We just finished another family experience at our church. Our series was called “Angry Words” and we talked about how powerful our words can be. Obviously, we got the idea from Angry Birds. The kids and parents absolutely loved it. We re-created a giant catapult that launched birds at boxes and pigs. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will spark some ideas or you can just steal what we did. Enjoy!

Week Two Lesson (click to download)

Week Two Service Order (click to download)

Week One Phrase Cards:

Angry Words Coloring Page
Angry Words Coloring Page (click to download)

We made the birds were made out of a medicine ball (body), paint (eyes), half a NERF football (beak) and glue (to glue the beak on the body)

Pigs were super easy made from green paper lanterns and eyes/snout we printed on card stock and cut out.

The hanging pieces is wood we cut out and painted (clouds are cut out styrofoam board).

We just finished another family experience at our church. Our series was called “Angry Words” and we talked about how powerful our words can be. Obviously, we got the idea from Angry Birds. The kids and parents absolutely loved it. We re-created a giant catapult that launched birds at boxes and pigs. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will spark some ideas or you can just steal what we did. Enjoy!

Week One Lesson (Click to download)

Week One Service Order (Click to download)

Week One Phrase Cards:

Slides:

Memory Game:

Promo Card:

T-Shirt:

So, I’m playing soccer again. Right now a bunch of us play on Sunday nights and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m not sure how it happened, but I’m the “old guy”. Not only, are we having fun on the field, but a group of us decided to join an indoor soccer league. Now, I’m on a soccer team.

I played soccer when I was young. My older brother was a great soccer player. He played varsity in high school and toured Europe playing soccer. Me on the other hand, galloped around on the soccer field on all fours, played kick ball with some other kid behind the goal post when I was supposed to be playing goalie and was kind of timid to get in there and kick the ball. However, I’ve always loved the sport. Now, that I’m older and a sports fanatic, I’m much more aggressive, very competitive and still love playing.

Here’s two of the four things I’ve learned from this great sport:

1. You must have endurance in soccer.
Soccer is unlike other sports. There are no timeouts or catching your breath. You are constantly on the lookout and constantly running. Ministry can feel the same way. We feel like we’re always running—and we are. There are no timeouts, there is just in between games. But, even then we’re practicing for the next game—event, service, project, etc. Make sure you’re resting in between “games” if you want to be effective for the long haul.

2. Soccer is not always about what happens now.
Soccer is a low scoring game. You feel like you work so hard all game long and yet only score a single point or two. Over the season, points are accumulated and that determines who moves on to the playoffs. Ministry can feel the same way at times. It’s easy to get discouraged when we want to see big results real fast. The church was never designed to be a fast, now, high scoring game. The church is most effective when we understand that big results come over time with hard work. Not only will results come, but they will be LASTING results.

Craig Groschel states, “Because you feel entitled, you [this generation] often overestimate what God wants to do through you in the short run and underestimate what God wants to do through you in the long run.”

I’ll have a couple more thoughts about this tomorrow.

Thoughts?

-PJ

“You must first meet and then exceed the expectations of your customers if you are going to build a reputation for quality service” –Disney Institute

Have you ever asked yourself, or even better—parents what their expectations are for children’s ministry? We often hear of people saying to exceed expectations, but how can you exceed them if you don’t even know what the standard is?

Take some time over the next several weeks and take some notes. Ask parents of children and teenagers what they want from you as the church. Ask them what they expect. Once you get a good feel of their expectations—meet them! Pull your team in, recruit new volunteers, buy resources, do whatever you have to do to meet those expectations. If you’re finding that most parent’s expectations are counter to your church’s culture, bring it up to your lead/executive pastor and inform him/her what the majority of families are wanting. If it’s way out there—and normally it’s not—sit down with these families one-on-one to explain what it is your church does and why.

Having done this before, I’ve found that most parent’s expectations are VERY reasonable and should be done in any children’s or youth ministry. It’s all about execution. After you’ve established met expectations, then and only then can you move on to exceeding expectations.

You can’t exceed what you don’t meet.

Thoughts?

-PJ

Back to the wonderful world of blogging. The last two weeks looked like this for me…

Our team had to move one of our campuses in just four days. Not from high school to high school, but from high school to permanent location. This included build out, painting, décor, cleaning, etc. You name it—we did it in just four days!

We launched another addition of our very successful family experience. This time it’s called “Angry Words” and it won’t take a rocket scientist to figure out our theme.

On top of all that we had to get ready for Easter. To say the very least, my last two weeks were probably some of the busiest weeks I’ve ever experienced.

