5 Ways to Help Keep Your Students’ Attention

As a leader, how often have you looked into your audience, whether in a conference room, classroom or large group setting and realized what you were saying was, well, boring?
The Instructify website has a post titled, 5 Ways to Help Keep Your Students' Attention. Click the link and take a moment and read about five easy ways to keep people's attention no matter who's you're audience.

5 Ways to Help Keep Your Students' Attention

Freedom

Freedom - the power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints

Tonight my wife and I experienced freedom in a middle school service at a church we are "shopping." In a life of being on staff at one church or another, we're in a place we've not been at in a very long time; being able to shop for a church. Ok, we haven't done a real extensive shopping campaign, the first church we've checked out is probably the one we'll settle on, but hey, I hate shopping anyways.
Back to freedom. Have you been someplace, whether it's a restaurant, home, church, whatever, and either really felt that it was "right, good, comfortable" or that it was "tense, restrained, uncomfortable?" You know you can feel it when you walk in and move around. Tonight felt right.
There were quite a few possible "checks." We were visiting with our middle school age son at a place we've never been, in a sea of wild middle school kids, and we didn't know anyone. And yet, it felt good.
My wife and I talked about it feeling good. What was it that was a factor in our comfort? We laughed, we worshiped, we listened, we prayed. And in the end, it seems the word that came to mind was freedom. There was a freedom in the building, amongst the staff, permeating the kids, evident in the worship and the words spoken. And it felt good, really good.
Sometimes you don't realize what you're missing until you realize you've been missing it.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Transparency and the Draining Effect

Basically John said he was totally drained today.
I was in the same place yesterday, in fact I know most if not all of our Management Team felt the same way.

June 11 will be a day remembered for a long time amongst us staff folks at our church.

8:30 am: Lead Pastor, Executive, Worship, Nursery/preschool, Student, Small Group and me Children's pastor (Management Team) all together, one room, to work through the first layer of the pyramid from the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick Lencioni.
We all knew we were "dysfunctional" we just didn't know our dysfunction was as deep, wide and murky.
We focused for most of the day, and yes, it was a full day - til almost 4 pm, talking about trust.
Don't get me wrong, we needed to definitely clear the air. The last few weeks have pretty much brought a whole load of dookie to the table that was once covered and put away.
It was just, wow, totally emotionally draining.
Pretty much in my experience I've never, ever, EVER been in a meeting where this much transparency and honesty has taken place. It was good, it just hurt.
My hope is we, gulp, continue this process; it would be a colossal shame to open this box to only have it quietly forgotten.
If you think about it, pray for us.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

10 Things To Do Before You're Hired

Read a great article titled, 10 Things To Consider Before Your Church Hires Another Staff Member by Todd Rhoades.
It's an article geared towards churches before they hire, but it's an insightful post for anyone looking for a job as well.
Click here and jump to the site.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Gang Life

Francis Chan, session speaker at the Orange Conference and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, told of a story about a gang member who attended his church once he was saved. After a period of time the gang member was starting to struggle. Francis had an opportunity to chat with him and found out he was wondering why church life was not as fulfilling as gang life. While in the gang, the young man always had people who were accepting of him, trusted him and had his back. His observation of church life was that people were unaccepting, did not trust him and did not have his back.
What a heart wrenching story. It was the last part that really grabbed a hold of me; having other's back. The phrase has been so important that it's been elevated to my prayer sheet.
I pose the question, do you have other's back? Immediately there's family, friends, co-workers. But what about there at your church? Do you have the lead pastor's back? The pastoral staff's backs? Elders' backs? And of course, the Children's Ministry back's?
Just something to think about.

Orange - Francis Chan

Pastor Chan is one of my favorite speakers. Truly, every time I listen to him I’m challenged and today was no different.
Three questions to add to my growing prayer list:
Is the Holy Spirit truly in me?
Do I have other’s backs?
What does God want me to do that I’ve not been doing?

