Ministry Best Practice from Troy Fountain, Lead Pastor of Wiregrass Church, Dothan Alabama. I promised Troy I would blog about this. So here goes.

Have you ever noticed that anytime you throw something away, a week doesn’t go by before you need what you just threw away?

Best Practice: if you throw something away, don’t empty the trashcan for a week. That way if you need it, you can pull it out of the trashcan. If a week goes by and you don’t need it—empty your trashcan.

This could revolutionize your ministry. I foresee that some tech savvy person could figure out how to apply this to digital files as well.

This is the best part of about conferences—nuggets of truth in the hallways. This is why I go to Orange Conference.

Much love to my North Point Strategic Partner friends

All leaders are learners, but not all leaders plan their learning.

What’s in your queue? Some of us know more about what’s in our Netflix queue than what’s in our reading queue.

Call me old fashioned but I still believe that much of what we need is in a book out there somewhere. But, I’m still shocked how many leaders don’t do much reading. We like to ridicule those with only book knowledge, but what about those with only experience knowledge—i.e. their own uninformed experience. As leaders we are asked to make decisions on a moments notice. Evaluate a situation and give direction. Our ability to come up with a creative solution often has to do with the repertoire of answers we have available to us. We can glean those answers from our own experience, but we should also be looking for ways to broaden that experience. Maybe even utilize the experience of others. Let’s face it our own experience only gives us a small list of options. What if you could access the experience of others? Great books do that.

Just recently, while reading Accidental Creative by Todd Henry, I found three great questions to help you populate your reading queue. Here are Henry’s questions:

Where are you lacking information that you will need over the next three months?

What are you curious about right now?

What would be good for you?

For a long time I’ve kept a queue of books that I plan to read. Anytime I run across a good book, usually the recommendation of a friend or a reference in a book I’m already reading, I add it to a running note in my iphone.

Here is a sample of what’s in my queue right now:

Just Finished Reading:

Start with Why—Simon Sinek

Accidental Creative: Todd Henry

Hunger Games Trilogy: Suzanne Collins

Currently Reading:

Switch—Dan Heath

Quitter—Jon Acuff

Family Evaluation—Michael Kerr

18 Minutes—Peter Bregman

The Experience Economy: Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore.

Stretch—Jim Wideman

Necessary Endings: Henry Cloud

Just for Fun:

The Lord of the Rings—J.R.R. Tolkien (Rereading this)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Reading these to my kids right now.)

Hope to read soon:

Anna Karenina (New translation—loved these translators’ version of Crime and Punishment.)

What’s in your queue?

I’ve had several people ask about getting information on the breakout I did at San Diego called Why Children Are the Most Important People in the Church–Everything you wish your senior pastor knew about Children’s Ministry.

So here is the information you are looking for.

Why Children are the Most Important People in the Children

Breakout Audio (MP3–I fixed the audio so that it is a littler clearer than what you may have bought at CPC)

Seasons of the Soul

Thanks for coming to my breakout.

I’m attending the Children’s Pastors’ Conference in Orlando and promised people attending my breakouts that I would put some resources online.  So here you go.

Breakout: I’m Not Creative: Leading people who don’t think they are creative.

I’m Not Creative Presentation Slides  (I use prezi.com.  Click the link to the left.  You have to sign up for a free account to download it.)

Breakout: Why Children are the Most Important People in Your Church

Why Children are the Most Important People in the Church Presentation Slides

Seasons of the Soul Handout

If you are looking for more information about the breakouts email me.  Or come to the Children’s Pastors’ Conference in San Diego.

Most people decide to follow Jesus between the ages of 4-14.  This has been called the 4-14 Window.  And if you are in church ministry being mindful of this window could be the most important thing you do.  It is certainly why I believe that kidmin is the most important ministry of the church.

Kidmin is the most important ministry of the church.

I think that the 14-24 Window may be the next most important.   While many decide to follow Jesus between 4-14, what their lives will look like, whether they will be fully devoted followers of Christ or just church attenders, whether they will be spiritual champions or spiritual second-handers is largely shaped by the decisions they make between ages 14-24.   This is a monumental time in a person’s life that we cannot afford to neglect.

