Ministering with Your Hands/Team

The Great Get-Away Pt. 4:
*These next posts are simply interacting with Youth Ministry concepts given by Jason Ostrander*

This is the final Great-Get Away blog installment.

Jason during this weekend was showing us youth pastors/leaders the importance of the Word of God in Ministry, calling us back to what really matters and it was refreshing. It sounds interesting that a "pastor" had to be reminded of the power of God's Word and it's importance in ministry...but we do!
Ministering with your hands is the "what we do" in ministry. The nitty-gritty, the raw facts, the stuff we get dirty with and there is a lot of work in Youth Ministry. Sometimes we get bogged down with program, or maybe our focus is in the wrong place...this past weekend retreat opened my eyes to see some new areas to focus on and to see that what I've been focusing on is not quite where I should be. Jason talked about silos. Those big farm silos where you dump "the goods". These are the things we focus on, where our time and energy gets dumped. He drew out three silos and said here are our typical Youth Ministry silos: Sr. High; Jr. High and Sunday School/Young Adult. These three silos get our attention, our time and our efforts. We try to tailor everything to each individual silo. Here are the four things we put into these silos: Worship, Prayer, Word, Service. ( Here he drew these as smaller silos going across the three main silos). Jason described how each of these conduits goes into our ministry. What he did that I didn't expect is he FLIPPED the picture, so the four silos of Worship, Prayer, Word and Service became the main silos and the silos of Sr. High, Jr. High and Sunday School/Young Adult became the secondary silos.
Jason then described how our ministries could be transformed by God if we dump the goods in the silos of Worship, Prayer, the Word and Service. If we paid more attention to detail here, still tailoring stuff where it needed to be tailored, but the focus is changed! "Maybe instead of a Jr. High Youth Pastor, you have a pastor of Prayer" Jason said.
For me, this made a light switch go off...yeah! Why do I focus more attention on the other silos to the detriment of the other silos? Why don't I work with my team to develop a different focused ministry? This is where team came in. I can't ON MY OWN change the focus of the Youth Ministry. I need to utilize my team in such away that the silos of Worship, Prayer, Word and Service get dumped into! I may be a gifted speaker, but I totally STINK at singing and musical stuff...so I need a team around me who is gifted in the areas I am weak. Working with a team is allowing their strengths to compliment your weakness and visa versa.

I deeply hope this information has blessed you as much as it has me. I am still working on how to impliment all of these amazing ideas, so we can journey together if you desire. I want to have a vibrant ministry that is more focused on God-sized things rather than on man-sized things. May God bless you youth pastors and youth leaders richly!