Judgement and Conviction

More on a general note, rather than a note for children's ministry. Let's talk about our interactions with one another.

You often hear, "Don't JUDGE me!" and we think that, "Oh. I don't like to judge others," but in the words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I don't think it means, what you think it means."

Here is a devotional I had to present to a group of my peers about Judgement vs Conviction. Do enjoy!

Judgment vs. Conviction

Eric Riskus

READ: Matthew 7:1-5

As a leader and placed in authority, we often have to face everyday the moment and time to deal with someone else’s issues. It’s part of being in a ministry position.

There is a fine line between Judgment and Conviction.

Judgment is defined as the forming of an opinion, estimate, notion, or conclusion, as from the circumstances presented to the mind.

Whereas conviction is defined as proving or declaring guilty of an offense, especially after a legal trial; or to impress with a sense of guilt.

Judgment done improperly leads to gossip.

My favorite character throughout any video game series or cartoon was always Bowser from “Super Mario Brothers.” In fact, he’s one of the tattoos I plan on getting. Here is what I learned from Bowser.

1) He’s the bad guy

2) He keeps kidnapping the princess

3) He tries constantly to get rid of Mario

Now, everyone’s first thought when playing a game is, “Let’s defeat this guy,” but I never saw it the same way. My thought process was,

“Why is he evil? Why does he keep kidnapping the princess in each and every game, and why is he trying to get rid of Mario?”

Then a game came out that completely gave me the paradigm shift I was looking for. Super Mario Sunshine. (Bear with me.)

In this game, every question I had was answered.

1) He’s evil because that’s what his upbringing was, and didn’t know better.

2) He wants to find a mother figure for his boy, and is doing so the only way he knows how.

3) This guy keeps on beating him up for it.

Now, I list all that to say, how often as leaders to we take a minute to figure out someone’s story? We see some gruff dude waltz into church, throwing his cigarette outside, smelling like booze, and swearing in casual conversation. What is our first instinct?

We need to learn as leaders how to balance conviction and judgment.

Especially for those young in ministry, it can become muddled or difficult to find the difference between the two, especially if you are a person who is non-confrontational. Sometimes there is a thought process of

“I don’t want to step on someone’s toes” or “I don’t want them to think that I’m judging them.”

Or maybe immediately we skip conviction and go straight to, “You can’t do that here, can you please step to the side?” or we let someone else do that to them.

READ Acts 5:1-10

We need to understand our attitude before we approach someone. What should we say? Personally, I look for why the conviction is there. Is he repeatedly disturbing anyone else within reason? Is there an opportunity for growth present for the individual? Am I cranky and just looking for confrontation? Do I want the approval of others?

Why do we convict? To bring forth any guilty action brought on by the individual.

As leaders, we are put in a seat of power to convict those around us, but a leader can be more that someone on staff, or a volunteer in the church. A leader could be one of two friends looking to stand up for what is right, vs. what is easy.

To wrap things up, let’s understand 2 things.

1) Passing judgment is the initial bias we get from our own mental assessment of what we see.

2) Conviction is bringing forth any issue, guilt, or transgression that needs to be dealt with, regardless of who, or what the situation is.

READ: PROVERBS 24:23-26

As a leader we need to have a healthy balance of both. It’s in human nature to judge, and as leaders we need to develop that sixth sense and not become naïve to judge, but to make sure that our judgment is just and if we are going to judge, we had better be ready to convict as well. For you can’t have one without the other.

Tips and Tricks to managing your time.

TIME 

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.

Now it goes even farther to allow you to give each service a title and a description.

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

Kids CRAVE Consistency!

Thought for the day. How consistent are you with your children? Do you tell them "no" on one day, but another day give in to the temper tantrums? Do you tell kids in your church, "No talking" and then allow quick little tidbits "as long as they are funny and relevant?" Kids crave consistency even if they don't realize it.

I was at Wal-mart the other day, and this little girl was trying to push the cart, but she was going slow and getting in everyone's way. The Dad stood up and said, "Alright, you have three more seconds to get the hang of it today. There's people waiting to get through." He counted to three, and then the little girl shrieked and started crying. So he threw his hands up and backed off.

It may not make the kids immediately happy, and they may even throw a little fit, but you can not give in to a child like that. Especially as a parent or within your children's ministry. I was horrible with this at first when I started out as Children's Pastor. I had my four rules.

1)No Walking
2)No Talking
3)You Should Know Better Than That
4)Have Fun

However, with rule #2, I didn't realize it, but I would allow kids to break it all the time. It's a smaller group that allows for some group discussion at points, but kids would interrupt me with something funny and somewhat relevant to what I was talking about, but I didn't want to stifle creativity or make a kid feel bad even though their joke might have been super lame.
However, this started to backfire after a while. Kids would then start interrupting me for more and more mindless idle chitchat and next thing you knew, kids were just completely disregarding the rule.

You make one exception, you're actually making a chain link of exceptions, so I learned anyway.

So now rule #2 is NO TALKING. If you have something important to say, raise your hands, and a volunteer will check to see if it's worth interrupting the service for. If it's not, then you can wait until after the service to give me your funny anecdote. If it's important to note, then the volunteer will step back and let the kid keep raising his/her hand and I'll know then that this is important, but usually it's never important enough to interrupt my service.

