Renew Your Vision With a Reset

Visioning is art. 

With this understanding, we can see why creating and sharing vision is such a challenge for so many leaders.

When you create art, you want it to be appreciated and to varying degrees understood. The art of vision is about the experience of a desired future. One can learn different approaches to visioning but in the end it’s up to those who will interpret the vision that informs us whether or not we have art.

In Student Ministry the challenge in our art is that we have such a varied audience–teens, parents, staff, supervisors and outsiders. The best art in student Ministry needs to be simple. 

Art begins with a blank canvas, supplies, and the time to create art. 

In order to create art I’ve asked three simple questions.

  1. Are you seeing new faces at your weekly events?

  2. Does your meeting room look the same as last year?

  3. Have you changed anything on your Student Ministry calendar in the last year?

As you consider your answers to the above questions, let the art begin. 

Stay in front of the canvas until you have art.

A Case for Camp

A Case for Camp

Have you ever given serious thought to not having youth camp? Most haven’t. It is a conversation that we had at one point in my career and considered pulling it from the summer schedule. After much thought and intense conversation, we continued having an annual youth camp.

Here are a few of the things we learned in the process:

Is Summer A Sprint?

Is Summer A Sprint?

In the scope of a Youth Ministry calendar year, we tend to sprint during the summer when the stakes are the lowest. It is hardest to reach students when they are scattered. If you can’t adjust your expectations, then you may run out of energy and resources during the summer and miss the best opportunity you have to reach students—the Fall.

4 Thoughts On Thinking Smaller This Summer

4 Thoughts On Thinking Smaller This Summer

Now more than ever it is time to experiment in your ministry. If you have been preoccupied with getting back to business as usual, then give yourself a much-needed break.

Ministry is in a rebuilding/rethinking process and it may take several attempts to find a new course for your ministry. Be prepared to focus and be persistent. Take notes and when you start to get traction then learn to scale your ministry to the next level.