Much of what we do in children’s ministry involves equipping parents with tools for their most important job: parenting. Communication is a key aspect of parenting, so it’s important that we provide opportunities for parents to learn to communicate more effectively with their children. What a better time to do this than the beginning of…
When it comes to church and youth ministry, numbers matter. They aren’t all that matters though. The question isn’t should we count; it’s what should we count? I don’t see this as a tension to resolve as much as it is a tension to manage. Churches that are anti numbers tend to be uninformed and…
Hiring is hard, yet necessary. Few things are more important to the sustainability of a ministry than hiring the right people. Nevertheless, hiring the right people is difficult while finding the wrong ones is easier than catching the common cold. According to Craig Groeschel, the potential of an organization rests on the strength of its people….
Take heart, don’t lose heart. Have you ever found yourself discouraged in ministry? If you’ve been serving in ministry for more than eleven days, I’m going to guess that your answer is “yes”! I hit an all-time low several years ago. The church was growing, and we had just opened a new facility, but volunteers…
I was recently meeting with a ministry director who had been through a bit of a tough year. From an outsider’s perspective, his ministry was going well. Kids were involved and growing in their faith. Volunteers were showing up, engaged and leading with excitement. Yet something was a bit off. This director was leading several…
No one warned us that we’d get mad at our church. You would hope that church work would be different, right? But church people are still people, and when the stakes are high and emotions are higher, most of us do a lousy job at holding a constructive conversation. The authors of “Crucial Conversations” say…
Most leaders lead backwards. The problem is they don’t know it. Until they figure it out and do something about it though, they will never lead up to their full potential. Last October, I accepted a new job. It was at a bigger church than I had ever served at and came with more responsibility…
There I was, sitting across a desk from an eager youth pastor (I’ll call her Cindy). We had just spent a few days with her church and prepared a youth ministry assessment report. The presentation went over like gangbusters. People were excited because we put a plan together to help them put effective systems and…