numbers | More Than Dodgeball

Josh GriffinMore Posts Weigh In Volume 25: Tracking Students Attendance

From time to time I post a question that comes into the blog for YOU to answer. What advice would you give this youth pastor who is asking about tracking youth group attendance in their youth ministry. Weigh in!

Hey, I was wondering if you have a process for tracking students so you know when they aren’t there on the weekend. We are struggling with this right now – what are the best practices, tools or systems you use that would inspire us to create one of our own. Would appreciate any insight.

In all honesty … we don’t have a system where I serve currently! Please help him out – and maybe I’ll steal yours, too!

JG

15 View Comments July 27, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Why You Need To Build A Youth Ministry Dashboard

Back in high school I had to borrow my neighbors car to run a few errands. As I picked up the car I asked him, “Is there anything I need to know?” He replied, “Keep your eye on the flow of traffic because the speedometer is broken.” Being a new driver I didn’t realize how big of a deal this was until I was heading down the road passing what felt like a million cops with no clue whether or not I was speeding.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that you need every gauge on your car’s dashboard to head down the road safely. Without it you don’t know how far and fast you are going. You need it to track the health of the cars and when you need a tune up.

In youth ministry you need a dashboard for similar reasons, because you need to know:

What Are You Tracking?

This might be a question that makes you nervous because it brings up the numbers game; however, it’s more than that. Knowing what you are tracking means you are keeping track of the health of your ministry. Therefore, you need to be tracking:

Who Is Coming: Attendance is more than just a blank number, it can help us determine if we are tracking more boys than girls or more churched than unchurched. Tracking attendance isn’t just counting bodies; it allows you to understand how you are growing. Knowing who is coming will also shape the identity of your ministry.

Spiritual Deepening: It’s very difficult to judge a man’s heart (unless you are God); however, by tracking spiritual deepening you are looking at the ratios of teens that are showing up versus how many are going deeper. Knowing the ratios means knowing that teens might struggle to plug into a ministry versus a small group. This helps you understand the path you’ve laid out for them in your ministry.

Why Teens Are Coming: Tracking this question may lead to answers as simple as, “My friend brought me.” Or “My mom made me.” however, it will also show you your influence and impact in the community. Do people know about you? How are they learning about you? Are you more present in certain schools, clubs or teams? Know this and you can make your impact greater.

Adult Influence: Tracking ministers might not be a difficult task because you work at a small church or there aren’t a lot of adults serving in the student ministry. However, if you don’t track who is serving, how long they are staying, why they are leaving and how they got into ministry then you are never going to learn how to grow the number of men and women serving in your ministry.

Budget: If you want to protect or increase your budget you need to know where the money is going and even where it’s coming from. Finances are definitely not the most appealing area of student ministry; however, it’s important. Without God honoring stewardship it’s going to be hard to fund the movement you are trying to lead.

Whether you use certain software or a basic spreadsheet you need to be tracking the progress, growth and movement of your ministry. With no dashboard you are essentially putting your ministry at risk of crashing and spinning out of control. Talk to your leaders and take the time to answer the question, “What should I be tracking?”

What other aspects of ministry should we be tracking?

Chris Wesley is the Director of Student Ministry at Church of the Nativity in Timonium, MD. You can read more about his blog Marathon Youth Ministry.

2 View Comments June 2, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Preparing for Growth in Your Youth Ministry

A youth worker sent me an email with a question about preparing for growth in their ministry as they were seeing larger classes in their children’s ministry heading their way – it looks like their ministry is on a path to double soon. Here’s part of how I replied to him, thought it may be helpful to you as well:

Infrastructure is absolutely key. I would definitely start building a team of leaders with all your energy. You might be tempted to think adding more programs but I think people and systems are the best choice.

Adding a position
Getting another staff person, even part-time, is a crap shoot. Flirt with it in your mind, but in my experience that is usually where it stays. Typically leadership waits to see results and staffs late, or staffs intentionall what is hurting instead of what is building. Ironic, but want to be real with you so you don’t get your hopes up. I do think it is time to ask for help before it is too late. And either way, start pouring in to your leaders and building a team of people, paid or not.

Core Leaders
Start a core team of people who are totally on board with the vision of your ministry and love and follow you. These are the people you’ll do life with and know the best. You need to trust them. They will trust you. You need to eat together, laugh together and develop some inside jokes and memories as soon as possible.

More Leaders
Next, I’d work on developing as many additional leaders as I could. Get your small groups/life groups super small next year, so they can scale and grow with more students as they start entering the ministry. If each group has 4 students, you could easily give them 6 the next year and 8 the year after. So make them all super small right now and get the rookies some experience and get ready with an infrastructure for growth.

