Lead Well

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash John Maxwell famously said that leaders are readers. I’ve taken that to heart and become a voracious reader.  Every year I set a goal to read a certain number of books. I’ve gone all the way to 36 but have settled between 20 to 24. This year, instead of focusing on quantity, I focused on subjects that interested me and read a few pages every day. Somehow, I still got 20 books in. For this post, I broke the books into categories. Each book has an affiliate link to Amazon so you can easily make your list for next year. Thanks for your support! What I read in 2022

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash Come Christmas time a question I see asked over and over is, “What is a good Christmas movie to show at my church?” Whether it’s for simple service for the Sunday after Christmas, a part of your midweek service, or a family movie night outreach, trying to find the right movie for your audience can be tough. We have to consider language, content, message, and several other factors not to mention complying with copyright laws. I’m not going to cover the legality of showing movies in your church, but you should check with your media/ worship pastor at minimum or a lawyer to make sure it’s ok to show. You don’t want Disney coming after you because you decided to show “The Santa Clause” and broke their copyright. With all these factors in mind, here are five movies you can safely show in your church. I’ve vetted all of them and shown most of them in my own ministry. 5 Movies to Show in Church this Christmas

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash Over the last several weeks, I’ve posted about planning for next year. You can read about calendar planning here and budget planning here . If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may realize that just putting dates on a calendar doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Early one September, I was going through my to do list for the week and a calendar reminder popped up. “ K-Team Starts ” Uh-oh. I wasn’t ready. I needed to send out invites, advertise to kids and parents, buy materials, and everything else. What's worse is I had spoken with several parents about it already. They were excited for it to begin. And here I was looking at not just an event, but a whole class. One that I had done nothing to make it happen. That’s when I decided to implement this one simple planning trick to make sure something like this never happened again.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Budgets, love them or hate them, you need to have one to effectively manage the resources God has given you and your ministry. The churches I’ve served in have been on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to budget planning. One of them didn’t give me a budget at all. If I needed something, I had to ask my lead pastor. Most of the time this worked because he would say yes.  However, while I served there, the global recession hit, and we entered a spending freeze for 2 years. I didn’t have a budget and the answer for buying literally anything was almost certainly going to be no. It became impossible to plan and very difficult to minister. On the other side of the spectrum, one church required me to put almost every purchase into its own category. I had income and expense line items for over 20 categories. Many of which were legacy categories my predecessors used that I had no plans for. In addition, I had to painstakingly plan out each c...

Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash Since this is coming out on Black Friday, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about one of my passions. Video Games. I’ve been playing since I was a little kid and still play regularly. Also working in NextGen, I’ve seen a lot of kids exposed to games and media way before they’re ready because of their parents' ignorance. It doesn’t have to be this way though. Every game has a rating ranging from E for Everyone to M to Mature. (There is a higher Adult Only rating, but those games are few and far between.) As a parent or pastor knowing what games are going to be fun and appropriate for your kids is important. For this post, I’ll pick three games from each system that are family-friendly and can be played easily with multiple people. I won't make recommendations on consoles, but you can see my buying guide here.   In addition, many of these games are on sale for Black Friday. If you’re looking for Christmas or update the games ...

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash One of the best ways to retain your volunteers for years to come is to show them appreciation. So many jobs they do go unnoticed. What’s more, if you work in NextGen, your volunteers may never hear from those they serve that they’re doing a good job.  How many two-year-olds do you know tell you how great of a job you're doing? They can barely speak English! That’s why it’s important for you as the leader to express your appreciation for their tireless efforts. Even if they serve once a month. With Christmas right around the corner, you may be thinking this is a good time to get them a gift or something special, but you're at a loss for what to do.  With this in mind, here are 4 simple, yet effective ways to show your appreciation.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash Family services. Love them or hate them, they have their place. I'm an advocate for family services because I believe children’s ministry needs to be more than a ministry held in another room never to be seen or heard from. These services can be a great tool for emphasizing ministry to the next generation, highlight the great things that are happening, and give your volunteers a much needed week off. Some churches do them great and others never have them. The churches that I’ve served in have been on both sides of the spectrum and somewhere in between. Here are 6 Steps to a Great Family Service.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash It’s the most wonderful time of the year!  No, I’m not talking about Christmas or Thanksgiving (I’m a no Christmas until after Thanksgiving person).  I’m talking about planning for the next year. I know I’m weird like that, but I look forward to the meetings, vision casting, and planning of the next year with great anticipation. Whether you’re weird like me or hate having look at dates and times until you go cross-eyed, I thought I’d help by giving  6 steps to make next year’s ministry calendar.

