Who has any of that nowadays. Earlier this year I viewed "time" as a dirty four lettered word. Between doctors appointments for my thyroid, and more for Kristine's pregnancy, and then there's Celebration Church, and Eric's Way, and this, and that, and AAAAUUUGHHH!
Finding time to plan out your services can sometimes feel like a daunting and time consuming task. You have to get it done, and your volunteers in the know, and get the prep, and buy the materials, and work on your graphics, and find extra things to do in case you run short (God Forbid)
Time is like volunteers. Sometimes you feel like there's never enough and you could always use just a handful more!
Anyway, having ADHD I have had to really learn how to block out my days when I was a teen otherwise I didn't get anything done and I found myself frustrated with the amount of uncompleted tasks that surrounded me. If it were not for lists, I would never have learned to work with it.
This Blog post is more so for Pastors and Leaders in the Children's Ministry setting, or special event directors for that matter. Hope it helps!
1) Plan Ahead.
Here's what I do. I have the help of Planning Center Online (http://www.planningcenteronline.com) to help plan ahead. If you haven't heard of this before, it's exactly what it sounds like. You can plan out your services, detail them, and even go as detail oriented as timing out every segment of your service. I've included a PDF to show you what I'm talking about.
This is how I start. I had my planning meeting with my fellow campus Children's Pastors and from there we discuss what we want our topics to be. Now speaking from a single church perspective, you have a little more liberty to simply decide what your topics will be.
Make a day of this. Grab a big ol' calendar and list out what topics you want to cover 6 months in advance. Yup! 6 months. On each Sunday write out your topic for the day. If you are doing a series, be sure to note how many weeks that is and write that in each Sunday. You don't have to get into the nitty gritty just yet. Simply lay out what your topics will be.
Then look for a theme. Is there a way you can decorate your room to accomodate what you are speaking about? Are there any supplies that you know would be handy to have on hand? Keep side notes for each month about these things.
Once your Sundays are done and laid out, work on the Wednesdays if applicable. Do you use this time as a review for each Sunday? Is this it's own seperate entity? Is it more game and activity heavy than a Sunday? Consider these things. Then start mapping out your monthly Wednesday Nights. Look for any dates you can switch up and throw an activity into. Christmas party? Easter Celebration? Costume Night? Pajama party? Ice Cream social? Pizza and Movie Night? Whatever you can think of just get it down on paper.
And simply start from there.
2)Figure out the details.
An artist will never draw the picture exactly as it is first. They start with a wire frame, and then work on the major details. Where will my eyes go? How big should the nose be? What shape is the mouth? They don't necessarily worry about color, and shading, and detailed lines. that comes later.
Same thing in planning your services. Don't worry about activity descriptions, or games, or how you're going to teach the memory verse. What I did was in Planning Center (You can do this on a paper calendar too) is on each day, I put down the following Headers.
-Pre-Service
-Start
-Worship
-Offering
-Introduction
-Bible Story
-Wrap Up
-Small Groups.
My Wednesdays look a little different.
-Pre-Service
-Start (Opening Song)
-Introduction
-Game
-Lesson
-Small Groups
I start with my wire frame for each Sunday and Wednesday. Then I copy and paste, and move around and sometimes I'll switch it up, but I'll do this for Each Sunday. You would not believe how much this already frees up your time to get more accomplished on later dates.
Once you are done with your wire frame, start thinking about simply the colors of each wire. Here's an example of my Wednesdays.
-Pre-Service
-Pre-service activity
-Checkin
-Start (Opening Song)
-1 Song
-Introduction
-Welcome
-Rules
-Opening Prayer
-Worship
-Song #1
-Song #2
-Song #3
-Game
-Memory Verse Game
-Memory Verse Review
-Lesson
-Recap of Sunday's lesson.
-Similar Story to wrap it all up
-Review Game
-Small Groups
-Activity
-Prayer Time
-Take Home Application
and after I do this for each service I will the detail out what my descriptions are and activities. This has given me a solid template for each service.
3.In Retrospect
If you take a day or two to do what I've just given you, you might think, "Well. I've sucked up an entire 2 days," But think about it. You've just done 6 months of material. Do you realize how much free time you have just given yourself in the planning time alone? From here you can go week to week and just work on the fine details that don't take up as much time. Since doing this, my level of stress has down gown considerably, my volunteers are able to get feelers so that even if they get a last-minute assignment, they still feel like they know what's going on in some sense.
Time for discussion! Let myself and everyone here know, "What do you do to help manage your time planning services and balancing life?"
Until later...
-Pastor Eric Riskus
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