Systems
This is where you can prepare for growth as well – make sure that all of your systems are ready to scale as well. Take a look at your communications tools, your curriculum, your web presence, your parent ministry – all of these systems need to be able to scale up to double/triple their size. If not, you need to ditch the tool now before it dies under the strain of growth. Take care of these things now and adding students is a breeze.Wait and it will crush you and slow your momentum to a crawl.

Other random stuff/links to consider:

JG

1 View Comments May 3, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts The Metrics of Youth Ministry

Really enjoyed this post over on Nick Farr’s Everything Pastor blog – this week he talks about numbers in youth ministry and I though it was right on. Here’s a clip of the post:

Myth #1: Numbers don’t matter.

The truth is–numbers DO matter. The Bible talks about numbers a lot. (Read the book of Numbers for an example.) God wants us to have healthy ministries and we cannot know what healthy ministry looks like unless we create specific goals and measure them. Measuring goals is the key. You can have all of the goals in the world for changing your church, youth ministry, community, etc., but if you can’t measure your progress you’ve failed.

Don’t be ashamed–count.

A word of caution: Don’t allow numbers to become everything. Put them into perspective of God’s plan. Just like money can be the root of all kinds of evil, so can numbers. However, money/numbers aren’t sinful within themselves.

The second myth that youth pastors buy into is that they know what’s going on in their ministry and have a good grasp of everything.

Great rest of the article – head there now to finish reading …

JG

Add Comment February 13, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Beneath the Surface

Recently, I compiled a series of blog posts that have gotten my blog a lot of traffic. There’s an iPhone game, Snappers, that causes more frustration than child-proof packaging. So, I scoured Google, Yahoo Answers, and my game experience, and compiled a list of walk-throughs for the various levels. As I was laying it out, I also carefully key-worded it and SEO’d the mess out of each blog post. Now, when you Google for Snappers levels, more often than not, this website will be one of the top 3 results.

Thanks to these 5 blog posts, check out my web traffic.

Pretty crazy, right? Those are unique visitors (by IP address) per day at my website. I uploaded the first of the walk-throughs on January 21. Between then and the time of this blog post’s beginnings, I’ve had 37,796 individual people come to this site.

This kind of traffic landed me as one of the world’s most visited wordpress.com blog pages.

According to wordpress.com’s Blogs of the Day, I’m a high-influencing blogger. This page varies in it’s order, but here’s the rank (the site lists the top 100) the time of this writing…

Yep…that’s right. austinjwalker.wordpress.com right now is the #28 blog in the world (out of blogs using wordpress.com not .org or any other platform). Let’s put this in a little bit of perspective, just to help out. Scott Bourne hosts (or at least used to) a widely followed podcast called Photofocus, in which he answers emails on photography. Scott has over 166k twitter followers, one of the best blogs on wordpress.com with posts featured in the worlds top blog posts of the day on a regular basis, and a wealth of knowledge in his field I will never be able to touch. Here is where is blog was at…

I say all of this not to brag, but to set up this observation. It would be natural to think that kind of traffic would increase influence, traction, and authority. Twitter followers may jump, commenters may arise out of thin air, and the beginnings of a solid network may emerge. But here’s another interesting stat for you…

Painfully revealing. I’d love to hide these numbers. I’d love to pretend the stats aren’t real. The fact of the matter is, in the last 7 days, the unique readers of my true “content” (including my home page, about, and contact forms) are but .007758% of the traffic. .007758% is nothing.

So why am I writing about this, how does this apply to anyone reading this (the .00000005% of my future blog traffickers)? Here’s how it hits student ministry. What do your numbers truly reflect? When you’re talking with other student pastors, deacons, your pastor, or anyone you’re wanting to be looked up to by, how do your numbers come across? Does your ministry attract a LOT of people? If so, that’s awesome, and if done right, there’s a LOT of positives that can come out of that. But looking beneath the surface, is there any depth? Are you discipling students to pursue Christ and lean into His call on their life, or are you just satisfied to count their head at youth and let them chow down on pizza and warheads?

Are you making use of the numbers God has given you, or are you doing everything you can to gain accolades, with no meat beneath the surface? Is there substance to accompany all the hype?

Austin Walker is the Student Pastor at Fellowship Bible Church in Cabot, AR and blogs right here.

