KidMin Leader Cast: We Make Professional Kidmin Leaders

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Todd. Well, hello and welcome back to the kid

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men leader cast. My name is toddxenbaugh, and I am your host today. Pretty excited to get to talk with you about a pretty crucial

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topic, casting

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vision for children's ministry, and specifically casting vision with your volunteers or the people that you lead in mind. And so as always, I want to start off this episode with encouraging you, hey, if you haven't subscribed yet to the podcast, it's totally free. You can do that by going to Apple podcast. You can do that by going to Spotify wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Go ahead and subscribe. It's totally free. Just hit that button and leave a review as well. It's a great way for me to be able to hear your thoughts, hear what you like about the show, hear what you don't like about the show, and how we can continue to improve. And so go ahead and smash that subscribe button, leave the review, all of those things. But today, what we're going to be doing is diving into and giving you tools to equip you to inspire your volunteers with a compelling purpose. One of the things that I was looking at is over 75% of volunteers indicated in a recent survey that they would be likely to be more engaged or feel more part of the vision of what they're doing with leading children in small groups, or in Sunday school, or whatever the context that they're volunteering in, if, if they understood the air quotes, why behind their work? And that's the big thing, right? What's the why behind what it is they're doing? And that's what we're talking about. That's vision, vision. What is vision? And how can we cast vision? So in today's episode, we're going to learn the importance of casting vision. We're going to learn about how to craft and communicate a compelling purpose. And then the third thing we're going to learn is we're going to practice have practical ways to keep the vision alive, keep the vision alive, and how we can continue to keep the fire burning. So let's get started in today's episode, the first thing is the importance of casting vision. So why vision should matter? Why you should even care about this vision is what gives meaning to the work that you do and that I do many days, whenever I wake up in the morning and I know I have a difficult meeting I have to handle. I know that I have to prep a story, and I know that there's some hard work that needs to be done. The thing that keeps me going, the thing that makes me want to go and and do that is, we can call it an internal motivator. We can say, you know, you're paid to do that. It's the vision. I've bought into the vision, and I have a purpose, and I believe in what it is that I'm trying to do, Vision gives meaning to the work. Volunteers are also motivated in the same way, they're not motivated by tasks, they're motivated by purpose. Let me say that again, volunteers are motivated by purpose, not tasks. I mean, I've had volunteers before. Their whole job was making sure that they were organizing the cabinets in the ministry. There's not a whole lot of fun in organizing cabinets, but if they can see how the vision connects to having cabinets organized. If they can see how it's important to have XYZ happen, whatever the task is, if you can connect it to a bigger vision, a bigger purpose, then they're bought in. Then they can see it. They can understand the why. They can grasp it. It's tangible. And so volunteers are motivated by purpose, not just tasks. The writer of Proverbs, Solomon, he says it like this, in Proverbs, 2918, where there's no vision, the people perish. And that's that's true, that they don't necessarily physically perish, but, but they die on the vine, they wither away. They don't they walk away from the ministry. They walk away from what it is they're doing. One of the things that I think about a ton is how I can help people to buy in even more to what it is that we're doing. It's an important thing. The second big thing is the impact of a strong vision. So, like, What? What? What is the impact of that? What does it mean to have a strong vision? What does it mean to have a deep purpose that you've cast and that you've given to people for the ministry? What? What's the impact of that? First thing is, it unifies your team around. A common goal, if all of us are pulling in different directions, if all of us are chasing different things, if all of us have different motivations and different things that we're trying to accomplish, we're not going to accomplish anything. How can you accomplish anything if all you're doing is pulling in different directions? Doesn't make any sense. Jesus himself says this when, when people are accusing him of of being possessed by Satan. He says, A house divided cannot stand if you have two minds, if you have two minds on things, if you have multiple minds on things, things that you're trying to accomplish, of course, it's not going to be able to be successful. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. So unifies the team around a common goal, but it also helps volunteers see an eternal significance of their role. You see in children's ministry, ministry in general, we have an added benefit. You see people who work in the private sector and in the secular world, most of the time, their motivation is pretty easy to understand. It's money, right? It's promotions, it's status in the ministry world, what the motivation is, and the most important thing is the eternal significance of what it is that we're doing. You see, when we're organizing cabinets, when we're prepping curriculum, when we are putting on events and doing setup and tear down, when we're doing all these things, all of it has should be built off of a bigger purpose. And the purpose is the fact that we're connecting people to God, right? We're connecting people to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And when we do that, there is an eternal significance there. And it's a big deal. It's a big deal. And so we have the benefit of having this eternal, significant thing that we're dragging people towards, in some ways, but but casting vision and pointing them in that direction. And finally, a strong the impact of a strong vision. It fosters commitment and passion, right? I don't know about you, but like I want the people who I get to work with, I want them to be fired up about this. I don't want to be the only one that's excited about being able to connect children to God. I don't want to be the only one excited about the gospel and what's happening. You see when you cast vision appropriately, you get people that are fired up. You get people that are excited. They're passionate. They want to be part of this big, grand thing, the story that God is weaving within your church, within your parachurch, within your ministry. That's what having. That's the impact of having a strong vision can have we talk a little bit about the challenges of a lack of vision, some symptoms, maybe you would call them

