Tag: ministry

Communication Avenues

We use all sorts of communication avenues in my high school ministry.

Text Messaging is our primary means of communicating with students. We text students at least once a week with reminders about events we’ve announced. We use a company called “Boom Text“.

Facebook is our second most used avenue. We have a “fan page”, which isn’t ideal. It doesn’t allow us to send messages to our students and parents that are fans, just “updates”, which they don’t see unless they click their Inbox and look at the updates. I am friends with all of our students on my personal account, and I have them in groups of 20 so that I can send them messages. So I set them up like “Mission Students 1”, “Mission Students 2”, etc… Then I just copy/paste the same message into group messages. I’d like to just set up a page for the ministry that behaves like a normal profile, but Facebook doesn’t allow it. We utilize a few tabs on the page too (Events, Videos, etc…). We also tag every student in our photos, which draws them to the page.

We use fliers for everything. How many of them actually make it home? Who knows… but I can’t give up on this one yet. We could probably go paperless, but I’m old fashioned I guess.

We create a quarterly calendar, on paper, which is also saved as a picture and pdf and posted everywhere.

We have a Twitter account, but only a handful of our students are on their, so we primarily use it to update our Faceboook. It also posts to our website.

Email is last and least. I use it as my primary means of communication with my volunteers, but I usually copy every email with a Facebook message to them too.

We also have an “Announcements” time during each gathering on Sundays- they sure do seem like they’re listening, but who knows!

WHICH ONE(S) OF THESE DO YOU USE IN YOUR MINISTRY?

reaching inward

The past few weeks at Mission have been all about discovering our giftedness. Last week’s message concluded with a challenge to get involved and serve at the church in some way. Everyone that wanted to take the next step was handed a card, asked to pick a couple areas of ministry they want to plug into, and attend a training this Saturday.

640 people signed up! 31 of those were for Student Ministries… not bad. I’m PUMPED about the 178 people that signed up to volunteer in our “Justice/Mission” ministries.

That’s so many! Some cynicical statistician will probably say, “Yeah but only ___% of them will actually follow through and stick with their commitment“, but I think this church might not be a victim of stats like that.

I love numbers like these… they’re the best kind of evangelism. When that many people step out and use their giftedness for God’s glory people will notice.

We’ll have some church on our hands for sure!

Do volunteer leaders need to be members?

I’ve almost always said yes to this question, minus a few exceptions, but I’m curious what you guys think.

If someone wants to be a volunteer leader at your church do you think they should also be members of the church? Do they need to come every weekend? Where do you draw the line?

There’s a difference between working the parking lot and mentoring students, so where does that play out?

Maybe a scenario would help: If you were a youth pastor and you had a great leader who led a small group for some of your students every Wednesday night, but went to the church down the street on Sundays, would you be OK with it?

Let me know what you think!

Grace in my face

This past month has been brutal on my soul. I have just been carrying a huge burden. A big, fat, heavy burden… and it was all about having to announce our departure from Calvary. I knew it was the right thing to do, but it didn’t make it easier.

But today is a new day. I feel no weight. I’m a little nervous about the new role at the new church, but I’ve got peace about it all. I think it’s because I’ve been given so much grace.

Every single person at Calvary has been remarkably encouraging and positive throughout this whole process. Everyone.

I’ve heard so many horror stories about pastors transitioning to new churches (I was a part of one), that I couldn’t help but be a little bit worried about this one.

But this has been so good.

Grace in my face… thank you Calvary Church šŸ™‚