14 Finding Your Bounce: The Inside Secret of Sustainable Children’s Ministry

Finding Your Bounce

The Inside Secret of Sustainable

Children’s Ministry

I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.

Balance. It’s like a unicorn; we’ve heard about it, everyone talks about it and makes airbrushed T-shirts celebrating it, it seems super rad, but we haven’t actually seen one. I’m beginning to think it isn’t a thing.

Our church had always put on a large fall festival for the community. It was a full-blown event on an evening in October, complete with petting zoo, bands, carnival games, food, and fair rides.

Since we had always pulled off this event successfully for years, we decided to expand it from a couple hours into a full-day affair and to partner with other churches. What had once been an event in our church parking lot benefiting only our church would become a citywide outreach and benefit lots of churches. We were excited. The potential to impact and encourage our community was going to be exponentially more than our church working alone—or so we thought.

We scheduled an initial meeting with other churches in the area, and they were less than inspired by the idea. Our efforts to make this a multichurch sponsored event weren’t going anywhere. The weight of our great idea for a massive community fair ended up resting solely on us. Our three partner churches did send a total of six volunteers (out of more than one hundred required for the event). But we were not discouraged. We forged ahead with our plans.

Finally, the day came. We were encouraged by a nice handful of people waiting when we opened up, but the food vendors were two hours late. Can you imagine a fall festival without food?

We had hired a great band. But we made the mistake of scheduling them to perform first. There might have been twenty-four people there to hear the band if we counted the volunteers who snuck away from their responsibilities to be in the audience. The vendors working one of the carnival games didn’t speak a word of English and then ran out of the supplies they needed by just after noon. It seemed like nothing went as planned.

The turnout was much weaker than expected. In fact, we could have held it in our church’s small parking lot. The crowd looked even smaller against the backdrop of a massive city park. And with low ticket sales, we had spent more money than we hoped to bring in. Our budget was totally blown.

We had dreamed big, really big. We had worked hard, but in the end we had embarrassed ourselves and our church partners in the process. This was a public flop in front of all the people who had volunteered, all the people who had contributed financially, all the people who had trusted us with this dream.

I hope you’ve never had to experience a failure this public or this epic. But if you stay in this work long enough, there’s a good chance that you’ll find yourself shaking your head at the disappointing end of a “great idea,” wondering what in the world went wrong.

If we are doing our jobs, every now and then we’ll be stretching ourselves, experimenting, innovating, and, yes, failing. Show me a children’s minister who hasn’t failed at something in the last few years, and I’ll show you one who is trapped in “the way we’ve always done things.”

The good news is that how we react to failure can be much more important than avoiding failure altogether. We can wallow in the wreckage of our best-laid plans, or we can learn to bounce. The good news is that resilience can be learned. The bad news is that the training exercises for developing grit and bounce almost always includes more opportunities for failure.

One of the benefits of having many ideas is that I get the chance to fail often and quickly. If there were such a degree, I sure I would have earned an involuntary PhD in resilience. (Please refer to me as Dr. Bounce for the rest of this book.) As one eminently qualified in the fine art of failure, let me offer a few steps out of the pit for those times you’re not sure you can (or even want to) get up and try again.

1. Be humble. My instinctive first reaction to my own failure in ministry is to get defensive. When I’ve worked hard to put together an event or new initiative and something goes wrong, I want to blame someone. I understand, theoretically, that failure is a part of the process. But ooh, when it comes, it stings every time.

Maybe it was my fault; maybe someone else totally blew it. But when someone makes a critical comment, it’s all I can do not to dive into rationalizing, justifying, and explaining (all ways of saying, “It wasn’t my fault”).

More often than not, though, the buck stops with me. Making excuses never helps and usually multiplies the criticism. Defensiveness has a way of fueling criticism even more. As hard as it is, I try to welcome criticism, take a few notes for next time, and respond with “Fair enough” or “Point well taken.”

2. If you pay the tuition, learn the lesson. Every failure costs something. It may cost our pride, our confidence, or the trust of those around us. I like to see every failure as tuition paid for my education in leadership and ministry. So if we pay the tuition, let’s learn everything there is to learn from the course! There’s a lesson in every flop.