1 View Comments February 9, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Game of Shadows

What is it about youth ministry that makes it seem like it’s always a game of shadows for so many of us? I just went out to finally see Sherlock Holmes 2 with two of the guys from our middle school ministry. After begging my wife to go with me since it came out, I finally gave up and took initiative on my own. As a side note, in case my wife reads this, it’s not her fault she never took me up on it as my invitations were always unplanned and spontaneous, and that doesn’t really work with an eight month old child. All this, however, is simply semantics. The movie was as good as I had hoped it to be, but as I drove home after dropping off the two guys it hit me: I’m pretty sure I’ve been involved in a game of shadows in my youth ministry this past year.

I’ve really discovered a lot over the past few months. One of the biggest discoveries came recently when it hit me that I’ve been sucked into the most common traps of youth ministry this side of the Mississippi. It started without even a warning. I simply looked around at all the programs, exciting events, and cool activities going on within our church and thought, “Wow, that’s what positive ministry looks like”.

I began brainstorming, and watched as ideas poured forth from my head onto my white board. Each one looked more brilliant then the last. As I did this, I convinced myself that my motivation was right. I thought, “These shiny new programs and events are what will help create the opportunities for relationships and sharing Christ.

Truth is, all I really did was fill up my plate-as well as the plates of those who VOLUNTEERED to minister along side of me. At the end of the year I found my self chasing hard towards an impressive looking ministry. The problem was I would leave at the end of these events wondering, “is this really the way it’s supposed to be?”. Sure, there were tons of students, lots of growth, and loads of fun, but for what purpose?

I look back and wish for the opportunity to do less, but mean more! I am determined to change things around. This game of shadows will confuse me no more. I am resolved to have a ministry driven by purpose. Not just any purpose, but the ONE purpose to which I am called. A Mathew 28 purpose.

Here’s the point: it’s so easy to get trapped by the pace of ministry, the lure of a dynamic program, and constant increase of numbers. It’s good to have a paced ministry, but be sure that the pace is one that ministers not only to students but also your family and yourself. It’s great to have a dynamic program, but understand, it’s not about you, your job, or your own personal success. It’s about making Christ’s name famous.

Lastly, let’s talk numbers. We hear this stuff all the time, and I realize that, but had it not grabbed me so easily I wouldn’t talk about it.

The reality is, Christ will draw people to himself, and He doesn’t need our help. He has invited us into his work, and wants us to be a part of it, but it’s His show. Listen to this carefully, numbers are a sign of positive Christ centered ministry, but not the sign. The power of the Gospel will draw students to it so don’t be so enthralled with numerical growth that it becomes the driving factor for your decision making as a leader. Let the Gospel of Christ lead, and be thankful for the way in which He uses you! Don’t be distracted by the youth ministry game of shadows.

Eric Upton is the Middle School Pastor at Bridgeway Christian Church and you can follow him on Twitter or roll over to his Tumblr here if you dare.

Add Comment February 7, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts 6 Worries of a Youth Worker

Doug Franklin, LeaderTreks student leadership guru, wrote an amazing article about the 6 Worries of a Youth Worker. Here are the first three – head there for the rest. I resonated with them ALL (if not now in some point in my youth ministry career)! How about you?

6. Worried about numbers
The number one question youth workers answer most is, “How many students were at youth group this week?” If that is the questions it’s no wonder youth workers are worried about numbers.

5. Worried about pay
Youth workers don’t often make enough money and they are worried that they might have to change jobs or leave the ministry due to lack of funds. The money issues put pressure on their marriage. It also causes them to distrust church leaders and leads to conflict between them and the pastor.

4. Worried about fraud
I talk with youth workers all the time that have no idea on how to do their jobs. They didn’t get any training before they started and no one is mentoring them now. They are scared to death that the parents and the pastors are going to figure they don’t have any idea on how to help students in their faith. They were hired because students like them, not because they knew how to lead students, volunteers, parents and the church in youth ministry.

JG

3 View Comments September 14, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts Book Review: Onward

I just finished up Onward by Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks. It was a gift (read: required reading) from my boss Kurt Johnston. Of course, it wasn’t a chore – I’ve been wanting to pick up the book after seeing it recently and am fascinated by how “it” companies like Apple and Starbucks work on the inside. The book was full of incredible insights with tons of youth ministry applications – but let me tell you right out of the gate that it is about 100 pages too long. The amount of detail is staggering, and quite honestly gives you an appreciation for the capacity of Howard Schultz. Here are a a few of the key things that stood out to me:

Howard took incredible risks. Some paid off, others totally bombed. When was my last risk?
People are what matter most. Period.
Howard took his time building an incredible team. Success is never solo.
One evening every Starbucks in the nation was closed for training. How much do I value training?
Over time, Starbucks changed reporting their “comps” to focus on other measurements. Am I looking at the right numbers?
Starbucks rebirth was guided by 7 principles. What are mine? What is guiding me?

Lots of good stuff. Great book.

JG