t bother and it didn’t seem to matter.
Dice up some fresh herbs, mix them in by hand, and let the mixture sit for about 20 minutes. (Set up step 4 while this all stews)
For our sun-dried tomatoes we added in some garden fresh rosemary and basil. This added a nice flavor and an incredible smell.
Drying vegitables outside is an ancient food preservation technique. Chances are good that if you live in a sunny climate, you won’t have a problem drying fruits and vegitables out in the open. You can basically dry stuff anywhere that is hot and dry. So inside a car on a summer day works. As does your oven at 150 degrees for several hours. As does a food dehydrator.
We live in San Diego, it was especially sunny and hot, and the summer made for a long day of sunshine. So we opted to try the outdoor method. We placed an extra window screen we found in the garage on our garden table, propped up by 4 matching clay pots. It wasn’t fancy but it was free and best of all, it worked brilliantly!
Spread them out evenly on the screen. We found that it was useful to seperate them as much as possible so try to break up the little piles as best you can.
This isn’t a very exciting process. But every couple hours go out and check on them. It really does help them dry faster to flip them and bounce them around a little bit. They have a tendency to stick to the screen, so you’ll be pealing a flipping a bit the first few hours. I set a timer so I would only check on them hourly, taking pictures every time.
Note about flies: We were worried about our local hummingbird or other birds taking notice and feasting when we weren’t looking. That didn’t happen, but we did attract a few flies with the sweet, savory smell. For our purposes this didn’t matter because we knew we’d be cooking these. But if that bothers you then you’ll need to build some one to seal this process off from bugs.
For us, by the time we came back from a family trip to the beach, the sun had gone down and they were done. In climates where it isn’t quite so warm you may need to store your rack inside overnight and leave them outside a second day.
They are done when they stop feeling sticky. Some of them we a bit crispy, but most of them were gummy but not overly sticky. If you do yellow tomatoes you’ll see that they darken significantly. If you are using red, you’ll see them get a very deep red when done.
We emptied our drying rack and stored our bounty into several ziplock bags. 5 lbs of tomatoes made about 1.5 pounds of sun-dried tomatoes which we broke up into 5 bags. We put one in the fridge because we knew we’d use it right away and we froze the rest.
The next day we enjoyed a delicious pasta dish with a sun-dried tomato and onion base.
Let us know how it went for you. And happy drying!
OK, I thought this was funny. If you don’t get it here is the original that this is mocking.
A youth worker in Minnesota asked me to share my definition of worship with her as part of a lesson she’s preparing for her youth group. I thought it’d be fun to post my response to her (with her permission) for a couple of reasons.
I think the English word for worship is limiting versus what God asks of us. So I break up the act of worship into a bunch different categories. (Not limited to this list)
- We come together to worship God in community.
- We spend time in prayer, fasting, song, reading of Scripture individually.
- Our work is worship.
- Our attitude is worship.
- When I give my talents and treasure to God, that is an act of worship.
- When I journal, that is worship.
- When I am alone with my wife, that is worship.
- Everything I do… I can do as worship of God.
Now, how do I define worship? Worship is any intentional human actions which bring glory and honor to God.
What do you think? Is the intention what makes an act worship? Or have I overstated what worship can be?
New pastors quickly learn that ministry life is full of big questions.
Questions that make you feel very small and insignificant. Questions that make God feel massively huge and almost out of reach. Questions that are so loaded and full of pain that they prime tears just to get the words out. Questions that have layers and layers of answers.
Questions in which the answers will define a persons walk with Jesus for years to come.
In those moments it is tempting to rattle off a pat answer. Or the denominations party line. Or what the board would rule as the right answer. Or something you read in a book. Or what you think the person wants to hear. Or a mechanical theological opinion.
Why did my dad die?
I don’t know.
Why did God chose me to get this disease?
I don’t know.
Was I born gay?
I don’t know.
Why did God allow my parents to divorce?
I don’t know.
Why can’t I have children and all my friends can?
I don’t know.
Why can’t the Cubs win the World Series or Brett Favre stay retired?
I don’t know.
Why did I lose my job?
I don’t know.
Why does God answer some people’s prayers but not mine?
I don’t know.
The list never ends. It gets longer and deeper every day.
I’ve found that when someone comes to me with a big question like that they really do need to know the answer to that question. But my responsibility, and what is ultimately helpful for them, isn’t to give them “my answer.”
I’ve found it most helpful in those situations to comfort, console, reaffirm, and point them to Jesus as the author, answer, and hope for those big questions.
With those questions I always point them to Scripture. I always make time to pray with them. I always follow-up later. I always affirm where the Bible is clear on a topic and where it isn’t. I always look in their eyes and say, “I do know this, that God always shows up. He always loves you. His ways aren’t always meant to be known by you.”
But my first response is almost always, “I don’t know.”
I bring this up because it is incredibly easy to pretend to have all the answers. As if, a seminary degree is permission to have all the answers. It makes you feel powerful. It makes you feel like you know what you are talking about. It feels good when people come to you with big questions.
But the role of a pastor is not to be the Bible Answer Man or to just to give the hard, cold facts. (There is a place for that, for sure. But an initial meeting isn’t it.) More often, our job to point people wandering the desert in their pain, sorrow, and longing to the Grace Giver. To the only answer to life’s hard questions. To remind them that no matter what, Jesus thought they were worth dying for.
It was very hard to leave Jimmy and Ashley behind in Romeo when we moved to San Diego two years ago. In the last year he transitioned from Michigan to the Houston area and is working full-time for a church plant called, Thrive.
There are probably a lot of very intelligent people who know how to judge a worship leader better than me. But Jimmy exhibits all the qualities I’m looking for.
So, that’s why I like Jimmy. He’s a good dude. I’m stoked for his album to [finally] come out. I hope a bagillion people book him for shows, camps, and stuff like that. And one day he will be such a big deal that he’ll finish a song and his guitar guy will walk onto stage and hand him a new one.
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.