Lead Well

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...