brad chandler | More Than Dodgeball

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Youth Tracker

A few months ago, I noticed a major weakness in our student ministry administration. It seemed like we had a revolving door of student visitors with no sense of follow-up. We had informational cards, but it never seemed like we did anything with them. The result was seeing new students come week after week, but finding that we were ineffective in drawing them in to stay. A youth pastor friend of mine, Cody Mummau, turned me on to YouthTracker.net last November and it has changed the way we gather information and follow-up with students. YouthTracker is an online database system that inputs students, staff, leaders, and parents into one easily accessible dashboard. As a result, we have seen more consistency in our core group of students and it has given us an idea of the new students and MIA students that we need to follow-up on. The work on the front end is a little tedious, but it’s so easy once it’s set up. Here’s how we roll…

1) First, we have students fill out a basic info card that looks like this, just for some starting details to create a student profile.

2) One of my volunteers searches for the student via Facebook/Twitter and adds them. There’s a place where you can go into their YT profile and link it to their social networking profiles. This makes it easy for one of my volunteers to search for a student and makes it super easy to match faces with names. After that, we’ll invite the student to add or “Like” our ministry Facebook profile or page.

3) The next time that a student comes in to our service, all they have to do is sign-in with their name via one of our computer kiosks! An event is created prior to the service, but all the students see is a sign-in screen. At the end of the night, I can check the event details to see which students were present and which ones weren’t. You can even update it on the spot in case someone forgot to sign-in. When my volunteer inputs the new students and signs them in, the event details show “NEW” beside that student’s name.

Here are a few of the features we’ve found most effective:

Event Numbers — I know, I know, you’re NOT about the numbers. But that nifty line graph helps give you a true idea of your week-to-week attendence.
Contact Reports — This feature shows every student in your ministry along with two sections: the last time they attended an event and the last time they’ve been contacted (a leader has an option to record a contact {i.e. phone call, FB message, one-on-one time etc.}). This ensures that no student falls through the cracks. There’s also a sub-feature here where it will make a student inactive at a set time. Ours is 120 days. But if that student returns and signs in, no big deal. It makes them active once again.
Address/Google Maps — Ever had your volunteers call you looking for a student’s address? No headache now! Their address is synced up with Google Maps. Schwweeeeet!
Text Message/Email Service — You can text (5 cents per student) or email (free). The great thing about this feature though is that you can target certain students according to your events. So you can send a text to the students who were at your large group meeting saying, “Hey guys! Thanks for a great night! Remember to love extravagantly this week.” And to the students who could make it: “Hey guys! We missed you tonight. We read from Matthew 22:34-40 tonight and talked about loving God extravagantly. Hope to see you next week!”
Address Labels – This has saved us hours of time. To send out postcards, just go to “print address labels” and WAH-LAH! That information you put in from the info card transfers right onto an address label template.
Demographics/Schools – This gives you an idea of your student makeup from a list of schools (you can also input the school address and the student’s lunch), grades, gender, nationality, etc.
Student Growth – You can move students through various stages (core, committed, community, visitor) and log their commitments (salvation, baptism, filled with the Spirit, etc.).
Student Account — Your financial volunteer will love you. You can utilize the student account feature to keep up with retreats, trips, etc. It even has their T-Shirt size for that missions trip!
Areas – Want to track your middle-school and high-school ministry separate? No problem!

There’s a host of other details that would take me forever to explain. This resource has been so valuable to us. Though we all hate administrative duties sometimes, its kind of a necessary evil in student ministry. This tool makes it easy to get past the follow-up and informational stuff, freeing up time to do what’s important: build relationships with kids. The best $25 a month we’ve ever spent. Check it out!

Bradley K. Chandler is a graduate of Southeastern University and is the Student Ministries Pastor at Trinity Worship Center in Burlington, NC. Be sure to subscribe to his blog here — good stuff for sure.

7 View Comments May 8, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Legislating Discipleship

Between 1919 and 1933, a small amendment changed the face of American culture…for a few years anyway. The Noble Experiment, as it was called, introduced the Prohibition Era with the banning of alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale. It was a huge failure. Repealed just over a decade later, we learned that legislating the lifestyles of Americans is actually quite difficult. Even today, questions of “legislating morality” still pepper the discussions of Congress, boardrooms, and classrooms all over the country. Can we give people a list of do’s and don’ts and call that morality?

Discipleship is a bit of a soapbox for me. The vagueness of that term discipleship is exactly why I want to explore the idea from a different perspective. When I think of discipleship, small groups, curriculum, Sunday School classes, and student leadership are usually the first things that come to my mind. Discipleship, in other words, is “smaller” in retrospect to your larger corporate worship service. It usually involves some sort of structure, schedule, curriculum, or teaching notes. If it’s done effectively, it creates good conversation and interaction. But if it’s done poorly, as the structured version often is, it usually leads to one person doing all of the talking while a small group of people (that gets smaller every week for some odd reason…) “listen.” As is, this is what we define as discipleship.

