Guest Post

3 things I love about events

April 16, 2013 by doug 8 Comments

I’m not a big event guy!

Either way you interpret that sentence, it’s true. Events are not the highlight of my year and the size and scope of them doesn’t change that fact. I prefer the process, the journey, and the moments in between THE moment.

But there are three things I’ve learned to love and value about events.

1. The work of the Spirit.

We have no control over this one but it needs to be said. I believe God honors our unity and I also believe that simply changing the scenery can heighten a student’s sensitivity to what God is saying. In other words, events can be a time of both coming together and coming apart. There’s nothing like seeing the Spirit use that combination to do a real work in teenagers, revealing Jesus to their hearts.

2. The power of the moment.

I can walk into certain rooms and immediately point to a place where I had an encounter with God. The moment becomes a landmark in our spiritual lives. In the Old Testament, our spiritual fathers built physical landmarks to signify where and when heaven invaded earth. While the ultimate spiritual landmark in our lives is the cross there are additional times when God reminds us of His greatness and the Spirit whispers to us of Jesus’ goodness. Those moments matter.

3. The importance of the conversation.

I often tell leaders that events have a way of starting, restarting or accelerating really important conversations between students and leaders, between disciples and disciple-makers. You can’t sustain a moment but you can sustain a conversation. Without the moment there may be no conversation but without the conversation, the moment will never be more than just a nice memory. Getting students plugged into disciple-making environments creates opportunity for the conversation to continue.

Question:So…what do you value about events? Share your thoughts here.

Guest Post: David Hertweck serves the Assemblies of God in New York as the state youth director. He has been involved in local church youth ministry since 1999. He’s also the author of The Word, an easy-to-use, reproducible Bible study guide for teenagers (available on downloadyouthministry.com) He’s married to Erin and has two daughters, Lilia and Caraline. He loves his girls, his family, good music, good food, his Weber grill, his Taylor guitar, Liverpool Football Club, the Yankees and the Gospel. You can follow him on Twitter at @DavidHertweck.

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Filed Under: Guest Post, Ministry (general), posts, youth ministry Tagged With: encountering God, events, faith development, guest post, ministry, programming, programs, spiritual growth, spiritual moments, youth ministry

How much ministry is in your ministry?

April 9, 2013 by doug 3 Comments

Last Tuesday, I walked into the office, worked at my computer, sat through a few meetings, filled out paperwork, and left before dinner. I was planning things and administrating things and writing messages and all of it was important.

time

This became my rhythm through Thursday and before I knew it, I’d done ‘youth ministry’ for three days and hadn’t had a single interaction with a teenager. That bothered me.

It bothered me because after ten years in youth ministry, I know that students forget the quality of my messages and the organization of my programs.

But they always seem to remember the conversations we had when we spent time together.

There is so much going on at our ministry jobs that it can be difficult to figure out how we should be spending our forty (or fifty or sixty) hours each week:

There are meetings that we have to attend.

There are messages that we have to write.

There are emails that we have to send.

It doesn’t end there.

Spending time with students is only a part of the job. The struggle – at least for me – has always been figuring out how much I should spend in the office building the youth ministry infrastructure and how much time I should spend outside of the office just pastoring teenagers.

The truth is that I don’t have an answer.

But as I tried looking for one, I discovered that there wasn’t a ton of data to draw from. I expected to find research and statistics or some study from someone much smarter than I am.

But I didn’t, so I created my own.

The first ever Youth Ministry Work Week Study is my attempt to quantify how youth workers typically spend their time. It’s nine questions that I’d love for you to answer–you’ll be done in less than two minutes.

In just a few weeks, we’ll have a pretty good idea how modern youth ministry divides its time and you’ll be able to see where you fall in those results.

The more people who take the survey, the better the data will be. I hope you’ll click over to the survey and maybe even tell a few friends about it too.

It’s worth noting that the results of this survey won’t tell us the BEST way to spend our time, only the most COMMON ways that people spend their time.