The evidence seems to bear out—that the church at large is not doing a very good job at this. In fact it was suggested in a recent article that we shouldn’t really be concerned with this age group at all.  Instead, we should just chalk it up to stage of life and wait until they come back to the church in their mid-thirties.  The short sightedness of this article made my toes curl.  Most of the people I know who are in ministry today made decisions to commit their lives to service between 14-24. We are seriously impacting the future leaders of the Kingdom of God by neglecting this age group.

The most important aim we can have for 14-24 year olds is helping them find their place in God’s Story—helping them commit their lives to meaningful service in the Kingdom of God.

Here are just a few foundational things churches can do to leverage this spiritual window.

1. Connect youth with mature Christian adults.  The more the better.  Check out Family Based Youth Ministry by Mark Devries.

2. Get 14-24 year olds in circles.  Real small groups where a mature Christian adult is investing in a small group of students every week.  Better yet, have this person travel with them through high school and college.  Yes, even through college.

3. Don’t let ministry end at graduation. The average 18 year old will be making most of their most life altering decisions in the first few years of college.  Most youth are virtually abandoned on graduation day.

4. Incorporate 20somethings into a total ministry strategy from birth through 25.  So much is wasted because Children’s Ministry, Youth Ministry and College Ministry leaders don’t play well together.  The bodies left in the gaps between these silos is staggering.  We must come together and develop a unified strategy.

5. Think beyond your curriculum.   The destination of a series of classes or a curriculum is more knowledge.  More knowledge and more classes cannot be a substitute for people doing life together.

6. Youth and 20somethings must have a sense of belonging in the church not just the youth ministry.  Check out this interview with Chuck Bomar.

7. Help youth find their place in God’s Story.

8. Connect the Church and home.  What happens at home always trumps what happens at church.

Just in the last year there have been several books written on the topic of youth leaving the church.  Among them You Lost Me by David Kinnamen at the Barna Group; Slow Fade by Reggie Joiner, Chuck Bomar and Abbie Smith; Sticky Faith by Kara Powell.  The topic of youth leaving the church is perennial—that is it seems to be a topic that pops up in cycles.  (Check out my post on an article called Why Do Teenagers Drop Out? From Teach Magazine Summer of 1963.)  While it draws a lot of statistical studies the truth is, for those of us in youth ministry it’s personal.  We know the kids who walked away from church and faith.  They are more than numbers they are faces.

This last week I had the opportunity to corner Chuck Bomar and ask him some questions about why youth drop out and what the church can do about it.

How do you create belonging in your church?

I ran across this article a few months ago while looking through some old Teach Magazines.  You can download it here Why Do Teens Drop Out? Teach Magazine Summer 1963

The article cites three reasons for teens dropping out of church:

1. Not enough activity  I.e. most environments were sit and soak environments—youth wanted to be involved, they wanted relational environments.  They wanted to connect with their peers in meaningful ways.

2. Adult hypocrisy—leaders/teachers were not prepared, not invested, or more invested in transferring information than transforming a life.

3. Boredom and lack of challenge—youth were looking for real life connections between their life and the Bible

Do any of these things resonate with you?

Check out the final summary:

Two overall impressions gained from tabulating survey results were that dropouts were saying in effect:  1) “I’m here, but unused.  Give me something to do;” 2) “I’m here, but you aren’t hitting me with God’s Word.  Your shots are off target.”  Churches today need dedicated spiritually strong leaders who know how to reach young people with God’s Word and use them to His glory (and their satisfaction).  It is one of the greatest needs of the hour.

It was true back then and it still is today.

There are over 4 million children living in the non-urban villages of Cameroon—an African country the size of California. They speak over 270 different languages.  In their churches, children’s programs are rare, children’s teachers are rarer and tools and resources are rarer still.

With the help of Wycliffe the Bible is being translated into several of the indigenous languages.  However, Chris Johnson saw that most churches in Cameroon don’t have teachers and they don’t have tools. Wycliffe in partnership with 1 for 50 has a goal of training at least one teacher for every 50 kids.   He also saw the need for children’s materials to teach kids the Bible in their own language in an age appropriate way.  So he is working on a project to create 52 lessons based upon the Gospel of Luke.  These will be the first children’s Bible lessons ever written in their mother tongue.

Few teachers! No tools! The first Bible lessons! This floored me.