Unknown Speaker 7:50
volunteers. Feel aimless or undervalued. Let

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me tell you a story. I hadn't been in ministry for very long, and there were nursery workers who had been serving in the nursery at the church that I was at for Good lord, probably 30 years at least, maybe more,

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and I came in and

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within, I would say, year

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they resigned, they left. And you know what they said was they felt like their time in the ministry had had run its course, that God was not calling them to that ministry anymore, and that it was just, it was just time. It was time for them to move on. Well, okay, what do you do with that? Right? That can be true, right? That can be true, that your time in the ministry that you've been in for all that time, it might be time to move on. But as I began to have conversations and push in further and poke at the thing, I realized I had not done a great job of helping them to see the bigger vision. I hadn't tied them into what was happening and what I wanted to have happen. In essence, I was leaving them drowning to the point where they symbolically drowned. They died on the vine. They weren't connected to anything. They were just in the nursery. These are people who had been doing this for forever. These are people who had been super bought and super connected. And what I realized fairly quickly was that what I had done was I had withdrawn something from them. I had not given them something that was significant. I hadn't connected what they were doing to God's kingdom. I hadn't connected it in any way to a larger vision of of children growing up in the ministry from the time they were little. I hadn't done any of that. Had some conversations, some hard conversations, and I began to drag that out of them and realize that that vision mattered. Okay, even though they had been there for that long, they still needed to see something. And we had those conversations. And luckily, a few of them did come back, not all of them. And that was that was on me, right? That was on me that I hadn't done that it was a hard lesson to learn. I don't want you to have to go through that. I want you to to understand that vision matters. The other thing is burnout, turnover. One of the first things that I do whenever I'm helping to evaluate a ministry, or when I'm looking at my own ministry, when I see an area where there's a high number of turnover, right? That's always a red flag. It's always a red flag to me, and what it says is that something is missing. And you can go through the processes and procedures, you can go through the training, you can go through all those things and see if that's all happening. But at the end of the day, it's conversations and understanding. Have I communicated well enough what it is that we're trying to accomplish in nursery ministry and toddler ministry, preschool ministry, early elementary, middle Elementary, late elementary,

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all of that. It's important,

