Here’s the final part 3 of 3 posts on some brutally practical tips on managing your ministry life.

WHAT’S YOUR STRATEGY TO KEEP UP WITH EMAIL?

I hate a cluttered inbox.  I try and keep mine to 200 or less. Maybe that’s cluttered for you. Maybe that’s a dream.  But if I get it to 50 it’s a miracle.  Around 100 is just kinda normal for me.  If it hits 200 or more and I have to go sit down and deal with it. If an e-mail is in my “inbox”, it is because I either haven’t read it, haven’t finished the project it is relating to, or it is there as a to-do list reminder of sorts.

But, here’s what I do to keep most of it out of there.

Don’t give it your best time:  Be careful that you don’t let e-mail become our job.  I limit my access to it, refuse to respond to long e-mails on my phone, turn off the “chime” saying I have new mail, and stuff like that.  Sending e-mail can be done for me just about anytime.  Message prep, meeting with leaders, and stuff like that cannot.  So I can’t use my most productive hours to respond to e-mail.

Unsubscribe like crazy:  If you don’t need it, hit the unsubscribe button on all your flyers and mailers and junk.

Set up accounts for certain things: 
I have a private e-mail I give virtually no one and use often to send myself stuff and reminders. I also use it for social media.

I have another one I use for purchasing and website registrations.

I have a work one.

I have a home or “family” one.

This may seem crazy to you, but it really helps me keep life straight and access to e-mail uncluttered.   Since I can check them all in one location (I use apple mail), it’s way easier for me to not just send everything to one e-mail.

Create personal inboxes and rules for all my direct reports and staff: 
So that no one that is really important in my world get’s lost in the shuffle, I have created folders for most of my ministry team.  Then I create a “rule” under my mail preferences and anytime I get an e-mail from them, it goes directly to their personal box.   Some people use “flags” and “colors”, but I use “personal inboxes”.

This does two things:

(1) it makes it easy to find mail from individuals

(2) it shows me at a glance who has sent me mail.  I’ll have bold face number next to any of their boxes telling me how many e-mails I have from them that I haven’t read just yet.  So if I have 50 unread e-mails, I can tell you immediately how many are from my direct reports and how many are from our lead or executive pastor or etc.

This is super helpful to make sure that the most important stuff gets dealt with first.  Here’s a screen shot of how it looks for me:

Next up:

HOW DO YOU BUDGET YOUR TIME, OR WHAT DOES THE AVERAGE WEEK LOOK LIKE FOR YOU.

1. Let’s not talk about my average week.  Depending on the season, it’s stupid.  ha ha.  pray for me.  Some days I should be asking you this question, not writing about it.  Ok fine, most days.

2. Here’s kinda how it works for an average week for me (i.e. not christmas, spring break, summer, or soccer coaching in the fall).  Hence the word “kinda”…

• Monday: off work. I take Becky, Billy, and Jake all to one-on-one meetings with me.
• Tuesday: Direct report meetings, meetings with exec team, prayer meetings as a staff.  Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. 
• Wednesday: Breakfast with my son TJ, High School Pastor stuff.  Small groups that night. 
• Thursday:  Breakfast with my son Tyler, message writing, doing stuff I need to do to get ahead of my team and that I can’t get done in meetings, and seminary that night.
• Friday: Final message prep, meetings with volunteers, dinner out with family, church that night.
• Saturday: off.  At night, I look over and review my prep for high school the next morning. 
• Sunday: High School Ministry in the morning, volunteer and student meetings in the afternoon, play indoor soccer at night. 

Recently, I got this e-mail:

Brian, 

I saw that your role seems similar to the one I am serving in.  I’m wondering if I could ask you three questions: 

1.  What are you doing to develop your direct reports?
2.  How do you budget your time, or what does the average week look like for you?
3.  Whats your strategy to keep up with email?

So, incase you and I both share similar worlds or maybe you’re just morbidly curious what I said, here’s my answers to his questions.  I initially had this all in one post, but it was getting to long so I decided to go ahead and break it into three, but I posted them all today.

By no means do I have this all figured out, but here’s what I do.  Hopefully one of them is somewhat helpful to you.  Feel free to share what you do in the comments.

First up:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO DEVELOP YOUR DIRECT REPORTS? 

Meet directly:  On a personal level, I do my best to encourage them, ask how they are doing, be available, and speak into them as the need arises. Specifically, I meet with my high school paid staff weekly, my direct report team leaders twice a month, and the rest on a monthly level since they are “direct reports” to someone else on my team primarily.  Then in addition to that, about 2x a year we get together for a 1/2 day of team building and dreaming as a “Generation Team”.

Local ministry training:  In terms of specific training and development, from time to time I take my team to local ministry training events.  We don’t have the budget or funds to send our team across the country to tons of conferences, but we do try and seize the local opportunities that come our way.  Whenever we can get together as a team and go to a training that fits our budget, schedule, and aligns with our ministry, I try and make it happen.

As a church, we send all our paid staff and many from our congregation to the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit annually in August since we host that as well.