From here I could go several directions.  The easiest would be to talk about how crazy spoiled we are.  Seriously—how many curriculum choices do I have to choose from?  There are enough free resources online that I can create several years’ worth of curriculum.  It’s all at my fingertips, and I can put my lesson together on Saturday night and print it out for Sunday morning on my own desktop printer.  But this is not the direction I want to go.

We have everything we need to do the best we can.

When I see how little they have, and I see how much we have—yes, we should give; we should do whatever we can to help—but, here’s something just as big:  Out of respect for the little they have and the much we have, mediocrity on our part is inexcusable.  We have people who can be teachers. We have excellent resources.  We have everything we need to do the best we can.  We have what many people around the world will never have.  Out of respect for them we should be creating the best environments, training the best teachers, creating the best curriculums, the best resources and the best programs.  Anything less is inexcusable.

We have a responsibility to do the best we can with what we have out of respect for the rest of the world that doesn’t have what we have and can’t do what we do. 

You can give to the Cameroon Project and Chris Johnson’s ministry here.

In 2008 I planted a church (along with a team of people), in 2010 I closed that same church.  I often get asked about how a person processes something like that.  Really the best answer to that question is: “You do.”  It gets complicated with things like “calling” and gifting, God’s Will, God’s sovereignty.  And in church world we probably over complicate this.

Last night I was reading “Concerning the Our Father” by Simone Weil.  BTW you can only read so much of Simone Weil at a time, because it will wreck you.  Here is a quote that expresses where I am at in my best moments:

We have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else.  We have to do so, not because what has happened is good in our eyes, but because God has permitted it, and because the obedience of the course of events to God is in itself an absolute good.

Powerful!  The rest is worth reading.

Measured on the dial, an hour a week to prepare a life for eternity is too brief a time to allow one wasted moment or one careless touch upon a soul.  Henrietta Mears

Let’s face it, the amount of time we have with a kid is not growing.  Once you take away vacation and sick days we probably only have 40 hours a year with our most faithful kids.  And, when I look at all of the non-purposeful unstructured time in many Sunday kidmin programs, we could have much less than that.  One estimate puts actual teaching time at only 17 minutes on an average Sunday.  That would be less than 12 hours per year.   The mission of leading kids to Jesus and the limited amount of time we have to do so each week, demands that we become intentional about every minute we have with our kids.

When “Sunday’s coming” it is easy to get into thinking “How am I going to fill the time?” versus “How am I going to leverage the limited time I have?”  If leveraging the limited time you have with kids each week is important, I think the best thing we can do to make every minute count is to clarify what a win looks like at every level.  A win is what are we aiming for in everything that we do.

Clarify the Win

In baseball, there may be all kinds of “wins” like strike outs, catching fly balls, tagging a runner out etc. .  . but the difference between a winning team and a losing team boils down to one thing: how many runners cross home plate.  The ultimate goal is to get as many people to cross home plate as possible. That’s it.

Define the “win” of your kidmin:  If you only accomplished one thing what would it be? 

Just like baseball, kidmin has wins. If you only accomplished one thing what would it be? You can define the win for kidmin itself, every program, every part of that program, every event, every volunteer role, every department.  A good place to start is defining the win for all of kidman.

A “win” is not a mission statement.

A “win” is more than a mission statement.  Mission statements tend to be broad and all encompassing: “We exist to magnify God by loving others the way Christ loved us to develop every person’s gifts to fulfill the great commission to reach the lost in Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth . . .”  That may be a great mission statement.  It says a lot of things.  A “win” is an irreducible minimum.  If we could only do one thing what would it be?

Here’s a great kidmin win: when a kid takes the next step in a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.  That’s a win.

What it might look like: It could be the first time an unchurched kid comes to your church.  That’s a win. When a kid expresses an interest in following Christ.  That’s a win.  When a kid is open and transparent for the first time in a small group and a small group leader is able to speak God’s truth into that child’s life in a deeply personal and life transforming way.  That’s a win.  All of those are steps in a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

Defining the win at this level will help you prioritize your ministry.  If you can’t clearly define how something you are doing, whether it’s a program, an event, or a part of a program helps a child take the next step in a growing relationship with Jesus Christ, it might just be something that you should stop doing.  Here’s where you can begin making a list of things not to do.

A great resource for more on this topic is 7 Practices of Effective Ministry

In my next post, I will talk about what wins might look like for a Sunday Morning program.

What’s your ministry win?