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Category: Organization

Is Your Kidmin in Survival or Creative Mode?

I love Minecraft. For those who don’t know what it is, it is basically virtual Lego. I run an online community for my son and other kids to play in. (details) It’s fun! When you play, you get to choose between two basic game modes: Survival and Creative. In CREATIVE – you get access to all the pieces and can build whatever you can imagine! In SURVIVAL – you start out with nothing, and must find or build what you want/need. In Minecraft, the process and making things from other objects is called “Crafting” – you combine certain items to craft new items. For example, sticks and coal can be used to craft a torch. What does this have to do with Children’s Ministry? In ministry, we often start out in Survival Mode – we have to start from scratch. Nothing exists! We need to find volunteers, leaders, resources and supplies. We need to create spaces where ministry can take place… and as we build (craft), better options become available. We build upon past successes, learn from mistakes, all while watching out for Creepers and Zombies! These are roaming creatures that are constantly needing to be dealt with and repairs…

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Making Meetings Matter

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Two things in life are certain, death and taxes…” perhaps he should have added “meetings.” We went into children’s ministry because we love ministry to kids… and yet, we find ourselves in a LOT of meetings! I am amazed at the number of meetings children’s ministry leaders have to attend. I’ve had friends share with me how overwhelmed they are by meetings. A few have told me they have over twenty meetings a week. One said, “I’m being meetinged to death!” So when I started my new children’s pastorate one of my first orders of business was to make sure I got control of meetings. Not only did I not want to attend more than necessary, but I didn’t want to meet my own leaders and volunteers to death. So I asked a few of my friends for their tips on meetings, and developed a set of rules that would guide the meetings that I called. At my first team meeting, I established the following guidelines. Perhaps you may find them helpful. You are welcome to use and modify as you need for your own ministry: Team Commitments and Roles When there is not a…

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How Much Can You Stack?

My son and I have a favorite game that I have owned for years. It’s simply called Chairs. The goal of the game is to to take turns stacking some colorful plastic chairs in fun, random arrangements until the tower finally collapses under the weight of the unbalanced collection of chairs. Of course, part of the strategy is to place your chair in a way that makes it more difficult for the other player(s) to place theirs! We laugh and laugh as the tower crashes down. At the same time, we want to see how many chairs we can add, hoping we can make it even higher than the previous game. Oh, how nervous we are as we try to add chair after chair to our wobbly tower, wondering if we can somehow defy gravity and fate – always having more chairs than the laws of physics will allow us to stack. We have never been able to stack all the chairs that came with the game. Either we aren’t very good stackers, or the game creators were generous (or cruel) in the amount of chairs they provided with the game. We keep on trying to build a tower with…

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IT’S URGENT!

How “urgent” are the urgent things in your life? I’m slowly learning that much of what I consider urgent, isn’t truly urgent at all. It usually has more to do with my URGes than being genuinely urgent. My urg to produce, my urg to succeed, my urg to accomplish, my urg to create security, my urg to finish things, my urg to start things, my urg to get on to the next thing. Being at CPC is a good reminder, because everytime I am at a week long event, everything else gets set aside, or delayed, or postponed and it frustrates me, but it also reminds me that those things truly can wait a week. If I hadn’t been at CPC they would all have been urgent THIS week, now they will just be urgent NEXT week. Or when I get sick – the world survives all my urgent things getting done later. My family survives, my ministry survives, and the things that truly need to get done, DO get done, in time. In fact, looking back, even the things I’ve accomplished (and I’d like to think I have accomplished a few good things in life!) don’t really matter now…

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Sean on Time Management

Here are some Time Management Tips from the designer of this blog, Sean Copley from Timbuktoons. (Don’t miss my Podcast interview with Timbuktoon founder Todd Hampson) Sean is a great guy and I know from personal experience, well organized. In their recent newsletter Sean gave away some of this secrets… CREATIVE PROCRASTINATION There are not enough hours in each day so you know you will always have to procrastinate on something. The trick is to force yourself to choose to procrastinate on the small things in order to get things done. Keys: Don’t clear up the small things first! Resist the temptation- we often underestimate how the small things add up and seemingly never end (especially e-mail)! Choose to do the most valuable and important first. Place value on the items you need to accomplish each day. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of what you do is the least valuable, while 20% is the most valuable. Do it tomorrow! Work on the e-mails and phone messages that came in yesterday and file today’s away for tomorrow. The benefit is that when your mailboxes are empty, you are done for the day regardless of what comes in! For example, I…

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