At the end of every failed operation, I typically want to pretend that it never happened. The last thing I want to do is debrief. But debriefing is exactly the step you’ll need to take if you don’t want to repeat the same mistakes again.

When we pull together a listening group to gather feedback “for next time,” it will likely be painful to be reminded of the places where we missed the mark. But debriefs can also get folks thinking ahead with solutions for improvement, rather than just looking back at our mistakes.

3. Talk most about what you want most. Here’s a profound principle for life and ministry: we always get more of what we focus on. If our focus is on mentally chewing our mistakes over and over again, we’ll likely get more mistakes. If we focus on what we want to see come next or the ways that God works in spite of our foibles, we’ll be more attentive to God at work.

Once we have a handle on what went wrong and how to improve next time (if there is a next time), we can continue to celebrate the things that are going well. I’m not talking about pretending everything is great, but owning up to our failures and not allowing our entire life and ministry be defined by a couple of misses. We can set the atmosphere by choosing to focus first on the ways God is at work regardless of our most recent misstep.

Fail fast. Fail forward. Once you’ve had the chance to practice the resilience strategy a few dozen times, the sting of failure may not go away but it won’t be quite as sharp. And one day you may become a failure ninja like me!

Your Constellation of Coaches

One of the keys to longevity and joy in ministry is the constellation of coaches and mentors you build into your life and ministry. As you’re building your own bounce strategy, take a minute right now to assess your mentors and coaches, along with anyone you are currently mentoring.

If you’re not satisfied with your list, write the names of five people you could ask out for coffee or a meal over the next month to see if they might serve as formal or informal mentors or coaches for you in the coming year. Here I want to introduce you to the various types of people who might provide the healthy support, training, and coaching you will need.

1. Ministry mentors. Sure, we can learn from our own mistakes. Personally, I prefer to learn from someone else’s! Someone else has already paid the tuition, and I’d love to learn from them.

Most of the children’s ministry leaders I know haven’t had much in the way of formal ministry training. Few have studied children’s ministry in college or seminary. Most haven’t gone to a single children’s ministry workshop. The best leaders, are, of course, learners. But too often we’re so caught up in chasing the details of our ministry that we see training for ourselves a luxury we can’t afford.

Let me put it as clearly as I can. If you hope to stay energized, alive, and effective in ministry for the long haul, ongoing learning is not an option you can afford to be without. Experience doesn’t necessarily train us, especially when our experience serves to calcify us in doing the exact same things in the exact same way.

Whether you’ve been in ministry two months or twenty years, I recommend that you build two strategic relationships into your life: you should always be mentoring someone, and you should always have a mentor. When you provide mentoring, you can’t help but become wiser and clearer in your ministry skills. And if you take the counsel of a person mentoring you, you will grow, even if their advice isn’t always perfectly on target.

Mrs. Geni began to teach me about children’s ministry when I taught my first Sunday school lesson at eleven years old. She taught me piano when I was a teen, but between the scales we spent a good chunk of that time talking about life. She had a profound influence on my faith, my love of music, and my ministry.

When I returned to Dallas for grad school, I worked for Mrs. Geni part-time, coordinating the midweek children’s ministry at our church. We met at least once a month, and she would share what she knew about leadership and organization, teaching me about ministry systems the whole time.

When I took the leadership of a children’s ministry in the same town decades later, guess where I went for help? Mrs. Geni even sponsored a children’s ministry training conference, involving children’s ministry leaders from churches from all around the area. I brought my best and brightest leaders to her meetings so they too could learn the systems she practiced that allowed her to keep so many plates spinning at one time.

At times, I have invited different people to formally mentor me. But I quickly realized that I didn’t have to formally define someone as a mentor to pick up incredible wisdom from them. I often reached out to friends whose lives and ministries I deeply respected.

2. Supervisors. As you embark on a position in a new church, your supervisor will play a huge role in your development. Especially early on, it’s great to have a supervisor willing to spend time with you every week to help you learn about the culture of the church and to hold you accountable to the priorities that matter most to them.

Your supervisor can warn of you landmines, give you invaluable pastoral care information about families in your ministry, and help you get the right things done without ruffling the wrong feathers. This person doesn’t need to know a lot about children’s ministry. You have been hired as the resident expert in that field. But your supervisor is the expert on the expectations the congregation and staff have for your position.

