tony sheng || mobilizing students for missions

A good problem to have
So you have this pretty dynamic youth ministry, that seems to be attracting loads and loads of students. And you start to build in a piece of the program centered around strategic community service and missions. And for one of your service launches, you get close to 50 kids that show up. That's a problem, true? Yes, but a good problem to have. But it is, nonetheless, a problem.
Here are some things that I see about it:
- With that quantity, certain ministries will not host you. You can't walk into an inner city ministry with 50 kids from the suburbs. It would never work. And it doesn't fit their style of indigenous ministry.
- Certain other projects would be great with that many kids. For instance, a Habitat for Humanity project, possibly. As long as the host ministry could really utilize all those people.
- Maybe we have to get to the point where we have the same theme for a day, split the kids into smaller groups, working with different ministries around town doing the same kind of thing, and then at the end, regroup and debrief. Sure does make for a pretty complex day though. And lots of volunteers.
The more this year goes along and the more launches we do, I'm seeing this whole job of mine in a few interesting terms:
- Definitely lots of event planning. This year was the first year in student ministry that I dealt with school buses and rental vans. It's a good thing.
- A bit of networking. People have started calling me asking about contact info to other places to serve. That's a good thing too.
- I think the biggest and most important part is the shepherding and vision casting. The SPACE crew is a major motivation for me. To build into these kids, to have them step up to be leaders in this, to get them to 'get it.' It's huge, fun, a passion of mine. It also fills a void because I think I need students to be working with.
Anyway, I'm just talking off the top of my head. Good stuff.