So, after you’ve taken the survey, I’ll leave for you to answer in the comments:

QUESTION: How much time SHOULD a youth pastor spend interacting with students? Share your thoughts here.

Guest Post: Aaron Helman is the Youth Minister at Clay Church in South Bend, Indiana and has been in youth ministry for ten years. He is also the creator and writer of Smarter Youth Ministry, which is designed to help you navigate your biggest frustrations – things like time management.

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Filed Under: Guest Post, Ministry (general), posts, youth ministry Tagged With: Aaron Helman, guest post, ministry, Smarter Youth Ministry, time management, time with students, youth ministry

Messy Marriage or Messy Ministry? Which comes first?

March 6, 2013 by doug 4 Comments

It’s the proverbial “chicken or the egg” conundrum—which comes first?

Messy marriage, therefore, messy ministry?

Messy ministry, therefore, messy marriage?

Well, in my household, it’s been both/and. There were times when the messiness of my marriage made our ministry messier. And there were times when the messiness of our ministry made our marriage messier.

How marriage made the ministry messier …

• I can remember having to be “on” and smiling bright when we opened the doors of our house to the members of the church we’d planted more than twenty years ago. We had to do this even if we were feeling burned-out, uninspired, stretched-thin, or stressed-out—which seemed to be most of the time in those early and challenging days of marriage and parenthood.

• I can remember my husband’s difficulty in conducting any ministry business in his basement office, because it happened to be below our kitchen floor where our toddlers shouted, ran and even rode happily above—oblivious to their daddy’s predicament beneath them.

• I can remember how “daddy” made it everyone’s predicament, when he came storming up the stairs, yelling at our busy boys to use their “inside voices!”

• I can remember, on more than one occasion, my husband and I getting into an argument in the middle of a small group meeting in our home. Talk about making everyone feel awk-ward! Yikes! I’d never seen so many of our members burying their heads in their Bibles before! I would have been inspired, had I not been so irritated with our Bible teacher!

How the ministry may have made the marriage messier …

• I can remember the stresses of barely scraping by on an uncertain and meager church planter’s salary. Naturally, that gave us plenty of exciting and new topics to ~~argue~~ discuss when bill-paying time rolled around.

• I can remember the long and on-call hours that our fledgling church required. Boundaries, shm-oundries!

• I can remember the resistance and general bad attitudes that some of the church members brought with them to our meager mission church—often after being disgruntled with the church they just left. Those other churches might have kindly held the door wide open for these folks as they exited. But we thought we needed warm bodies to fill our vacant chairs—no matter how cantankerous that body was!

• I can remember the pressures from those same church members for us to know how to do something God-sized with our little bit of 20-something ~~knowledge~~ hopefulness.

• I can remember the back-biting and gossip that stung like a dagger in our hearts when our little church was rocked by difficult times and even more difficult attitudes.

Ministry requires a lot of a couple—especially a young couple that’s just trying to figure out marriage, much less ministry. I think we often forget that Satan wants to destroy anything of any power or significance to the kingdom of God. But even more often, we forget that our own fears and insecurities blind us to the many ways God wants to use us—imperfect and messy men and women.

I say all this just so that those of you who are on the frontlines and in the trenches of ministry know that you are not crazy, weird, failures, and most importantly, … you’re not alone. If you’re discouraged or simply worn-out, take heart that God does not waver in His call to you. And let these words resonate in your ears, “But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.” 1 Peter 2:20b (NIV)

Question: In what ways has ministry made your marriage messier or vice versa? Share your thoughts here

Guest Post: Beth Steffaniak is a pastor’s wife, counselor, life-coach and mom to three budding young men. She blogs at messymarriage.com, where her heart is to be “Real, Raw and Redemptive” about the messiness of life and marriage. She believes that God calls us to see the ugly, broken, desperate mess from His perspective—the eternal, unseen, redemptive side.

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