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash Feedback is so important. I can’t tell you how many times I thought something was going to work and it bombed and other times something trivial became a huge success. Through the years, I’ve found collecting feedback increases my odds of creating success. There are a lot of tools out there to facilitate the collection of feedback, but the one I use for most events is surveys. As part of my follow up process, which I write about here , I always send out an email thanking people for coming and inviting them to our next service or event. At the end of the email, I’ll include a link to a survey. Because I’m asking for their time and opinion, I strategically provide the carrot of a gift card drawing between $25 and $50.  One time for budgetary reasons, I skipped the drawing. As a result, the survey responses were very low. By offering some kind of payment the response rate increases dramatically. I’ve used Survey Monkey in the past with great succ...

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash It’s Fall, and that means it’s time for your fall festival, trunk or treat, Holy Ghost Weeny Roast or whatever you call the event you do this time of year. This is a unique event because a lot of people who may not come to your church may come to your campus for the very first time. Unlike events like VBS or Egg Hunt, fall festivals offer a specific registration challenge. Because the nature of the event is come and go, trying to collect people’s contact information can be really challenging and cause a lot of friction between your volunteers and the people attending the event. Over the years, I’ve seen and tried a lot of different methods for getting this valuable information, and I finally landed on one that works. Here are 4 ways to not do registration and one that works.

Photo by Elissa Garcia on Unsplash Let’s imagine that through very little work of your own you had 30 new volunteers show up in your ministry on the same day. Do you know where you’d put them? Do you know what job you’d give them to do? How would you onboard them to make sure they understand the mission and vision of your ministry? Asking these kinds of questions helps you see the holes in your ministry. And what you need to work on to get to that next level. In a previous post, I talked about building your ministry for growth you can read that here . In that post, I talked about creating a flowchart to see where your volunteer holes are and where to fill them. But when you put new volunteers in their positions, the next question they’re going to ask is, “What am I supposed to do?” This is where job descriptions come in. If you’ve ever worked in the corporate world (in my case, retail) you’ve seen these before. Hopefully, you were given one when you were hired because they help...

Maybe you’ve seen this. You have a fifth or sixth grader completely checked out. They may have been engaged a few years before, but it’s getting close to their time to move on, and they have senioritis all of sudden. You thought it was only for 12th graders, but now you see it in 12-year-olds. But what do you do? Do you encourage them to engage? Talk to their parents? Let them move on to youth? In my first ministry, this problem was rampant. I was the fourth kids pastor for those sixth graders, and they were over it. They didn’t care and a few of them did whatever the wanted causing major distractions. Putting a discipline plan in place helped a little, but it didn’t solve the problem. That’s when I decided to begin a kids leadership team. We still had Sunday School, so for the ones who came, I’d teach a little about the Bible, and then train them how to run sound, lead worship, and do puppets. They helped me make videos to remind kids of the rules and to go to the bathroom...

Photo by Liam Shaw on Unsplash I’m not a worship leader, but somehow, I’ve led worship in front of kids and now youth for over 14 years. I can carry a tune, but my rhythm needs help. I can move fairly well, but dancing was never my forte. When leading in kidmin most of that doesn’t matter, because they’re learning too. Don’t get me wrong, the musical part of your service needs to be done with excellence, but sometimes passion and energy outweighs talent. Over the years, I’ve worked hard to get better and am forever thankful to people like Yancy and Orange Kids Music for helping me. It seems to me there are two extremes in children’s worship. Either it’s silly, fun songs with little biblical truth or serious theological filled songs that kids barely understand. We have to find something in the middle that’s fun, exciting, and theologically sound. Ultimately, we need to create an environment that leads kids into the presence of God where he can do His work. With that in mind her...

