Planning Ahead in Student Ministry

The global financial crisis and the way that churches had to respond, many moving from annual projections to quarterly and even monthly projections has got me thinking a lot about how I plan in student ministries.  My habit is over the summer months to plan out the whole year in terms of message series and adjust on the fly if necessary.  It takes a lot of the hum-drum planning out of my meetings with my leaders but it also gives them less input into the overall conversation we have with students.  I am starting to wonder if it might be a good idea to making things even more flexible and start planning only one series ahead and give my leaders the opportunity to have creative input.  We have a meeting coming up so we’ll have to see what they think.

5 Responses to “Planning Ahead in Student Ministry”

1. Henry Zonio says:

   January 4, 2010 at 12:50 pm

   Another option is to have them as part of the planning for the entire year and then have creative planning meetings throughout the year to work out the details. That way they are involved in each step of the planning.
2. admin says:

   January 4, 2010 at 1:41 pm

   yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot and one of the things I’ve done is asked our leaders at the end of the year and right before the academic year begins to give me their ideas of what they think our students need to be learning based on their interactions with students. I think I need to add more structure and maybe a survey though to really get them into it.
3. Matt says:

   January 4, 2010 at 1:44 pm

   I am always up for being part of the creative side of things.
4. admin says:

   January 4, 2010 at 1:48 pm

   Yeah that’s true Matt, you are. I should mention that one of the new things we’re doing is turning our weekly debrief session into a debrief and planning session. Each week we’ll spend time analyzing the past week and looking at the upcoming week. It’s going to be a cool new experience. Always evolving though, always evolving.
5. Matt says:

   January 4, 2010 at 1:59 pm

   yeah, I am looking forward to that, especially since we have more or less nailed down the night from week to week and there is far less to debrief about.

   Also new theme is nice, I like.