As a youth minister, I usually have one or two activities each month. I am usually good at planning great events. I make sure that each event has a purpose (evangelism, equipping, encouraging). I work hard at doing good things for the right reason.
Unfortunately, I sometimes miss the most important aspect ? inviting God into the planning, action, and follow up of my event planning. Sure, I?ll pray that events go well, I?ll pray during them (especially lockins! You need prayer during lockins!) And occasionally I pray afterwards, usually when things go wrong and I am mad at God for letting all MY great planning go to waste.
From talking with youth ministers that I know, this is a common problem. Its nothing malicious or devious, its just that we?forget. We get so caught up in our great plans, our great devices, that we forget to check if this is on God?s agenda. So when things go right, we did a great job. When things go wrong, God messed up. Really? I don?t think so?
Here is how I believe we should approach praying for our events and activities -
1. Preplanning ? Event planning often goes back 6 months to a year. Before you even sit down to plan your calendar, you should kneel down and ask God for guidance on what He wants HIS youth ministry to be doing in the next year. As you pray, reflect on the students you have, pray for them and ask that God gives you the wisdom on how to minister to that student. Think about the students in your community, and pray that what you do will reach them this year. As you think through the calendar, pray about each individual event, asking God to bless it and do more than you can even imagine. Finally, when you?re done, pray again over the whole year (or six months or three months) and ask God to work throughout this year in you, your ministry, and your students.
2. Preparation ? Sometimes events are quick to get ready for. Sometimes they take hours and hours of time and energy. As we get ready for events, the first action we should do is pray for the event. Pray over the steps of preparation. Gather together with your leaders (students and/or adults) and pray for it. Some events like a trip to Kings Island or Laser Tag won?t require tons of prayer. But don?t neglect the power of the ?fun event? because those times of relationship building are often more valuable than a big evangelistic outreach. Ask God that your students will be open to talk with and that your words will reach them in some way.
3. During an event ? If you don?t have a prayer team, I encourage you to recruit 3 or 4 adults (or more if you have them!) to pray for your teens. Give them a list of stuff to pray for during an event. BE SPECIFIC! Don?t just say, ?Pray for life change?. If you know a student is struggling, say, ?Pray that Bobby will give up his drug habit? or ?Pray that Suzie will overcome her eating disorder.? I would be careful of giving out names in certain situations, for obvious reasons. After all, God knows who those students are. But we need to be praying for specifics, not just generalities.
4. Following an event ? Do you pray after an event? Its sometimes weeks or months later that something might hit a student, so we need to be following up in prayer that what went on will positively affect a teen.
I wish I could say I was faithful in doing all these things all the time. I am striving to do all these, but its hard moving from self-reliance to God-reliance, even in ministry. Yet I know that if you do these things your ministry will be blessed, as will you.
What do you do to invite God into your ministry events?
Bill Nance blogs at http://billnance.org.
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If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister. Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more. My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.
That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS. After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random). Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.
Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time! Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.
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Jeff Atherstone is a friend of mine from seminary. We also worked together for a few years at Cornerstone – he was the pastor of student ministries in one of our church plants. Cool and very sharp guy.
A few years ago he left the ministry at Cornerstone and went out to Uganda to be a part of training leaders there. Church leaders. Pastors. There is a video here that has some very interesting statistics that honestly kind of surprised me. But in this video Jeff articulated a vision for what they are doing. He sees the big picture and is trying to get people behind it. He has been challenged by some questions by pastors of churches in Uganda:
Do I feed the orphans in the church or my own children? Do I pay for the widow?s hospital bills or do I take my own wife to the hospital? How can I find something to teach when I have never been taught?
Deep and penetrating questions. I wanted to post this video for three main reasons:
Anyway, watch and enjoy this short 2 minute video….it’s very well done.
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