This guy is powerful.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Orange – Family Experience: The Non-weekly Option

“80% of kids raised in church will walk away from church by the time they get to college.”
Carey Nieuwhof is one of my favorite presenters and today he was on fire. Great presentation about the wisdom of using the family experience on a monthly basis. Good emphasis on strategy; so vital to hear.
Once again, awesome.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Orange - Picture This!

Greg and Jen are leading this session about helping us all with story telling. I am not from a drama background, so the exercises/games they taught us were helpful. Certainly exercises I’ll work through with both our on-stage and small group leaders.
Great stuff.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Orange - Design on a Dime

Awesome first session with Jeffrey Reed, Design on a Dime. Came away with great ideas for enhancing our current children's ministry rooms. Foam, spandex and pvc pipe are our friends!

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Orange Conference Day 1 Preconference

We’re here! Flew in last night, picked up a very cool minivan; I know, I’m old. Drove out to the conference center and painlessly registered. What a relief. Beautiful hotel and now, Monday morning I’m in my first preconference session, Design on a Dime with Jeffrey Reed.
I sat in on a session with Jeffrey at Camp Kidjam and so I’m looking forward to his wisdom.
Update to follow…

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

How's Your Fire?

In the midst of prayer today, I thought about a meeting a couple of weeks ago when big, burly, manly-man, Wayne broke down and, yes, shed tears during prayer. Honestly, I’m not much of a crier, but there are times when I lose some salt. One situation that always brings emotion is when I’m brought back to the reality of why I do what I do; the calling God has placed on my life and the inherent urgency of ministry.
I certainly go through times when I look at ministry as just a job or an obligation. I wrestle with those periods; I do hate it when those feelings rise up. But no matter how crabby, stressed, cynical, or dull I feel “in the moment”, ultimately, it’s the calling and the urgency that are my fire.
The “fire” is not the programs I’ve been a part of, the events I’ve helped lead, or the object lessons I’ve brought. The fire is the urgency of knowing true eternal transformation is taking place in the lives of children and their families. The “how” we do what we do changes over time, but the “why” is always John 3:16.
And so I ask you, how’s your fire doing? My sincere hope and prayer is that you serve because of the desire, the calling, the necessity in your life to see others eternally transformed. I pray God would continually stoke the fire of urgency in you. This blaze impacts how you pray for “your kids” and their families, how you interact with them, even how you prepare your lessons. It burns away “job and obligation” and thankfully reveals calling and urgency.

I’m struggling with the ending here, so I’ll end with the question, “How’s your fire?”

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Updated: Mrs. EVAN'S Famous Saying

"When someone tells you who they are the first time believe it!"
Ah, the famous saying from John Stickl's mom-in-law. It was about a year ago that I first heard it and from that very first moment, I knew this woman had great wisdom.
John is our Adult Ministries Pastor and oversees small groups; this guy is good. He and I talk a lot because I can always pick up some nugget from him. His MIL's saying has been one that has resonated with me. I wish I had known it sixteen years ago when I first started in ministry.
As I've looked back at first impressions of my different ministry opportunities, I've peeled away the "happy happy joy joy" parts of the visits. I've seen an interesting correlation between the first impressions and how the future at each particular position has developed.
People who have "told me who they are the first time" by going out of their way to be friendly, show trust, be respectful have been the one's who've proved themselves to be that way. Churches that showed characteristics of generosity from the first visit were that way in real life. The unfavorable impressions have also played themselves out. Very interesting.
So I'm adding the saying to my bag of wisdom in hopes of it being one more gauge to use.
Thanks Mrs. Evans.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Let the April Fool's Pranks Begin

Alrighty, the pranks have begun.
I've done six "tape over the mouse sensors", one "food coloring in the milk", one "rubber band around the sink sprayer" and will be setting the clocks ahead one hour.
I'll also be loading the "blue screen of death" screen saver on unsuspecting pc users and possibly will load the "broken screen" screen saver as well.
Oh, I forgot about the invert colors on the macs at our offices.
I know, I'm 40, but come on, it's April Fool's!

