I believe in planning, so I try to plan my basic teaching and event calendar 9-12 months out. I’ll give you three reasons why.
1. It makes recruiting volunteers easier. I can wing it with the best of them and run a meeting or an outreach on the fly. But, while that might be a necessary skill on a mission trip when your bus breaks down or the teacher gets sick, my experience says it’s a lousy way to run a day-to-day ministry and a great way to burn out volunteers. When I wing it in my everyday ministry life, it usually becomes all about me. My volunteers quickly start feeling used instead of utilized. When I fail to plan ahead, I don’t know what I need and can’t effectively ask others to help, or when I do ask, I have to apologize for the last-minute emergency.
2. It saves money. We do a lot of ministry purchasing and ordering online. So if we need an earth ball or a bunch of water balloons or books for a small-group teaching series and I don’t want to run around town to fifty places to get the quantity I need, I simply order them and have them sent. But a huge budget killer is paying to have everything rush shipped. When I plan ahead, I can have someone search for the best deal, find it on sale, and pay for the minimum shipping or accept the free shipping without having to stress that it won’t be here on time. And if you’ve ever tried to book a speaker, artist, band, retreat center, airline ticket, or hotel last minute, then you know it’s not only more stressful and difficult to do, it often costs more too.
3. It increases creativity and ownership. My experience says that both of those things take time. If I want creativity to be a team task and I want to pool the best ideas from my team, then I have to gather people together far enough out to give input. When I do this, they also feel like it’s their thing, not just my thing. When we talk about outreach or basic ideas for a teaching series, planning gives a lot more time for input and increases the creativity of what we can do because we now have the time to plan the skit, create the design, gather the people, or prepare something to be really well done with a wide level of involvement.
Annually, in the early summer, I have my student and adult leaders gather for a couple of days of basic skeleton calendaring for the next school year. We spend some time in prayer, and we talk about our mission and why we do what we do. We eat and laugh and share visions. Before they arrive I take a huge whiteboard calendar and mark when school is out, when holidays are, and large, nonnegotiable things, like the annual summer camp we go to or church-wide functions. Then we look at the space that is left and start talking about our dreams. We talk about details like when small groups should start, what other retreats or events we want to do, and some main topics, themes, Bible texts, and teaching ideas we want to cover in the next year. Since we teach in series form, I then begin to then lay out a rough sketch of teaching series, and we start putting them down on our weekends.
Quarterly, I gather some key people to talk about what is coming up. We gather several months before major seasons like the fall kick-off for school, Christmas, spring break, and summer. These meetings are less about overall vision and begin to move into the nuts and bolts of design. We start making lists of things that need to be done, thinking of people we could ask to help, and dreaming about what we’re planning and what it really looks like.
Monthly, I meet with my student leadership, and we plan out the next month’s youth group meetings. We meet after church and over lunch, and we brainstorm the next month based on our previous nine-month plan and any changes we now have to make. We talk themes, pop-culture references, relevant songs or movie clips, brainstorm games and discussion questions, and evaluate and identify anything we learned from the previous month of doing ministry together too.
I love Google Maps. When you load the homepage, the default view is zoomed way out, showing you the whole United States. Type in an address and it zooms in quickly to show you a specific region. Click “street view” and BAM! you’re looking at things as if you were literally walking through the neighborhood on foot. Kinda creepy, since this means Google is stalking us, but kinda awesome at the same time. And a great example of how we typically plan our youth ministry calendar.
We first take a look at the big picture of our ministry then zoom in on the season ahead and finally get a street view all the way down to the current teaching series and events.
It is a wise idea to get away for the day and get a big picture of your ministry. Take a break from the pace of ministry and the distractions of email, voicemail, and the persistent nagging of Google Plus and wrestle with an overview of your youth group. August is the perfect time for this!
For some, this is a simple task because they live in the world of ideas and vision. For others, it will be challenging to stick your head up over it all and get a glimpse of the whole.
Key questions to ask yourself at this big-picture stage:
- Where do you think God wants to take students in the next year?
- What worked well last year, and will it work again?
- What annual events would be effective again this year?
- What needs to get the ax?
- Have you blocked out your week of vacation?
- Where are we strong, and where are we weak?
- Is there a good balance of God’s eternal purposes for our ministry (evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, worship)?
Paint in broad strokes what your youth ministry year will look like at this point. Spend lots of time in prayer. Ask God for discernment. Use pencil.
