Lead Well

Photo by Dominic Hanson on Unsplash At my first church, I felt like I was alone. My senior pastor was sick, and the church was struggling. I had been in ministry for about a year and half and at first, I thought I was doing ok. But then when problems came, and I expressed them to my fellow staff members, it fell on deaf ears. I had a few friends in kidmin, but they lived in other states. Also, Facebook was in its infancy so finding others like me was difficult. Then at a sectional meeting with other church leaders in my area, I met a guy who told me about his kids’ pastor and how he had a podcast. Intrigued, I downloaded a few episodes and instantly felt at home. You know that feeling when you meet someone, and they just get it?  Since we were in the same town, I looked him up, and we went to lunch. It was the first of many connections and set me on a journey of seeking outside sources to make my ministry better. The thing is you were never meant to do ministry alone. We need o

Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash The dirty secret of children’s ministry, specifically, and NextGen ministry in general is that very little of your time as a pastor is spent ministering to that age group. In reality, you will spend 1-3 hours a week actually leading them, while the other 40+ hours are spent doing other things. When I first started as a kids pastor, my father-in-law asked almost weekly, “So, what do you do the rest of the week?” Thankfully he’s figured it out, but he’s not alone. A lot of people don’t know what we do week in and week out. It’s easy to scoff at this question and what they don’t understand, but when you think deeply about it, what do you actually do the rest of the week ?  How do you know what you did this week actually helped you move the ball forward? How do you know you did everything you needed to do to be ready for what’s next? No matter where you serve in NextGen ministry, I believe there are four types of work that each minister needs to