Sizing up the Seasons

I had an interesting conversation with Fr. White yesterday regarding the different seasons we encounter and how they affect our attendance, message series, programs, etc. It’s becoming clear that one of the busiest times of year is from the beginning of May to the end of June. You have:

• Graduations(or as some schools are calling it moving up day), which cause families to travel and plan celebrations.
• Camps/Trips start up. I use to think this all happened in August, but that’s when more families are on vacation, so it makes sense for schools and other organizations to plan all of their camps at this time.
• Lacrosse tournaments. This is the epicenter of lacrosse nation. I was surprised that the final four wasn’t here this year. Anyway it appears that there is a big tournament here every weekend.
• Mothers Day/Father’s Day and Memorial Day. You just had a barbecue, now it’s time to plan for the next one and then the next one and then the next one. I love barbecues and with these great reasons to get together and cookout why not.

I know this is just a few of the many things that come up in these two months, and I’m not listing these as a complaint, in fact one thing we’ve learned in church ministry is that you are going to have a lot of competition and conflict from week to week. You can have seasonal vacations, Raven’s football, snow, sunny days, rain and so on, but no matter what you face you need to be consistent. If you only focus on planning events, you’ll find there is no perfect weekend. It’s only by being consistently present for others that you can guarantee building authentic relationships.