Tomorrow I am giving our youth leaders a new framework for thinking about how we do youth ministry and how we measure success. I believe that this is something that God has shown me over summer as I've listened to the leaders and their joys and frustrations, prayed, read and thought about our youth ministry. It's below.

Please leave comments with your feedback!


Our Goal
To be a community that thirsts for God
With all our heart we desire to be constantly seeking to grow in our love and knowledge of God above all else.
We want to cultivate this desire of our hearts in those we pastor.

Our priorities
Pastoring people - our main job is to care for and lead our people
Praying people - we cannot do the first without God, so we pray

Our Danger
Becoming solely program planners - the nature of the Youth Ministry beast is to run programs and we will have plenty of them in 2010.  However, we must remember that the majority of our focus, energy and time should be spent on our priorities.


How does this mindset help us?
Our priorities affect how we measure success. If we see ourselves as program planners then we will be constantly obsessing over who is coming to our programs. If we get 20 kids to something we have been successful. If only 4 show up we have failed. If however we see ourselves as pastors and people of prayer then we will measure success by the quality of contact we’ve had with people and the amount of time we’ve spent lifting these people up in prayer to God. For example if we’ve rung the youth directly assigned to our care and asked them how they’re going and prayed for or with them then we’ve been successful.