It’s inevitable that in life, and especially in ministry, things will get funky between you and someone else.  It will happen in your family, your marriage, your work, your team… pretty much your everything.  Where there are relationships, there will be funk. I promise.

So….

Expect it.  Anticipate it.

And please…. for the love of all things holy… go directly to the funk and get through it.

Don’t go around your boss.  Don’t go down the chain of command.  Don’t go to friends.  Just go to the person you’re in a funk with and deal with it.

Matthew 18:15-17 reads as follows: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

So if we just follow the textual prompts with this teaching of Jesus, then we will follow a very specific order of events when we confront people when there’s a funk or sin or whatever it gets labeled:

1. Go directly to the one you have a conflict with, and try to work it out personally
2. Bring in two or three people who you respect and who are in godly leadership roles to help mediate
3. Bring it to a larger group of Christ-followers to work it out.  Maybe the elder board or something. 
4. Then the ugly gets dealt with kinda ugly and people get removed all together to eradicate the funk. 

While I pray that you never have to get to step 3 or 4, my experience is that we would avoid about 90% of all of it if we just always started with step 1.

Don’t go to the person’s friends to get clarification first. Don’t text your small group or ask 12 people for advice.  If you’re in youth ministry, don’t ask another teen what they think.   Just go directly to that person and ask a good question.

Look for clarity.  Strive to understand. Apologize if necessary.  Undo misunderstandings.  Assume the best.  You know… just be sane and stop the gossip train.

If you do that, you might actually be on the road toward God-honoring restoration, too.  You definitely will be on an less traveled road to a God-honoring response for sure.  And the peace you’ll have that you acted according to the voice of the Holy Spirit will be from God.

Just yesterday I asked students to turn in written prayer requests as a way to start off 2013 right.  I invited them to write down an invitation to ask God to move in their life in a specific area.  Some students did nothing with them, but some dove in.  Some dove in deep.

How deep?  Well one girl, at the end of service, on her very first time in our youth group, walked up to me and handed me a prayer card.  As she started to walk away I read it and realized that it said her mom had died just 5 days earlier.  It doesn’t get any deeper than that.  The truth is, she wouldn’t say it to me, but she would write it down.  I called her back.  We hugged and cried. We prayed.

As she walked away and as I had this card in my hand, I realized I was holding a deep spiritual need that I would have never known about had we not had these cards.  She sat at a table of girls and talked and smiled and said nothing about it.

As a youth worker, I can’t afford to not know that kind of stuff.  We can’t afford to not know this.  Too much is at stake. If you work with high school students, let me encourage you with just one thing: find a way to gather the prayer requests of your students.

For this purpose, I want to strongly encourage you to: USE PRAYER CARDS.

Why?  Well, if the story above isn’t reason enough, then here’s my top 3 reasons:

1.  STUDENTS WILL WRITE STUFF THEY CAN’T OR WON’T SAY OUT LOUD:

Plain and simple, call it the consequence of a texting generation or simply chalk it up to fear… but the truth is, when I hand a group of students a prayer card and ask them to write down what is weighing them down spiritually, often I find that someone has written a need they have not uttered to me or anyone else in the room.  

I was reminded this last Sunday that every weekend I need to remind students that we have cards they can write stuff on and leaders who want to love on them in the midst of their unfolding life story.

2.  WE CAN’T BE WITH STUDENTS ALL THE TIME:

I know you want to be a resource in the lives of your students.  But you and I cannot do that 24/7 and God can.  The best chance I have of coming alongside a student as a spiritual influence in their life is actually not to be with them more, but rather to constantly remember them in prayer.  Apart from it being spiritually powerful, on a brutally practical level, it also helps me in the times I am with them too.  I do a better job of remembering names, have a greater sense of spiritual connection, and have more meaningful things to talk about when I’ve prayed for them all week.

To this end, prayer requests that are written down are a goldmine for my spiritual investment in a student as I ask God to do what only God can do in their lives.

3.  THEY SET YOUR YOUTH MINISTRY APART:

Maybe they can hear music in youth group and at home.  Maybe they can connect with friends at school and in your church.  Maybe they can go to the snow on a trip with your ministry and with their family.  Sure, maybe the activities and opportunities of church and life collide in a lot of different ways.

But when you offer a student a chance to communicate a spiritual need in their life every time they come to your ministry, you set yourself apart as a place where students know they can go to cry out to God in-and-among a faith community in ways that are both profound and distinct.  And that… that is a one of kind thing that the church is supposed to be.

Sure… use a youtube video and play relevant music and write Bible Studies that relate to their lives…. but don’t miss the opportunity to do the one thing they don’t do anywhere else:  write down a prayer need so you and I can join them in the incomparable privilege of taking a life to God in prayer.


So… I hope you join me in this prayer card priority in 2013 if you don’t already do it or even if for you, but like me, it sometimes gets casually addressed instead of intentionally called out.  Let’s change that this year.

I suppose that could look like 1000 different things, but here’s the one we use in our ministry if you want to download it for a sample.