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whether it's an event or a weekly ministry, to be checking and if you see turnover in an area, a lot of turnover, usually that is a that is a dashboard signal, you know, whenever something's wrong with your car and it has the check engine light that comes with that, your check engine light is on and it's blinking. So these things happen, right? This is what happens when you have a lack of vision, not every time but but a lot of the time it is. So how do we craft a compelling vision? You know, Todd, I got it. It's important, and it's not good to not have it. So what do I do? Well, the first thing you do is you want to root it in Scripture. Everything that I do, I bathe in prayer, and I make sure that it aligns with God's word. Every single time, I don't make any decision in my ministry and in my personal life without checking those two gages. Those are two very important gages for me. You know, prayer is how I communicate with with God, and Scripture is how he, by and large, communicates back with me. He can do that through people too, but, but scripture is usually one of the big ways that he can communicate with us. And so I'm always wanting to make sure that I'm grounding the vision, crafting a vision that's centered around scripture. Let me give you two that that I have used in my career, that have I believed with our children's ministry been a bedrock foundation. I'm just gonna give these to you and let you chew on these. Okay? The first one is Deuteronomy, chapter six, verse seven, and so it says, it's, it's, it's, it's where we're talking and and Moses is speaking, and it's him describing how we want to teach our children about God in everyday life, right? Deuteronomy, Chapter set, chapter six, verse seven, is incredibly, incredibly important. It's a bedrock foundation, right? It's where we're talking about how we're having God's word as almost the frontlets of their eyes, because their parents are talking about it so much. If we're doing that and we're communicating to our volunteers, hey, this is so important, what you're doing. We want to be a part of what we're equipping our parents to do. That's a big vision. It's a really big vision. The other one is Proverbs. Chapter 22 verse six, train up your child in the way that he will go and he will and He will never depart from the Lord. I didn't write down the Scripture but, but it's Proverbs, chapter 22 verse six, that's a huge vision. See, here's an example of how you can begin to use this verse. In particular, our vision is to help kids know, love and follow Jesus, building a faith that lasts a lifetime. And one of our scripture verses that we use is Proverbs 22 verse six, or Deuteronomy, chapter six, verse seven. Right when you begin to talk about that, and you repeat it over and over and over again, and you talk with your volunteers about how the Bible is connecting, and how you're using scripture, and how you're showing families, and you're showing volunteers that, hey, this is connected. This isn't my words. This is God's word, right? We're trying to do is something that God has given to us. This isn't man made. That's when you begin to cook with gas, my friends, that is when you begin to cook with gas. The second thing to know is we want to make it clear and specific, right? We don't want to have vague statements. We don't want to say things like,

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you know, we want to

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help make disciples. Okay, that's great. Good. I'm glad you want to make what does that look like? Like? What do you want these disciples to do? How do you want them to be formed? How do you want that to work? Give us something specific, right? You want to have them answer key questions. What do we want to achieve? What are we serving? How are we serving? How do the volunteers contribute to this mission? Here's an example. Our goal is to disciple children by equipping families and volunteers to create meaningful faith experiences with God. This is just an example. It's one of my old mission statements from a church that I worked at, right. That's specific. What are we doing? We're going to disciple children. We're going to do it by equipping and families and volunteers. And what they're what they're gonna do is they're gonna help create meaningful faith experiences to connect kids to God. Very specific. That's a good statement. It's a key thing to get that statement out. And then here's the other thing, and this is huge, okay? And I was guilty early on in my career of not doing this. You always want to make sure that it aligns with the church's mission, right? Yes, you are the under Shepherd. You're the director, you're the person who's in charge of your children's ministry at your church, right? Or you're a part of running the children's ministry church, but ultimately, your church is called by God and ultimately serves Jesus Christ, right? So there are authorities above you that aren't just maybe your boss, right, right? And they have been given a vision by God, and that vision is your church, and so we have to make sure that we are aligning our vision with that. It's not the other way around. They don't need to come to you. They don't need to align their vision with you. It's you that needs to align the vision with the church, and you need to make sure that, as you're crafting it, that it does align with the vision of the church. You're going to make sure that your children's ministry vision supports the broader mission of the church. Here's a good example of how to do that. If our church's mission is to reach the community, our children's ministry can be a key gateway for families to get connected in right? So you're want, you're at a church that's your senior pastor, your senior leadership, they're super, super, super duper, down the rabbit hole when it comes to evangelism, right? Well, let's craft a vision that enables our leaders, our volunteers, to be able to bring families in and connect families in, maybe in your church, right? It's a church that's heavily, heavily focused on discipleship. Great. Let's think about how our vision can connect to discipleship. Or maybe your church will say, hey, we want, we want to do all that great. Figure out how to connect your vision to your church's vision, right? You have to do that. It's important. Then we have to communicate this effectively. Okay, we've built the vision, right? We've asked good questions of the vision. We know what happens if we don't have a vision? We've crafted it. We got it. It's clear, it's specific, it's aligned with our churches. Is aligned with our churches. You know? Vision? Great. We know it's impactful. We've started to get stories about how it's impacting people and how volunteers are pumped up about it. Great. Well, now we have to communicate that vision effectively,

