How Effective Children's Ministry Leaders Spend Their Time ~ RELEVANT CHILDREN'S MINISTRY

Time is one of your most precious commodities and there is never a shortage of things clamoring for it.

How you choose to spend your time will determine your effectiveness. As I have watched and learned from successful children's ministry leaders, I have found that they focus their time on four key areas.

Personal Growth
Ministry is an outward expression of the inward workings of God in your life.

Effective leaders know that who they are is more important than what they do. They know if they will be who they are supposed to be it will enable them to do what they are supposed to do.

Effective children's ministry leaders spend time working on their...

relationship with God
spiritual growth
leadership
people skills
blind spots
strengths

The discipline of spending time working on yourself is not always easy. If you're like me, it's easier to drive a car than it is to wait patiently by the gas pump while it's filling up. I don't have time to sit and wait for the car to fill up...I've got places to go...things to do. But remember, you can only skip the gas pump for so long before you run out of gas and come to a screeching halt.

The same applies to personal growth. You can skip it and be effective...but it will be very short-lived. Neglect filling up personally and your ministry will come to a screeching halt.

You may be reading this right now and you've been so busy working on the ministry that you haven't been working on yourself. You know you're running on fumes. Is it time to move personal growth back to where it should be on your time list?

Don't let the lid on the ministry be you.

Family
Effective children's ministry leaders know that their first ministry is their family. They make sure they invest first in their own marriage before they try to help other people's marriages. They make sure they invest first in their own kids before they try to help other people's kids.

The health of your family is more important than the health of your ministry. Healthy ministry flows out of a healthy family.

Take a look at your time allocations. What does it reflect? Where you spend your time tells what your priorities are. Is your family a priority?

Team Building
Effective children's ministry leaders know that success in ministry is not in what you can do but it's in what you can empower others to do. They spend more time equipping others to do ministry than they spend doing the ministry themselves.

Look at their week and you will see a big chunk allocated to enlisting, equipping, encouraging and empowering leaders. Look at their budget and it will reflect the same.

Time spent building leaders is never time wasted.

Ministry improvement
The most effective children's ministry leaders spend lots of time perfecting the ministry through evaluation, feedback, adjustments and changes. They spend time making things better rather than just letting it coast.

They are constantly asking questions like...

What's working?
What's not working?
What needs changed?
What do we need to focus on?
How can we improve?
What are we missing?

They spend time looking through a microscope that's laser focused on the ministry and how to improve it.

How much time are you allocating for these 4 key areas? Below is a tool you can download and use to evaluate. Make every week...every day...every hour...every minute...every second count. What you do matters...a lot...so be wise in how you invest your time.