I love people. Really, I do. If I didn’t, there’s no way I could be a student pastor. But even I tend to get task-oriented from time-to-time. Between writing sermons, filling out POs, hosting weekly meetings, vision-planning, and keeping the student ministries building in tact, life can get pretty busy. It’s that task-oriented mind that usually defines discipleship by the terms mentioned before rather than what discipleship is actually about: PEOPLE!

Discipleship is a cycle of leading and following that finds its life and vitality in one thing: relationships. Without relationships there is NO discipleship. No matter how savvy our programs, how extensive our small group curriculum, or how many ministries we have for students to get involved in, if relationships aren’t a part of it all…we fail. Now don’t get me wrong: small groups, student leadership, and Sunday school classes can be good tools to facilitate spiritual growth and even build some form of relationships. Oftentimes, however, we tag these programs with the umbrella of discipleship and they have nothing to do with relationships at all! It’s just another gathering to fill up time during your week, which in turn takes away from the relationships you should be building in the first place.

Let’s reel this in: Can you legislate discipleship in your youth ministry? Can you make students follow this program or buy into this vision or that ministry? I’m learning that the answer to that is absolutely, positively, “NO, NO, NO!”…without relationships. You cannot disciple a student that doesn’t want to be discipled. If they don’t want to follow, they won’t. It’s a little disheartening, but I’m finding it to be so true. But a student WILL follow if they know their teacher. They WILL follow if you’re spending time with them outside of your programs. And they WILL follow if your discipleship ideas facilitate the centerpoint of relationships.

To be honest, a lot of our discipleship programs exist for one of two reasons: 1) We’ve always done it that way. 2) It’s the next big thing from a youth ministry, yet we ignore the purpose and reason behind why THEY actually created it to begin with. Let’s take the concept of Sunday School for example. This discipleship program was very popular in the 50s and existed as a forum to ask questions and facilitate discussion that usually wouldn’t happen in the context of a sermon. Many youth ministries have carried on this program from generation to generation. But I wonder if you were to ask them now WHY they actually do it. I think I would shudder at the answer and I know what it would be for most of us: We would get crucified at even thinking about not doing Sunday School as it were. Heresy!

The course of my youth ministry has its own sacred cow in student leadership. Directing a student leadership program was one of the first things I did in youth ministry. To think of not doing student leadership is hard for me because it collides with my sentimentality. But the idea of legislating discipleship has never glared itself more true than in my experience with this program. The idea and concept behind student leadership is fantastic: allow students to lead. But what often happens through the application process, laundry list of student tasks, rigorous reading plans, and unorganized meetings is that we lose focus on relationships in the process. We begin investing in the program rather than investing in the students. Am I saying that student leadership is wrong? Absolutely not. Veterans like Doug Fields and Josh Griffin swear by it and have great success with it. But what I am saying is that I will not, nor will I ever again, sacrifice my students on the altar of programming.

As a youth ministry, YouthQuake has made a few changes to facilitate relationships in our discipleship process. By no means am I saying that we are the perfect model, but this is what we are experimenting with to see more effective ministry. Our Sunday School slot is being replaced with a short 10-minute talk about practical issues like dating, picking a college, time management, etc. through a biblical perspective. After that, we break away for a time of hanging out and relationship building so that our leaders can be more intentional about KNOWING our students. This slot immediately follows our weekly staff meeting so that all of our leaders are present. Our spiritual emphasis programming is on Wednesday nights so this is a more practical approach that simply acts as a conversation starter.

In place of a student leadership program, I spend time weekly with 3 small groups of my high-school and JV core students. With no plan or agenda in place, we take time to break open the Scriptures and just enjoy each other’s company. Out of these times, we’ve seen some incredible revelation happen and even creative ideas for how to move forward. Now these students get excited about the ministry that’s happening and they invite their friends like crazy. The meeting is not oppressive or something that the students dread going to, but its refreshing and encouraging. Its refreshing for me. This saves our energy to turn around and build more relationships. They come because they want to come, thus discipleship happens very naturally through the refreshing relationships that are built.

The key to all of this is to simplify your programming to align with your youth ministry’s vision. For YouthQuake we want to teach our students to LIVE extraordinary, LEAD creatively, & LOVE extravagantly. It just makes sense to free up as much time and energy to accomplish this. What you’ll find is that this process duplicates itself and students disciple other students. And that is the gospel lived out. After all, STUDENTS are what discipleship is all about.

Bradley K. Chandler is a graduate of Southeastern University and is the Student Ministries Pastor at Trinity Worship Center in Burlington, NC. Be sure to subscribe to his blog here — good stuff for sure.