Ministry
Start-up Reality: It's not about WHETHER college students will come; it's whether those students are the RIGHT ones for your ministry.
A ministry structure is the collection of activities that fit together to reflect your mission, vision and values. These activities usually have leaders that form the core, or central group of the most involved and committed people.
How to design your structure:
- the size of your ministry
- the amount of student leaders you currently have
- the amount of emerging leaders you currently have
- mission, vision and values should not only determine what, but where--church ministry often has less of a need to host events on campus vs parachurch--does the location of the event match the mission, vision, and values? especially think through evangelistic or new people parts of structure (frosh bible studies)--if they are not on the turf of new people then significantly decrease the chances of target audience attending.
Action Points:
- Spend two hours exploring resources related to vision (vision statements, vision casting, etc)
- Spend two hours planning for an eight hour vision crafting team time that includes the elements listed above.
Potential Roadblocks to vision:
- Don't let the pressure to fill your calendar with events keep you from laying a biblical/philosophical foundation. What are we going to do? Who are we? It starts with THE Leader, then the leadership team, then the movement.
- Fear of not being tactical or specific enough with your team
- Team members who want to turn every discussion into an event--your schedule will be full but your minds will be on different pages and YOU will spend LOTS of time later on in the year explaining the vision to them, but it will be on their terms and not yours.
- Fear of letting team down by dreaming of something that cannot be accomplished.