Once you’ve got an idea of the big picture, it is time to specially plan the next season. There are lots of ways you can do this. I like to divide the year into three unequal parts: fall, winter-spring, and summer. This is the time to start to really firm up specific teaching topics, series, and events. You probably already locked up some bigger things like summer camp, trips, and retreat locations, but now is the time to make final decisions.
Key questions to ask yourself at this stage:
- What needs to be cut?
- Am I keeping this program to satisfy a parent or some vocal students or because it is what is best for our ministry?
- Where do I have momentum naturally, and where is it lacking?
- What are the teaching topics for this season?
- Who is the best person to teach?
- Has my spouse seen this before I go public?
What looked good in the big-picture view might be too much now that you’re zoomed in a bit closer. You are still flexible enough to use the eraser if needed but definitely not on your vacation time.
The closest we zoom in for planning is the current month. You’ve planned everything from a year out, you firmed up much of those plans in your season overview, now it is time to lock everything down and walk into what you’ve planned.
Key questions to ask yourself at this stage:
- What adjustments do I need to make based on circumstances that have come up since we planned the year/season?
- Am I balanced and healthy with this calendar?
- What can we do to make our youth ministry even better next year?
I’m in the thick of planning our spring right now! May God bless you as you serve students and plan your youth ministry calendar too.
Some tools to consider helping you plan your youth ministry calendar: o www.rememberthemilk.com o www.30boxes.com o www.whomi.com o www.franklincovey.com/tc/software-and-applications
Also, please consider these related posts on my blog:
5 Steps to Calendar on Purpose
4 Guiding Principles for Planning Your Youth Ministry Calendar
I’m a big planner and enjoy strategizing just how to maximize our time and ensure that the most students, families, volunteers, and leaders will be impacted. In general, we try to plan all of our big events, retreats, missions, and activities at least one year out. This is especially true about our summer calendar.
I try to involve as many people as possible in our planning process, so it’s helpful for me to roll out preliminary ideas early so I can run them by parents, volunteers, students, and other staff to see what we are missing.
In this particular community we’ve found that moms are a huge resource in picking out possible conflicts.
When we get this many people involved in our planning process, the calendar stops being my calendar and instead becomes their calendar.I also try to out-plan parents. If I can get the dates for our events on their radar a minimum of one year out, then they can plan around our schedule. This is particularly important because, in my current community, people tend to disappear for the entire summer months. But, if we let them know the dates for our mission trips and camps, they more often than not adjust their calendars so their students can go.
Long-range preplanning actually helps us be more flexible. When we publish dates a year in advance, occasionally something comes up that we need to change. People in general are much happier when we make changes six months out rather than the week of. Last summer, we planned a houseboat trip with our high school students. Ten months out, I started asking parents what they thought and got a little pushback on the safety of the proposed location. We immediately made a switch, and the trip was a huge success. Because we planned so far out, we weren’t locked into locations and contracts and could be flexible to make changes.
My process of thinking involves a lot of people and dialogue. It’s way more than just grabbing clip art and making copies of a calendar. In the beginning, I spend a lot of time evaluating what we did in the past. We talk about impact, timing, dates, and cost. We try to make sure we always have a good sense of how something met our philosophy of ministry.
At that point, if everything lined up, we start talking about whether we want to do the same trip, activity, or event again. I’m a huge proponent of repetition because it is often our best advertising. I also like change, but in general, we first look to see what has worked before we start talking about what we want to change. This is also the stage where we pray a ton, asking God to lead.
Then we then start having dialogue about all the possibilities, followed by a process in which I write it all out and start looking for conflicts. I think about presence and impact when I do this. Specifically, I look to see how everyone will be impacted by our calendar. I look at the frequency and number of events. I evaluate the downtime between events as well as the prep time needed to pull something off well. It’s a system aimed at making sure all we do has huge impact but doesn’t burn anyone out.
The next step is when we finally talk budgets and money. We purposely wait ’til near the end because talking about budgets and money too early can be a killer to the dreaming process. I want us to dream big first without thinking there will hindrances.
Then it’s time to bring everyone into the loop. This often takes the most amount of time and can be frustrating because I have to explain the reasons behind everything we are doing. After everyone has weighed in and we’ve gotten most people to consent to the calendar, we try to get our communications ministry to get all of our packages for the events done as soon as possible. We have found that planning way out and then promoting way out produces the most success.
I’ve had a bunch of bombs over the years and have had many things not go well. But I’ve learned that spending a lot of time thinking, dreaming, and praying is most beneficial because it gets more people involved. If I could stress one thing above everything else here, I would say that more people involved will only benefit your calendar.
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