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effectively. By the way, there's an old saying, and

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I don't even know who said it. I've heard Andy standing say it. I've heard a bunch of different people say this vision leaks, saying it once is not good enough, saying vision one time isn't good enough. If we're not consistently talking about it, if we're not making sure it's put in places where people can see it, it will go away. Vision leaks. So consistent messaging. Share the message regularly through meetings, emails and events. Every single meeting that you have with volunteers, you need to be explaining how, what you guys are talking about, how the events you're doing, your Sunday morning experiences, your Wednesday night programming, your midweek stuff, whatever you're doing. How is this? How is this relating back to our vision?

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Hey, we're doing VBS, great.

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Here's how it's relating to the vision of what we're trying to accomplish. Hey, our midweek programming. Here's why I want to go in this direction. Here's why I think this is important. Connects to our vision this way, in meetings with even people on staff. Hey, you know, the reason that I'm kind of thinking we shouldn't do that is because it doesn't really align with the vision of of the children's ministry and ultimately, our church. When you start to communicate about this and talk about it, it, it begins to become a contagion, right? It begins to be spread like a contagion. All activity should be tied to your vision, right? You should it

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becomes a a

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it becomes sort of a thing that we we begin to view all of the events that we do through. We also want to use, we you also want to inspire through stories. Stories are powerful. Jesus taught with stories all the time, and he did that because story has power. I'm thinking about about all the time. How can I share real life examples of the children and families that are being impacted by our ministry? So maybe, maybe you're consistently asking for people, for your volunteers, to share stories back of how the ministry has impacted them and how and using those stories to be able to share more broadly, what the vision of the ministry is accomplishing. Right? Constantly be looking for those stories, use testimonies to highlight the importance of volunteer contributions. Highlight your volunteers. Highlight your leaders. Show them. Say, Hey, this person's bought in. This person is doing X, Y, Z, and this is how it relates to our vision. And look at what it's accomplished. Look at what God's doing through this person. Look at how God's used this person to be able to have wonderful ministry,

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it's important,

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then we want to personalize the vision for volunteers, right? Want to personalize the vision for volunteers. Help each volunteer see how their role contributes to the bigger picture, for example, as a greeter or as a check in person, you set the tone for families to feel welcomed and valued. Now, if you consistently tell that to a check in person, to your greeters on Sunday mornings that are near your check in area, hey, what you do matters, because you're the first people that that families see and and when we do that, you're connecting to this vision that we want to have families be plugged in to our ministry. That's how it plugs in and and connects to the larger vision of the church. And you are a huge piece of that some people tell me, Todd, that sounds like used car salesman stuff, right? That feels slimy. It feels it's not, though, because people need to hear that. They need to hear that what they're doing matters. They need to hear how this connects, and when you consistently talk about it, that's when people begin to actually believe the things that you're saying. That's how they build trust. That's how they buy into the vision. You need to celebrate progress, share milestones, share success. That way, it's reinforced. This vision can be solidified and actually quant, even quantified of what's actually happening. For example, 15 kids this past month, 15 committed their lives to Jesus because of the dedication of what you guys are doing week in and week out. I had a story about this just this past fall. We launched a midweek program called Good News club at our local elementary school. We had 19 kids in the first month that accepted Christ and you know, I was I took that back to the volunteer team at our monthly meeting, and he said, Hey, I don't know what you guys are doing, but this is what happened. And you know, it's only because of what you did that these kids were able to know who Jesus was, right? You guys were willing to put it on the line and share the gospel with them in a big way, and the Holy Spirit honored that by watering that and fruit came out of it, right, showing them that what they're doing matters.

Unknown Speaker 23:48
Finally, how do we keep the vision alive?