This can apply to parents too. If you tell your child that you are going to count to three, you'd better have a consequence by the time you get to three or your child will know that from there out they can call your bluff.

Take some time and leave some tips in the comments section! What are some good parenting tips you have in constructive discipline and consistency with your children?

Ministry Leaders: Don't Give Anger a Foothold

Ephesians 4:2 (NLT)
2 Be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other's faults because of your love.


Working with Children takes a LOT of patience, however sometimes so does working with volunteers!
   I have a pretty good team of Kidmin Volunteers. Though it wasn't always that way. It took about 3 years to weed and pick through the volunteers I knew I can trust. I had some volunteers that would be there every Sunday and Wednesday night. I would have volunteers who didn't necessarily work in the kids ministry every week, but I knew I could count on them during special events.
   Then I had the volunteers who said they were in it to win it, but then Sunday service would come around and I would be the only adult in the room. Or I would ask them to come in and help with check-in and I am getting set up for the service and I would walk out in the hallway to see a massive line of children waiting to get checked in! (First off, I've learned to have everything prepared BEFORE Sundays and Wednesdays, but that's a different post.)
   Then I had the volunteers who were not quite sure what to expect with. They might have just made a commitment to live for God, and were now looking for their spot in the church. So they know they loved kids and wanted to be involved in the Children's Ministry. Well I must have been spoiled because I would hold these individuals to a really high standard. A standard that I had for my veteran volunteers, but more than just hold them to the standard I would expect them to know it without me telling them. Boy, was I a kidmin n00b!
   We don't always know what situation or volunteers are in. The verse I listed above says that we need to give allowance for faults. Now I think we should still have our standards, but like everything else, practice makes perfect. Let's remember our first time as a ministry leader! I'm sure there were a couple of things we didn't get the hang of. If at the first mistake we were fired, we would have a bitter taste in our mouths.
   I think when we select our volunteers we need to keep a few things in mind in how we pick, and how we train. I finally learned my lesson about 2 years ago. I asked a youth girl who had been awesome on Sundays to take over a service while I was gone. I knew she had the ability to follow the curriculum and to teach, while the adults in the room handled the discipline side of things.
   Well i get a phone call the next day from our pastor that she showed up 15 minutes late to service, and one of my adult volunteers showed up 45 minutes late!! The one adult in the room were really anxious because they didn't know what was happing that day in the schedule, so they just let the kids play and tried her best to handle 20 kids on her own. I was irate.
   My first thought was to never EVER let her take over for me again, and to tell this other volunteer that showed up 45 minutes late that she might as well not come in that Sunday. Their faults made ME look bad! Then I got to thinking, "You weren't fired, your kids didn't get hurt. Don't focus on what COULD have happened, but learn from this and teach your volunteers for the future."
   So I made a phone call to my youth volunteer to come in and meet with me. I discussed what her actions did for that Sunday and for the kids in the room. Then I told her that I expected a lot more from her since I put her in charge. Then I told her that I want to start seeing her about half an hour early on Sundays that she volunteers.
   What I did here was let her know that she did let me down. I didn't let her actions slide, however I made an allowance for her faults and used them to teach her for the future. Now I didn't put her back in charge for a while, but three months later I gave her a second chance and she nailed it. She was there the night before setting up, and then she was there half an hour early to spend time with kids when they were checking in.
   I had a meeting with the other volunteer, and it pretty much went the same. I won't bore you with the details, but she has been a lot better about it.


Paul continues to write later in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 29, 


"Don't use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them."


It's important that as a minister, you realize that your ministry is not just for the kids, but for everyone around you. Your volunteers look up to you for direction, guidance, and accountability. When I was in college, I was volunteering at a small church about 45 minutes away. I was in a classroom with the teacher giving the lesson, and he was fumbling through a book, so while the kids were making up their own, "fun" i started telling them stories. About halfway through, the teacher looked at me, pointed to the door and yelled out, "You're being a distraction, you need to leave right now!" right in front of the kids! Here's what happened.
1) I was humiliated. I was doing him a favor by keeping the kids attention and focus while he was looking through his book.
2) I was scarred by that and didn't help him out any more.
3) The kids were freaked out a bit by it, and now when they were around me they just felt awkward


Luckily for him, I went to college for Children's Ministry so I was already solid in what I wanted to do, however imagine if it was someone who was new to the faith and was looking for their spot to help out? I can guarantee that it would have taken a LOT of repair work to fix up his confidence.


One more verse. Ephesians 4:27


"for anger gives a mighty foothold to the Devil"


In this case, anger made the leader bitter, anger made the volunteer shaken and allowed for Satan or his forces to come in and start planting seeds of doubt and lies.


So simply put, be careful how you handle volunteers that may or may not be the most faithful. Be gentle in how you handle them, but be stern and hold them accountable at the same note. Remember, an allowance is not an onflowing stream of letting them do what they want, but it's opportunities for them to learn and grow. If they are learning, then great. If not, well then it might not be the ministry position for them.


Anyway. Hope all is well!


-Eric Riskus