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Mac + Water + PRAYER = Dodged a Bullet

Oochie mamma! I dodged a bullet last night. I'm settling into my favorite chair, about to check email from the day, thirsty so I go to take a drink and then splash! Water on the Mac PowerBook G4.
Ahhh! I unplug, tip over and run to our other computer to search online for "spill on laptop." I then run back to the tipped over Mac, power down, remove the battery and start with the hair dryer on medium. Throughout this time, much prayer.
Well this morning everything works fine so far. Powered on, screen looks fine, keys and trackpad work. I'm about to go into the office, so we'll see if all the plug in items work. Update coming... Yes, everything works.
By the way, I've been a Mac convert for about two years now and love them! Unless forced to, I'll never go back to pc again. You can check out the newest Macs here, here, and here.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

LinkedIn and Facebooked

I took the plunge a few months ago and joined both LinkedIn and Facebook. Both of my accounts kind of languished for those few months until this past weekend.
I went on a social network blitz.
I took time to update both of my profiles and worked at connecting with friends, family and colleagues around the country. And it's been fun. I've reconnected with some old friends who I would never have found had I continued on my path of not connecting via LinkedIn or Facebook. Also, I'm interested in both networks being an avenue for me to expand my professional network. It seems to be all the rage. Have you had success connecting on either network? Let us know.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Retooling

Retool - reorganize, revise, modify
I know businesses do it, restaurants, even Starbucks kind of did it last night by closing all their stores for a few hours so all their employees could be trained at one time.

Have you heard of a church retooling?

This has been a topic in our staff meetings and lunch discussions for a few weeks now. We realize we have some systemic problems, inefficient processes and a loaded schedule that's not allowing us as a team to devote long blocks of time to work things out. Thus the thought of a retooling.

Well, after a long and thoughtful staff meeting yesterday, no massive retooling is scheduled for anytime soon. Sad.

Our processing as a team has been helpful, though. So here's a list of things to think about if you're dreaming about retooling.

Retooling List:

• Pray - always a given.
• Timing - when is the best time to pause as many activities as possible to get some margin in your schedules to reorganize.
• Focus - really, truly what needs to pause and make sure you pause it.
• Focus part 2 - if you pause activities for a time period, tell everyone why you're retooling, then you and your team had better work VERY hard at retooling. Our thought was if we retooled in the summer, it may have been one of our busiest summers, but we would set ourselves up correctly for the short and long term future.
• Focus part 3 - everyone needs to either be on board (executive staff, associate staff, elders, deacons, key laity) or know the why for revising (volunteer leaders, those affected by paused programming, congregation).
• Schedule - set in stone the dates and times your team will meet and don't deviate.
• Be Strategic - Know what systems, processes, inefficiencies need to change, make a list and one by one come to a conclusion for each item.
• You may feel a pinch - this will probably hurt. You will have some hurt feelings, anger and you'll probably lose some folks. Is it still worth it?
  
• The Captain - ultimately it's the senior pastor who has to truly embrace the retooling. If he's not on board, the ship isn't changing direction

Pastor Bob Kapp, a great friend and mentor was realistic when he told me retooling sounds good but is probably easier said than done, he was right.

What about you, any thoughts of retooling? Have you? And if so, what lessons did you learn.
Let us know.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Stories Just Keep Coming

For about the last eight or nine months we've been reminding our leaders to email us stories of life change taking place in their worlds. It's always good to know that the effort being put into ministry is making a difference.

The stories we've been receiving have been inspirational, touching and most importantly, they've been personal, hands-on, real life stories about people they know. We email the stories out to the rest of our team. It's been neat to talk about and hear our leaders talk about the great things taking place.

Stories are powerful.