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First? Way is, well, you gotta meet regularly. You see, I've been in ministries before where people became afraid of meetings. They didn't know how to run a meeting. We'll talk about running a meeting at some point on the podcast, but they stop meeting regularly. When you stop meeting regularly, you're not able to be able to pour the vision in. So you're going to host vision casting events and retreats for your volunteers. I do these quarterly. I want to make sure that every quarter of the year that volunteers are able to hear directly from me about what the vision is, what is the target we're aiming at. You're going to want to use these times that you've set aside to refocus and inspire. I do these on either a Sunday after church, or I do these on a Saturday. I've done Friday nights where we have, like a dinner with their where they can bring their significant others, their spouses, their families, and it becomes kind of a family night for for our volunteer teams, and we just all get together and, like. It's not me droning on about vision for 40 minutes. It's five minutes of hey, this is what the vision is we're aiming at. And then you're gonna want to provide ongoing encouragement. Send out a newsletter. I do this. I do this once a week. I my promise to volunteers is you're gonna get an email from me every week, and then on the weeks that you serve, you're going to get a notification, either through Planning Center or a text message from me or one of the interns, letting you know that when you when you serve, right? But in that weekly email, it is, it is, hey, this is what we're doing. This is what's happening. These are the awesome things that's going on in the ministry right now, and this is how you guys have contributed, and here's how you can contribute for further and then constantly offering words of affirmation and gratitude, like I was even just just yesterday, I was walking through our church, and there were some ladies that were that were preparing things for communion on Sunday, and I stopped and said, Hey, thank you so much for what you're doing. You know, it's looked at me like, I'm crazy. Communion is a big deal. It's a wonderful way to worship and and I believe it's, it's super important for a church community to partake in communion together, and like what you're doing is helping the church to be able to worship together at the Lord's table. They probably think I'm an alien, but, but like, I just wanted to stop and encourage them and just say, hey, thanks. This is a big deal. Thanks for this. Thank you for stopping and taking the time out of your day to come into the church and prepare this. Wow, what a big deal that is. And then, and this is important, stay open to feedback. Encourage your volunteers to share their thoughts, their ideas for how to improve the ministry's vision. Maybe, maybe you've rolled out your vision, but it's not quite accomplishing what you need it to accomplish. Maybe it's kind of off a little bit. Maybe, maybe it's not hitting and meeting the goals that your church has, right? Maybe you haven't done that step correctly. Listen to them. Listen to their feedback. Ask them questions. Ask questions like, what excites you most about our mission? How can we make it even clearer? What would you add?

Unknown Speaker 27:18
What would you add as a big one?

Speaker 1 27:21
Make it. Make it so that we can have feedback. All right, so let's, let's wrap this thing up. Let's wrap this thing up. Why vision matters? How to craft it, how to communicate it effectively. That's what we learned today. We learned that vision matters because it's how we can help people to stay connected to a larger vision. When you don't have it, it's a problem. We learned that you craft it by making sure it's aligning with your church's vision, that it's clear, it's concise, that we've explained well in a simple way, what it is we're trying to aim at. And finally, we learned that we need to communicate effectively. We need to communicate constantly, consistently. So here's what we need to do. Here's your call to action. I want you to share this episode. I want you to subscribe to the podcast, and then what I want you to do is I want you to send this to your volunteers, and I want you to bring them together and say, Hey, let's talk about our vision. Maybe you already have a great vision that's great. Never is a bad thing to review it. It's never a bad thing to review it. And then I want you to download the PDF that I've provided that has the outline for this episode. And I want you to make sure that you're going through that and using that as a resource to be able to make sure that your vision is solid, or that if you're trying to craft it, maybe you're trying to craft it for the first time, that you have resources to be able to put together an effective

Unknown Speaker 28:51
vision.

Speaker 1 28:54
Then what I mean do is I want you to email me at Todd, at Kidman leader.com, I want you to email me, and I want you to let me know what you think of this episode, but also I want you to be able to let me know other topics you'd like to talk about. Vision is important one,

Unknown Speaker 29:13
and so I appreciate you.

Speaker 1 29:16
I'm praying for you. So let's close today in prayer, Lord, thank You for the privilege of serving children and families help the leaders that are listening today to lead with clarity, passion and a vision rooted in you. Bless every volunteer who's listening today, every leader. Pray that they would feel inspired and equipped to make this eternal impact we talked about today. Thank you. Amen You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai