Getting in Focus

Tonight’s the last Church at Chipotle and as sad as I am to see it end, I’m glad for the month long break before we start up again in the fall with our regular worship service Uprising.  Other than a work camp the only thing on my plate for the month of August is gearing up for the our kickoff in September.  Last year at this time we had just made some major changes to times and days.  Uprising our worship for high school students was moved to Thursday, Resurrection (7th/8th) and Ascent (5th/6th) were moved to later times on Sunday.  The change was a little overwhelming.  This year, none of that, just turning the flywheel and getting a few things in focus.  Two of those things are:

• Vision Casting – When you have time like this on your hands it’s important to just give out vision.  If you don’t have any to give then it means you are too busy.  You need to have time to dream, to think and ask God, “Where is it you want to take me?”  When you hear what God is telling you, when you feel the Spirit guiding you, it’s time to share that with your team.  Vision is what’s going to motivate people, not a game, vision is what’s going to have them think outside the box not a new behavior policy.  So get dreaming.
• Recruit – Recruiting should be like vision casting to non ministers.  I always start with parents and former students, move on to the older crowd and then go younger.  No reason that’s just how it happens.  The goal isn’t to get them in ministry and ready to serve by this September, if that happens great, but I would like people to process the idea before jumping in feet first.  And for me it doesn’t matter if they get into students ministry, they can do any ministry I just want to get people serving.  When we recruit we also practice evangelization, in fact it can be a form of evangelization.  

I’m sure other things will pop up on my plate but for now it’s about getting the word out on what student ministry is supposed to look like and do.  I’m really hoping for some big thinking during this season, we’ll just have to see what happens.