Photo by Miguel A Amutio on Unsplash It’s so exciting when you first start in ministry. There’s so much passion and energy, and you just can’t wait to get in with the kids or youth and change lives. But if you’ve been in ministry for more than a year, you have to know that not everything moves as fast as you thought they would. There’s a famous quote that says, “We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade.” Ministry is a marathon, not a sprint.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash I recently saw a post on a Facebook group asking how many volunteers they need for 30-40 kids. It was really a question about ratios, which are very important, but having the correct room ratio may not be enough when thinking about the right number of volunteers. I’ve written about this before , but when I first started in kidmin, you could have called my Sunday morning service the David Reneau show. I led worship, told the Bible story, managed check-in and sound, pretty much every element of the service I had a hand in or was running it. I had a few volunteers relegated to crowd control, but not many more because, why? I was doing all of it, why did I need more people to sit with kids and keep behavior under control. I was running the ministry in what is called a maintenance structure. I needed to set up the ministry for growth. If I wanted to take the ministry to the next level, then I needed the structure to support it. One tool you’ll need b...

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash One of the biggest questions I see in the Kidmin world is what curriculum do we use? Which one is better? 252Kids ? High Voltage ? Bible Engagement ? Open Church ? Write your own? The curriculum options out there are endless, and you can spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to find the right one for your ministry. I’ve tested a lot of curriculums over the years and even tried to write my own. It’s a daunting task. I searched for over a year once, and all I really wanted was someone to tell me which one to do. Fortunately, no one did, and I’m not going to tell you which one either. However, I will give you four questions to help narrow it down and pick a curriculum that works best for your church and ministry.

Photo by Jesus Loves Austin on Unsplash If you’ve been doing small groups in your kids service for any length of time, you may be asking what is the best way to split the kids up? Do we do it by grade? Gender? Favorite candy? Random? The truth is there is no perfect answer and depending on the size of your ministry and how many kids show up per service the answer will be different. I’ve studied churches like Northpoint Community Church and Church of the Highlands and asked them what they do. In addition, I've spoken with several Orange Specialists on what are the best practices for small groups. Here’s what I’ve found.

Photo by  Tegan Mierle  on  Unsplash Milestones are a marker for how far we’ve gone and how much further we need to go. You can call them goals, or behaviors, or events, but they’re things that we celebrate as the people we minister to develop an authentic faith that lasts a lifetime. I track these milestones for each person, and they’re what I report and celebrate at volunteer and parent meetings. These are how I show that the ministry is successful and mean so much more than having a big event or a great service. I originally wrote and used these for my children’s ministry, but now that I’m working youth and adults, I can see how they also apply to these age groups as well. The biggest difference is that the older demographics may not be starting at square one, while kids most likely are.

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash I’ve heard business entrepreneurs say that you have to know your numbers. The same is true with your ministry. How many attended this week? Last week? How many volunteers? First time guests? Baptisms? Small Groups? If you don’t track it, and by tracking, I mean write it down in a spreadsheet, you’re losing out on valuable information that can help you keep your ministry healthy and growing. I’ll admit I didn’t always do this. In fact, my first few years in ministry it was an afterthought. Sometimes, I would remember to count how many were in the room and tell my pastor, but I never wrote it down. Then after one Easter, my pastor came into staff meeting agitated. I could see it all over his face. He told us that we didn’t have as many show up for Easter as we did the year before. He counted the weekend as a failure. I was shocked at first and then began to wonder, how many did I have? How many last year? Or the year before? I had no Idea. I h...

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash One of the biggest problems we have in ministry is getting the word out. There are a lot of different methods to tell our people about the events, ministry opportunities, and lessons coming up, and there is no silver bullet that every one will engage with.  My communication philosophy is not everyone will engage with every form of communication, but everyone will engage with some form of communication. Even though there is no perfect communication tool, one my favorite and most effective methods is writing a weekly email. Sending an email is just one part of my strategy for communication I outlined in this post , but I thought I’d dive a little deeper into the process and talk about how my strategy has changed since I originally wrote that post 3 years ago.

Baptism in water is an essential part of a Christian’s faith, and one of my favorite things to do. Working in Kidmin though, there are a lot of questions about kids being baptized. Can they be baptized? When are they old enough? How do you know if they’re ready? How do we partner with parents through this process? When I first started in Kidmin, I’d take any kid who raised their hand and said they wanted to be baptized. I would like to take the time to get to know them, but usually my evaluation was based on how long they’ve been coming to church. At my second church, we started spontaneous baptisms. This meant anyone who wanted to get baptized, could if they came to Welcome Booth during service. A person, usually a pastor, would talk with them for a few minutes to make sure they knew what they were doing, then get them all set up for baptism at the end of that morning's service. This is all well and good for adults, but one Sunday, I had a mom bring her three kids, ages 12, 8...

