As our summer student ministry schedule started an elderly man in our church approached me and said, “I hope you enjoy all of the vacations the church is paying for you to take this summer.”
How do you respond to this one!?
The only thing I could say is, “I will enjoy every minute of it! I’m praying that none of your grandchildren try to make out with another student while we are at the beach.”
Being a student pastor means you have a crazy schedule. Between the tags for events, retreats, emergencies, your own family schedule, and your church responsibilities your Google calendar looks like a rainbow threw up on it.
We would be naive to think this busyness is isolated to ministers – everyone is searching for a few more minutes to get things done.
In an effort to simplify our student and kid ministry calendars, I have re-visioned our key events – and dropped some of the non-essentials.
If we say our church wants to create environments for families to win, but expect them to spend every extra minute serving someone else’s kids, our families lose.
Doing less events often translates into more spiritual and numerical growth.
How we simplified our retreat/camp schedule
Our church said that the student ministry schedule was accomplishing a variety of ministry purposes, but when I took a closer look, I discovered that we over purposed each event. If a retreat was established to focus on fellowship we would also add in aspects to serve, evangelize, disciple, and leadership development. While all of these are needed in student ministry, they are not all needed in the same weekend! The event’s identity is lost, the students are confused, and the leaders are busying trying to make 20 things happen. But in the end, we were not doing many things well.
So, we asked 2 questions for each event:
- What is it’s purpose?
- Does it fit in our vision/mission?
This helped us to refocus, re-evaluate, and reschedule our student ministry calendar.
After many conversations we decided to implement the below schedule into our ministry. While this schedule works for our church and context, this might not work for you. Before you cut your schedule in half, make sure you are asking plenty of questions — you might be surprised which events need to stay on your calendar.
3 (Overnight) Camps Per Year
Spring – Discipleship Now
Purpose: Evangelism
Duration: 3 days/2 nights
(This is high energy and extremely welcoming for outsiders. This is by far our biggest event of the year.)
Summer – Summer Camp
Purpose: Discipleship
Duration: 5 days/4 nights
(Our summer camp schedule is divided into a beach camp for high schoolers and an adventure camp for middle schoolers.)
Fall – Fall Retreat
Purpose: Fellowship
Duration: 3 days/2 nights
(We have simplified even further and created a middle school only retreat while high schoolers attend a big one-day event in the fall.)
Bonus: International Mission Trip
Purpose: Mission/Service
Duration: 8 days/7 nights
(This is for middle and high school students. Typically limited to 25 total people. Because of the expense and distance, I tend to view this as a separate type of event.)
Every month we will add in a theme night, kickball tournament, or free food to keep momentum between events. This event schedule has allowed us to maximize our budget to create bigger, more focused events.
How do you organize your student ministry calendar?