Here are a couple lessons I learned along the way:

• I totally bombed at hiding my frustration. As you can imagine, moving an entire campus in four days put me a little over the limit in the stress category, especially since this wasn’t a planned move AND we were getting ready for our family experience launch AND Easter was just one and a half weeks away. Why was this bad? Well, I feel as a leader I’m allowed to be frustrated, but I’m not allowed to let it affect other people. There were people “under” me who were given a negative impression of leadership because of my attitude. I had to eat some humble pie and ask forgiveness.
• Serving God isn’t always “cookies and cream”. As a staff pastor I have to trust my leadership. This doesn’t mean I have to agree—it means exactly what I said—I have to trust them. If my pastor feels like this is the best move, I need to bring up my disagreements behind closed doors (which I did), but in the end I need to do my best to make it happen with a great attitude.
• A lot can happen when people are excited about the vision. We got A LOT done in a very short amount of time. It was due to volunteers getting excited about what God can and will do through serving our community. I want to find and create ways to excite our volunteers at all our campuses.
• I wanted everything to be perfect in my four-day move at our new kids building, however I was reminded that parents, members and guests at our church have no idea what “perfect” is. Because we went from temporary to permanent—anything (almost) we would’ve done would have been a great improvement and they would have loved it. Then, we could continue to finish up the building over the next several weeks and with every new added item would add new excitement.

So, as you can see we’ve been busy and God’s been refining me. There’s one thing that I’m absolutely certain of—I love what God is doing through our church and I love leading a great group of world-changers. I’m reminded that as crazy as things get, this is the best “job” ever!

-PJ

Another great question (click here for the first question) I ask myself regularly is “Why do I teach ‘it’ this way?” I wish more children and youth ministries asked that question. Again, the answer is probably “I don’t know” or “We’ve always done it this way”. I just can’t get myself to believe that those are good answers, especially from those leading.

Here are some other common reasons we “teach that way”:

• It’s easy—Please, please don’t ever do something just because it’s easier. I’m all about working smarter and not harder, but I’m not all about doing something just because it’s more convenient for me. The reality of ministry is that it’s often times inconvenient.
• We don’t know how to do it any other way—If this is your reason, please start networking with others, read books or just google something like “creative teaching methods”. In other words, put a little effort into searching for ways to be more creative and effective. It doesn’t have to cost money.
• It’s what the kids/teens like—This is only okay if you’re seeing growth both spiritually and numerically. If the same 20 kids/teens for the past six months like how you teach, I’d think about changing it up because something isn’t working.
• Inexperience—This is not a negative. If this is you—keep teaching, keep moving forward, but be mindful of your effectiveness. Don’t be afraid of constructive criticism. Don’t be afraid to try new things. The only way to get past inexperience is experience.

Give yourself some time and ask, “Why do I teach (or do it) this way?” You may realize that you have no idea why. That’s okay. Begin a journey to discover the “whys”. As you do that, you’ll discover more about yourself and other effective ways of ministering.

How do you teach (method) and why do you to it that way?

-PJ

Parents, here’s the promo to our new Family Experience starting Wednesdays at 7pm. Invite your neighbors and friends. It’s an experience for the entire family!

Get the word out and we’ll see you April 4th!

-PJ

Have you ever sat back and asked yourself why you teach what you teach? Hopefully you have, but if you haven’t don’t feel bad. You’re probably like many other children, youth, family pastors out there working hard trying to provide the best teaching you can but haven’t found the time to sit back and ask yourself that question. For me, it’s one I ask often. It can sometimes feel more like a curse than a blessing for me as I have a hard time committing to a specific curriculum for that very reason.

It’s important to know why you teach what you teach. Here are some reasons we teach what we teach:

1. We have always done it this way.
2. It’s part of the curriculum.
3. Is there another way to do it?
4. That board member is influential and it makes him happy.

Lame reasons all—and you could probably add to the list. Here’s what I’d like you to do, whether you’re using a specific curriculum or not: take a couple hours out of your week and ask yourself, “Why do we teach what we teach?”

If you ask that and you love what you’re doing—great! Continuing doing it. If you find that you have something burning in your heart, but you’ve never done it because it’s not part of the curriculum—change it. Teach what you feel God is asking you teach. Don’t feel constrained because a piece of paper tells you to teach this virtue or that virtue or this topic or that topic. Listening to God and teaching what He wants you to teach should trump and scope and sequence and weekend of the year.

Thoughts?

-PJ

So, if you’re a sports fan you know about free agency, trades, etc. Can I get a witness from my friends in St. Louis?! (by the way…thank you!)

I was thinking, I wonder what it would be like if associate pastors (i.e. children’s, youth, outreach, etc.) were treated like sports stars? Would it be bad? Here you are doing amazing things in your city at ABC Church when all of a sudden your pastor calls you in his office and says, “You’ve been traded to XYZ Church. We picked up a youth and outreach guy.” You’ve built up the ministry so well that now they’re sending you to another team to do what you did with them and in return they’re getting leaders to shore up other weaknesses.

We’re all on the same team. Why can’t it be a positive free agency or trade? Why does the church often times make “trading” awkward and difficult? It’s just a “what if” thought. What say you?

What would be the pros and cons?

-PJ