Whether we want to admit it or not, a lot of ministry is events. Yes, we want people to know about Jesus and grow in their love for them, but how do we do that? Do we hold a class? Do we host a service? Do we put on a VBS or camp? If you think about it, all of these things are events. Oxford language dictionary defines events as “a planned public or social occasion.” This means just about everything we do in ministry is an event. Over my years in ministry, I’ve held literally hundreds of not thousands of events. The following are some things I do every time to make sure they are the best events possible.

In my last two posts I've talked about designing your shirts and ordering the right amount.  You can read those posts here: Designing your shirts Ordering the right amount Distribution The day is finally here. Your event is coming up and you now have several boxes full of your brand-spanking-new shirts. But how do you get them out to your people? How do you make sure they get the right sizes? What happens if they ordered the wrong size? If you’re going to sell them, how much should you charge? Do you have to keep inventory? It’s a lot to think about. There are no perfect systems out there, but these are some things I do to get them out to the right people at the right time, even if I’m selling them.

This is the second of a three-part series.  You can read the other posts in this series here: Designing your shirts Ordering the right amount Distribution   In this post I’ll answer the question how many shirts should I buy? In a perfect world, you’d have every participant’s shirt size weeks in advance of your event so you can order the exact right amount and eliminate waste or worse, run out of a particular size. But because of Adam and Eve’s failure we don’t live a perfect world, and now we have to guess. Thanks a lot guys. My degree is in math education and we’re going to do a little statistics to answer this question, but if you’re the kind of person that freaks out at the sight of letters in an equation, don’t worry. I'll help you get through this. I’ve included an excel spreadsheet at the end of this post where all you have to do is change a few numbers, and the math is done for you automatically.

Let's do T-shirts! That’s a question that somehow got skipped in seminary. Nowhere in all my studies did anyone tell me how to design, order, and then sell/give-away t-shirts and somehow in my ministry experience I find myself having to do it at least once a year. Over the years, I’ve developed some strategies to help me be successful and get the kind of shirts everyone loves. This is the first of a three part series on ordering t-shirts.  Designing your shirts Ordering the right amount Distribution As Julie Andrews taught me in the Sound of Music , let’s start at the very beginning.

Working in Kidmin, I’ve had the unique opportunity to plan not just what we’re teaching, but what we’re singing as well. I’m a church kid, so I’ve heard a lot of church music and my children’s ministry was pretty progressive, so we were singing worship choruses long before other churches were. Some of the hits were, I’ve Got a River of Life, Lord You Are, and I am a CHRISTIAN. One of the most popular kids songs I remember wasn’t even played at church but at camp. I don’t remember the name, but it was set to the tune Barbara Ann. The lyrics went: Pick, pick, pick Pick, pick your nose Pick, pick, pick, Pick, pick your nose Pick, pick, pick, Pick, pick your nose Pick your nose ‘til the mucus flows!! They only played it once, but we sang it all week, and somehow, I still remember it. Ahh… good times. But when you’re in charge and thinking about the songs you’re going to sing in kids church, you can’t make the mistake of just playing the fun and fast stuff. Our worship has to have a me...

Photo by Jeff Dunham on Unsplash Volunteer recruitment is hard. One question asked most often is, “How do you get volunteers?” There are a whole lot of different strategies, but I'll cover those in a different post. Since the Pandemic , I’ve had the responsibility of finding volunteers for our Wednesday Preschool ministry. We changed our strategy for Wednesday nights to groups instead of an adult service, and I can tell you it has not been easy. I love the model and our people are growing but finding adults who are willing to leave their group to serve is a tough ask. Recently, I found myself with only one volunteer on a particular Wednesday night with less than two days to find new volunteers. Closing the ministry for the night was not an option, but it was looking like it may happen. It’s not a fun place to be. As I thought about who I can recruit, I found that there are four pools of people I can ask to serve. 1. Parents I looked for parents first. But as I went ove...