At the same time, having a supervisor as a mentor can be complicated and tricky. Assuming they will be a mentor to you is usually a recipe for disappointment. Your supervisor’s biggest job is to supervise you, to make sure you are doing your job, not to disciple, coach, or provide spiritual direction for you. Get the first part of the relationship clear (the supervising part), and the other three might just come in its wake.

3. Coaches. The coaches you build into your life can have a huge impact on your ability to bounce back from the certain setbacks of ministry. Executive coaching has become a multibillion dollar industry in the world of business. There’s a reason why almost all Olympians have a coach in their corner. Coaching makes us better.

A great coach will bring just the right combination of encouragement and pressure, putting the right tension on the string so your life and ministry is in tune. There is only one kind of children’s minister who doesn’t need a coach—one who doesn’t want to grow or get better. It will be a total waste of that person’s time.

The distinction we tend to make between mentors and coaches is that mentors primarily respond to your invitations to meet. A coach takes more initiative to help you identify your goals and help you achieve them. A coach also typically focuses on a single area of your life—finances, ministry, or health—while a mentor might be more focused on you as a person. Though not always, coaching tends to be a formalized relationship and mentoring is more informal.

Developing a Community of Support

When you are in the unique position of being on a church staff, community can be hard to come by. There are times when it will be wildly inappropriate and unhelpful for you to share your frustrations about ministry or the tension you feel with members of your team or colleagues on your church’s staff. But you will not likely last long through the messy chapters of ministry without a community of support. So where will you find it?

Unfortunately, most of us are anything but intentional about the communities we build around ourselves. It is possible, though, to create for ourselves a life-giving constellation of friends who together provide for us a healthy ecosystem we can do ministry within.

I’m coming to realize that friends outside of my own ministry, outside of my own church, can have a profound effect on me and my ministry. In addition to more formal coaches and mentors, I want to make sure I’ve always got the following kinds of people in my life:

Don’t worry. These are not necessarily relationships you’ll be tending to every week or even every month. One of the most life-giving communities of support I have is the team of fellow consultants at Ministry Architects. Once a year I get to meet with fifteen to twenty of them on an annual retreat. We might not touch base throughout the entire year, but this group of friends profoundly shapes the way I now do life and ministry.

When we surround ourselves primarily with those in the children’s ministry worlds, our ministries suffer for it. We may think we are focusing by not having a community outside of our children’s ministry team, but we’re actually ensuring that our next year’s ministry will be a shrinking version of the one we’re leading today.

For the Long Haul

To some people, the children’s ministry journey has felt like a royal game of bait and switch. For many of us, leading a children’s ministry at first sounded like a fun way to share with kids what a life with Jesus might be like.

It didn’t take long, though, before I realized how little time I was spending with children, maybe only 10 percent of ministry time. The other 90 percent was managing the people, systems, and projects that make ministry happen.

Remember the architect, general contractor, and laborer roles I defined in

This shift may be the single biggest struggle for the children’s ministers I get to coach. Their ministry success depends largely on whether they can make the leap from being a leader to being a leader of leaders. Leaders who can’t seem to make the switch from laborer to general contractor are destined to struggle year after year trying to keep their heads above water until they burn out, quit, or get fired.

When I met Gina, she was in her sixteenth year of children’s ministry, having been children’s ministry director in several churches. She knew the world of children’s ministry well, but after a year at her new church, things were still “falling apart.” She was working seventy hours a week or so and was running herself ragged just to get through the week. She stepped into her position on the heels of a well-loved children’s ministry director, and the church was not adjusting well to the change. She had not been welcomed with open arms.

She struggled to get volunteers and felt like she was a victim of a negative church culture. She lacked the systems she needed to shift out of her laborer role. She couldn’t imagine doing ministry differently.

When we first met, she had serious doubts about the process. I’ll give her credit; she opened herself to the process, but she was still skeptical that anything could really change. She had a big job ahead of her. Not only did she need to overcome the church’s own lack of enthusiasm and investment in the children’s ministry, she would need to be willing to hand off some of the laborer tasks she had mastered so well. She would need to live with the discomfort of knowing that, at least for a while, the tasks she handed off would not be done as well she had been doing them.

