Lead Well

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash It was a big Sunday. We’d had the biggest VBS of my career and we’d invited all the parents to attend a family service the following Sunday in kids church. Multiple parents came, including some that didn’t go to my church. Naturally, this day needed to go perfectly. I had put as much pressure on this day as I do for Easter. Then the unthinkable happened. Right in the middle of my worship set, my entire computer system crashed. I use video worship and teaching so having this crash was worst case scenario. I didn’t have a backup plan, and I was the only one who could fix it. Looking back now, I’m not entirely sure what we did to get through it, but we did. The Gospel was proclaimed, and we built relationships with the families that came. But that was just one service. I could fill this post with story after story of successes and failures on big days and small days, and I’m sure you could too. After that fateful day, I stumbled upon a paradox. A par

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.

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.

Events and ministry go hand in hand. It comes from when the church was the center of town. Everyone’s social calendar was filled with church activities because the church was the community. Now things have drastically changed, but we still do events. Now you may be in one of those churches that have fully embraced the Attractional Model and all you have to worry about is the weekend. As my southern friends say, “Bless your heart”. For the rest of us, it’s a juggling act. The pressure of Sunday is always coming, but you also have movie nights, pajama parties, picnics in the park, VBS, kids camp, back to school outreaches, Holy Ghost Weeny Roasts, the list goes on and on. I could talk about why you’re doing all these things and even question if doing all of them is even the right thing to do, but that’s a different post . The question I want to ask today is “Does the event work?” Many churches simply do things out of habit. “This is what we did last year, so we’re go