If you get a chance, check out my post about stories entitled, Country, Opera and Stories.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

A BIG All Staff Meeting

Every month, our church has an all staff meeting where everyone who's employed meets for about an hour as one big group. It's always fun and encouraging. Early this week, we had an extended all staff meeting where we met offsite for most of the day and it was wonderful. As a giant team, we had fun together, worshipped and prayed together, learned together and of course ate together.
Our jr. high student pastor, Josh Wintermute, summed it up perfectly, "It was truly a life giving event."
What about your team? Do you get a chance to pull everyone together a few times a year to encourage, fellowship, laugh and pray?
If your team is struggling with feelings that their environment is not life giving, take a chance and put this type of event on your calendar. Go ahead and get the process started of producing a life giving environment.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Orange Tour DFW - Session 3

Session 3 was with Carey Nieuwhof, a senior pastor from Canada. Great session with deep insight about the "c" word, change.

• Change is a constant
• Every change has a life cycle; an upswing and an eventual downswing
• Easy change takes place on the downturn, though this may not be the best time to change
• Well-led organizations change while on the upswing; this is the most difficult point of change, but potentially the most productive
• We may have to change stuff that was working in order to have greater impact
• We need to look at why we do what we do all the time

5 Steps to Implementing Change

1. Study the concepts
2. Get as many of your team on-board as possible – need leaders aligned
3. Define an action plan
4. Reorganize for change
5. Implement the change – soft launch, evaluate

A great session to wrap up an inspirational day. Tomorrow, Church Staff 101 continues the love!

Wayne

Orange Tour DFW - Session 2

Session two with Reggie. He talked about the phrases that need to come in-between the words from the two lists he talked about in session one.

So to get from list one to list two, we need to do the following:

• To get from focusing on Students to focusing on Leaders, we need to Integrate Strategy.
• To get from Content to Experience, we need to Refine Our Message
• To get from Production to Relationship, we need to Elevate Community
• To get from Age-focused to Family-focused, we need to Reactivate the Family
• And to get from Growth to Service, we need to Leverage Influence

Reggie passed out the “Calibrate” card. A "scorecard" to be used to see where our churches/ministries are at when it comes to getting us from the first list to the second list using the "in-between" phrases. Very good stuff. Even during our break, great discussions with our leadership that are here with us this weekend.

Check out Orange Tour to check out the conference and Church Staff 101 will continue the live blogs.
Wayne

Orange Tour DFW day 1

The giant ice storm was a dud, so right now, at this very moment I'm in the opening session at the Orange Tour DFW stop with the great Reggie Joiner. And as usual, incredibly "meaty" material from "the man."

Here's Reggie's list of things we probably think about every week:
Students
Content
Production
Age-focused ministry
Growth

And here's Reggie's list of things maybe we should be thinking about every week:
Leaders instead of students: most effective way of reaching the kids is us as pastors reaching the adult and teen volunteers who can multiply our influence.
Experience instead of content: There is a gap between what we’re teaching and what really happens out there, and it’s our job to close that gap.
Relationship instead of production: The world’s culture will always have better production, BUT what the world’s culture doesn’t have is the importance of relationship
Family-focused instead of age-focused: our 40 hours per year with the children we minister to has limited influence and impact. We need to leverage parents because of their 3000 hours of influence. We need to help make our parents experts at influencing their children. We need parents to fight for their relationship with their children, and we need kids to fight for their relationship with their parents
Service instead of numeric growth: serving must be a component of discipleship. We need people to volunteer for our ministries to help them grow spiritually, not for them to help us with our ministry

What would happen in our ministries if we moved from thinking so much about the first list and rather focussed more time on the second list?

Church Staff 101 will keep the updates coming.
Check out the Orange Tour website and sign up for the tour stop near you. It will be well worth your time, energy and money.
Wayne

Orange Tour Stop - Dallas

Tomorrow, hopefully we'll be able to attend the Orange Tour stop here in Dallas. I say hopefully because it's forecasted that we'll be receiving this year's ice storm tonight/tomorrow morning. We'll see...
Anyways, Church Staff 101 will post with the best from the tour stop, maybe I'll be able to blog live!

