This weekend we begin a new series called Impact (In Big Church it’s called YOU) and the goal is to breakdown the importance of ministry and how each and everyone of us is designed to fulfill a specific purpose that can make a lifelong impact. We have a program called Student Impact (no this name is not original) which helps high school students plug into the various ministries (i.e. children, cafe, ops, parking lot) through out the church. The idea is to show them that they are current members of the church and that God calls them to make disciples. We currently do not allow middle school students to serve; however, with this series that will change. The reason for this is because we never had a system that encouraged them to grow in their relationship with Christ. Meaning, we could get students into ministry but they were doing and not growing in their faith. We had to work this out with high school students before we could introduce this to middle school. The system isn’t perfect now, but you can’t wait for perfection, all I know is that we are now ready to take on the challenge.
The other task I hope to accomplish throughout this series is the recruitment of adults in the student ministry. Right now I have 55 ministers, I would like to increase that by at least 50% in this series…I would say more but I don’t know what to do with 110 ministers at this time. Anyway, I would like to see more men in Ascent, more small group leaders in Resurrection and more crowd ministers throughout the ministry. By increasing our minister capacity we will be able to create authentic, consistent and irresistible ministry, but what I’m interested in hearing is what others think the main qualities of a student minister should be. So that’s my question to all of you: What do you think it takes to be a student minister?