Adding Creativity to Your Ministry

By Patti Gibbons on February 07 2010

 1. Plan Ahead


Give your team time to think and process. One of the keys to understanding creativity is understanding that it cannot be forced. You cannot sit down in a meeting and walk out an hour later with several creative pieces for your upcoming fall retreat. Adding creativity to your youth ministry will mean you must provide adequate time for the people on your team to create. I want you to think about how far in advance you plan and prepare your Sunday School lessons or Sunday messages. Is it a week, a month or more?



When your lesson prep starts on the Monday of the week you are teaching, you are not leaving yourself time to create elements of creativity. Even if you do think of a creative element, you will probably not have enough time to implement it on the level you want. Instead of spending all of your time drooling over the cool stuff other ministries are doing, use that time to plan your calendar for the next six months. Planning in advance is not difficult... once you get started.



To get started, allow me to offer you this advice. For the next 3-6 months turn your ministry efforts down a notch: do not do a retreat, cancel that overnighter, stop small groups. For this period of teaching, find some good curriculum and use it. If you normally teach, get someone else to teach for you, allowing you time to plan ahead. Take this time to start dreaming about and planning the future of the youth ministry. Decide on themes, topics and Scriptures for your lessons and events. Take this information and pass it out to a team of people (see #2 below) who will think about how to add creative elements.



2. Team Approach


I would recommend including students and adults in the creative process. Hearing from a variety of viewpoints and experiences will help spark creativity within your planning and implementation. One hurdle to having a team like this is the fact that you will need to have people with differing opinions working together. Some people do not want this added stress when they are trying to be creative, but I do not think it has to add stress to the process. Stress can be avoided by making sure each member of the creative team shares the same vision for the youth ministry. When you agree on the big picture of ministry, the minor differences in opinion can be worked out more easily.



Starting a creative team can be intimidating, especially in light of the ministries who have full-time positions for people to do the creative elements. If you work with only a handful of adults on your youth team, do not try to be like the megachurches. Your first step is to find one or two other people who will be willing to help add creativity to your ministry. Next, you need to schedule your programming downtime. Once you have the time to plan ahead, start meeting and going over the future lessons, retreats, services, small groups and other events. Start by deciding what elements you want to add or improve. For example, if you feel the application of your lessons needs improvement, determine what you want the students to do after a lesson and allow the team to brainstorm creative ways to help the students remember the application.



As your team works together, you will begin to surprise yourself at how creative you can be. One person's idea will spark another idea and in the end what you implement will be better than you would have ever come up with on your own. Not every idea will be a homerun, though. Some creative elements will sound amazing when you discuss it, but will not transfer as well to your context. Do not give up when this happens! The longer you strive to have a creative youth ministry, the more good ideas you will have. The more good ideas you have, the more people you  will attract to your team. And when you add more people to your team, you will become a more creative youth ministry who shares the hope and love of Jesus Christ with teenagers who desperately need to hear it. 

Comments

From Donald on February 24, 2010

I love this. Thank you and God bless u

From Damita White on April 15, 2010

God is really using a variety of resources to help prepare me for the next level in ministry. Yours is one of them. I am truly thankful for this ministry. May God continue to bless you beyond measure. Thanks!

From Alberto Orozco on April 17, 2010

This article is really an answer to our new youth ministry.

From mike on April 18, 2010

thanks. I’m glad this article has been helpful to your ministries.

From Angela on August 27, 2010

Great article! thx…I’m finding this & other information on your site very helpful

From Junior & Jess on November 09, 2010

Thank you soooo much for this info, this is what we needed to hear. god bless you.

From Gordfather on September 19, 2011

Appreciate the insights as even attending NYWCs can be a bit of a let down in that they have always left us feeling like we were not cut from the same cloth and not measuring up creatively.