Wayne

Top 10 List for Most Ministries

As I was putting together the Top 10 List for Children's Ministry post at Children's Ministry 101, I realized the info would translate over to other ministries as well.

And so here's a top 10 list for most ministry programs and or departments. As always I hope it's a help to you and would love to read your comments.

Top 10 List for Most Ministries

1. Prayer. An essential, vital, can't make it without it, aspect of EVERY ministry. We can never pray enough, and we can never encourage our team's to pray too much.
2. Growth. Not numerical, but personal growth. We often say, "You can't give what you don't have." Spiritual growth is necessary as we pour spiritually into those around us.
3. Tell us stories. We love hearing stories of transformation taking place in people's lives, so we encourage our leaders to tell us and send us an email of stories they hear.
   
4. Be informative. All of our leadership are mouthpieces of our church. And so they are encouraged to be as informed as possible about their area of ministry and our church in general. Our job as staff pastors is to give them the info in easy to understand bits.
5. Continuing Ed. We highly encourage our leaders to further their knowledge about their area of ministry and spiritual matters. We provide a weekly email with ministry specific and church-wide info, provide relevant articles about their ministry role, encourage our leaders to attend local conferences (we try to cover some portion of the cost), provide two orientations a year and are always on the lookout for relevant books for them to read.
6. Be flexible. No, we don't offer Bible yoga classes, but we do want our leaders to be flexible about their serving role; always looking for areas of need and helping out in the moment, willing to change at the last minute if the time requires it.
   
7. Feedback. We do want to hear from our leaders. They are the "hands and feet" of our ministry, seeing things that we sometimes miss. We have an open door policy. Not every suggestion we're able to act on, but everything brought to our attention will be heard and thought through.
8. Free advertising. Our leaders know they are free advertising for the ministry so it's vital for them to be positive when talking about the it. Smile, tell good stories, have the "back" of the ministry.
   
9. Recruiters. Whatever word you use, recruiting, attracting, blah blah blah, our leaders, paid and volunteer, are the single greatest recruiting force we have at our hands. Planting the seed that they are needed to pray for more volunteers and talk to their sphere of influence about joining the team is a necessity. We tell our team to think in terms of replacing themselves this year with someone they've asked to join the team.
10. Membership. At our church, membership is mandatory if a person is leading other people. To us it shows that they are on board with the vision of the church

Again, let Church Staff 101 know what you think.

Wayne

Honor's Reward

Honor’s Reward
A few weeks ago, Pastor John Stickl let me borrow a cd set entitled, Honor’s Reward. It’s six cd’s of messages that John Bevere preached about the concept of honor. I’m only on cd 2, but getting smacked pretty hard in-between the eyes.

Growing up, the Korean half of the family was pretty forceful in molding me into what I thought was a honoring mindset. In fact, I prided myself on how respectful I was to those in authority in my life. Bevere’s messages have made me reexamine how I show honor to everyone.

I always think of honoring those in authority over me, but Bevere uses Scripture to show that I need to also honor those equal to me and those I’m in authority over. Very thought provoking stuff so far.

A couple of honor verses have grabbed a hold of me.

• Romans 12:10 “Honor one another above yourselves.” So I guess I need to respect, value and show as precious everyone, not only my authorities. Not that I’m a total jerk all the time, but I can’t be a jerk ever, to anyone.
• Psalm 15:4 “honor whoever fears the Lord.” No more making fun of the folks on the Christian tv channels. That’s truly the first thing I thought about when reading this verse. Certainly I need to be proactive in honoring those who fear God.
  

If only there was a honometer, so I could see how I was doing on this road of honoring...

If you’re interested, you can get the book here Though WARNING, I have not read the book, I’m just listening to the cd’s, but understand the book to be the written out version of the concepts in the cd’s. Let us know here at Church Staff 101 what you think about the cd set or the book.

