Lead Well

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...

A few months ago, I wrote a post about leaving well . The inevitable happens when you leave something. You start something new. But leaving something and starting something are two different things. They both have their hurts and their joys, but you have to approach them differently. Now that I’ve been in the new ministry for almost a year, I can look back at that first month or two and realize what helped and what didn’t. Here are 5 things you can do to start a new ministry job well. 1. Listen  When you’re first starting out you don’t know what you don’t know. There are new processes, programs, events, people, jargon, and ways of doing things that will be different from where you came from. It’s important that you listen to everyone. Ask questions in a curious and non-confrontational manner. The first week is always tough because of all the on-boarding, but if you come in with a teachable spirit, it will help you go further faster. But this goes beyond...

Vacation Bible School is this week, so I am going to blog every night about the night's experiences. Day 3 is over.  We had another great night.  Our volunteers continue to deliver from the oldest to the youngest, they are doing an incredible job night after night.   Tonight we got to help some ladies from another church learn some things about how to run a VBS.  They were amazed with the organization, the production, and most of all the excitement surrounding each event.  I had a blast walking around with them sharing some of the knowledge I learned through the school of hard knocks.   There is no way we could do this without all of our volunteers.  Your hard work and feedback is part of what makes this VBS so great.  Thank you so much for giving of your time this week. Don't forget to check out the pictures and videos on the Kidtricity Facebook page: http://facebook.com/kidtricity If your kids love their crew lea...

In a few weeks, I'm going to do one of the scariest things I've ever done with volunteers.  I'm going to give them the opportunity to quit. In many ministries, we recruit volunteers or volunteer ourselves with no end in sight.  We very infrequently recruit for a specific time.  After studying the recruiting strategies of several different large churches that have hundreds of volunteers and lots of prayer, I decided that I needed to trust my volunteers. So every six months the volunteers in all of Kidtricity will be given the opportunity to quit.  Of course I don't frame it this way.  I ask our volunteers to re-enroll in their ministries.  This gives them the opportunity to change their Sunday, their service, or even their department. After all of this moving around is done, I may have some vacancies, but I think it is worth it. My hope is that new people will take this opportunity to step into a new adventure in children's ministry.  Th...