matt flinner and adam lehman
the beauty of seismos is always the practical takeaways. so as we gathered on the third and final morning our guide, joel daniel harris walked us through one last session answering the questions: “what did we learn…what thoughts did we have”?
following that we broke up into several small groups to talk about our “take homes”.
i was part of group of good-hearted folks who are basically doing student ministry as the single staff person with volunteers, in a medium to large context. we spent the first 15 minutes developing a list of things we thought might be useful to talk through. here’s our list…
- how to interact with schools, parents, church & community
- nurturing those that lead youth
- helping the church see its need/role with teens
- how to engage parents as spiritual leaders of teens
- how/what to communicate w/ Sr. Pastor & supervisor
- transition to/from Youth Ministry
- What are our limits? Age? Church? -Redefine ministry opportunity
As we talked it was clear that the reality of life is that we don’t have enough volunteers, time, money, leaders, etc. and too there is so much noise in our lives that we need to be strategic and focus. we stated the obvious, but it was a healthy conversation about how each of us are addressing boundaries in our lives so that we could be more effective. the list we pushed through included:
- Time
- Track your hours (so as to know how much we’re investing)
- turn off phone
- accountability
- Don’t be the Rockstar
- Protect Sabbath (taking a day off a week-unplugged)
This conversation was very useful…to see how others were doing it and mostly encouraging us to stay in and stay healthy about our serving.
Char Messenger & Cara Schroeder
Then we stepped off in a conversation about leveraging our time investment by enlisting volunteer leaders. here’s the list we developed on engaging volunteers:
- (Vision) has to come from the Front (lead/sr pastor teaching in big church)
- Don’t beg
- ask small
- frame what it can mean to volunteer
- permit to fail
- take on their failure, give them all
- let them know what you do (so they understand the big picture)