Wayne

A Note to Pastors: Work Less

Scot Longyear has an eye opening post at the Worship.com blog containing some startling statistics about our profession, pastoring. He also includes a short list of practical to do's for a healthy leader.

Click to jump to the post, A Note to Pastors: Work Less.

It doesn't matter your ministry position, Church Staff 101 highly recommends reading Scot's post.

Also, take a moment and read my post, Taking a Break, about vacation, something Scot talks about in his post.


Wayne

Getting Started in Children's Ministry

Jason Rhode, children's pastor, co-founder of Children's Ministry University Online and adjunct faculty with Valley Forge Christian College, co-author's the blog, Children's Ministry Insights.

Church Staff 101 is always on the lookout for great insight from around the blogosphere and so check out his post, Getting Started in Children's Ministry. It's chock full of nuggets of truth everyone needs, no matter what area of ministry you oversee.

Check it out.

Wayne

"How" and Note Taking

"This is the ultimate guidebook for successful living. Its truths are simple but stunningly powerful." I'm hoping Marianne Williamson's quote is correct since I'm starting the book, "How" by Dov Seidman tonight.
A great friend and peer, John Stickl, recommended the book a couple of weeks ago, and I received it today from Amazon.
I'm also trying something new when it comes to note taking while reading. I always come across passages or information in a book that I know I'm going to want to find later, so I highlight or underline and maybe dog ear the page. But it takes me forever to find those nuggets later. Timothy Ferris wrote a blog post explaining his method of taking notes when reading a book. I'm going to take a modified approach and see how it fits for me.
As I come across something of interest, I'll underline like normal, but I'll also turn to the front blank page of the book and write down the page number and a short descriptive phrase about the passage.
Let's see if this works!

Wayne

How to Spoil Those You Lead

Jim Wideman, children's ministry professional and one of three authors of the blog, The Way We See It, writes:
"I love being spoiled. My wife has spoiled me for over 29 years. My daughters have spoiled their Dad all their life, my employees spoil me at the office on a regular basis. Because I like it so much I want to spoil others. A great goal for the New Year is to purpose in your heart to spoil your volunteers outside their classrooms as well as in. You’ve heard me say this before, you gain those you serve. It’s a spiritual law. Christ Jesus came to serve not to be served."

Read the rest of the blog article and Jim's Top 10 List for you to stand out in your church as a leader who serves their volunteers, How to Spoil Those You Lead.

Wayne

Taking a Break

Ah, it's great to take a break. Hopefully you've noticed, no new posts for a couple of weeks here at Church Staff 101. My family along with my wife's extended family had the opportunity to vacation in-between Christmas and New Year skiing in New Mexico. We all had a wonderful time. The vacation and the time of year made me think about how important it is to take time away from work and spend time with family.

"Yeah, but I just wasn't able to take all my vacation days." I used to believe I didn't need to take time away from ministry work. As I've gotten older, I've realized a few absolutes:

• The work will still be there when I get back. Uh, yeah, it doesn't ever end.
• I'm not that important. President Bush has taken more vacation time than most other presidents. He's in charge of the COUNTRY, I'm sure what we are in charge of is going to make it without us for a week or two.
• Must recharge "batteries." I cannot continuously give without recharging. Actually, I can (and have) but productivity goes down the tube after a long stretch of no vacation.

"We believe in family here at so and so church." I'm confident every senior pastor, executive pastor and board or elders would say they care about family and want their staff to make it a priority. Reality check here, just because they say it, doesn't mean they believe it or practice it. In fact, it's not up to them to make sure I'm prioritizing my family. It's my job to put my family first, period. And so more absolutes:

• Contrary to movie stars and televangelists, if you lose your family, you've lost it all. Aside from God, what's more important?
• Bragging about being a workaholic and saying family is a priority are not compatible.
• It's totally up to me. I have to make it a priority and stick to my decisions. It's necessary to say "no" sometimes.
• Reminiscing about events and situations taking place with those closest to me are the best memories.

Take the time off, I really truly hope and believe you won't regret it.

Wayne