But she knew that if she was going to stay in her position, she would need to cut her workload almost in half. She struggled as she worked the recruiting process, returning naturally to the negative narratives that had been burned into her brain.

But week after week, she worked the recruiting process outlined in

But recruiting her team was only half the battle. Now that she had a team, she had to equip them to play their positions well. Over the next several months she had built a children’s ministry leadership team that met with her once a month.

Their transition to taking on load-bearing responsibility did not happen immediately. Meeting once a month, it took several months for the team to move beyond just giving Gina advice and into carrying real leadership. Without knowing it, Gina had trained them to expect their children’s ministry staff person to do the vast majority of the work, rather than to equip the congregation to do the work.

But Gina presented the same model of ministry to them every meeting until it began to stick. By consistently, steadily, persistently clarifying each team member’s role, most of them began to catch the vision that the children’s ministry belonged to the church, not just to its staff.

I did say “most” of them. Some resisted the change and chose to end their volunteer commitment early. I had to keep reminding Gina that she was right on track. When healthy leaders lead well, not everyone will get on board. In fact, some will strenuously resist. In this case, we assured her, the resistance was a sign she was doing something right!

As Gina built a new team who embraced a new vision for a shared children’s ministry, she started to find freedom in her schedule. Within six months, and with a little strategic coaching through the slick spots, Gina had delegated enough of her laborer roles that she was now working twenty fewer hours a week—still more than full-time, but a huge improvement!

She was inching her way back into a sustainable pace of life work. And more importantly, she was architecting a shift in the culture surrounding the children’s ministry, learning to pay attention and tell better stories about the work God was doing in children, parents, and volunteers. Her excitement about what the team was accomplishing was contagious.

If you walk into her church now, you will find a woman who has grown as a leader, and you will find families excited to participate in ministry together. It took Gina almost two years to make the shift out of her laborer role and into the general contractor role. But as we told her, “Shifting a culture in two years is about one year ahead of schedule!”

In appendix G, you will find a template that over time will help you incorporate all of the systems in this book. We call it the “Children’s Ministry Systems Checklist.”

On Juggling: A Final Word

As we had to remind Gina many times, the process works when we are willing to work the process. It’s no surprise that the juggler has become an image so many of us use for the work we’re in. We’re trying to keep all the balls in the air at the same time, trying not to drop any of them, though more balls keep getting thrown at us all the time.

I remember seeing Jeff Dunn-Rankin, from our Ministry Architects team, offer a radical alternative to the anxious juggling that I and most of my children’s ministry friends had grown so comfortable doing. Jeff asks if anyone in the audience knows how to juggle. Every now and then a brave volunteer admits they juggle “a little.” Jeff brings the volunteer forward for a demonstration and asks, “Can you juggle one more ball?” Almost always the juggler says no. But Jeff immediately responds with “Just try,” and he throws another ball to the juggler.

Something always gets dropped—usually it’s everything. Jeff quickly picks up all the balls and says enthusiastically, “Let’s try again!” He repeats the process several more times, tossing additional balls at the juggler, until all the balls are on the floor. Again. (Maybe this is why Jeff doesn’t have many friends.)

Then Jeff says, “I’m actually a pretty good juggler myself,” and he brings out a basket of a couple dozen balls and shows them to the group. “How many of these do you think I can juggle at one time?” he asks.

Before the group can agree on an answer, he says, “I can keep them all in the air at the same time. Would you like to see?”

The curious audience responds positively. Jeff, to the immediate groaning response of the crowd, places each ball in the hand of a different audience member, asking everyone to keep tossing their balls in the air. Jeff keeps one for himself and tosses it in the air, proudly announcing, “And this is how I juggle two dozen balls at the same time!”

My dear friend in ministry, if you have made it this far, I know you and I are kindred spirits. We know this work that we have been given is too important for us to spend our hours scrambling and flailing, trying to keep up with the dozens of balls being thrown at us each day.

The beautiful news is that we can do more than react. We don’t have to be driven by the screaming urgencies of ministry. We can live at a life-giving pace and lead inspired teams who are deeply passionate about the ministry Jesus warned us not to ignore. We can build systems and use tools that will allow us to do exponentially more than we could ever do without them.

Just ask Gina.

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