Feb
20
Do you know what you are doing?
How would you do that?
That question has been coming into my head a lot lately. I am not really sure why. But it is something that I think can hold a lot of weight in one’s life.
Here is my thought behind that question:
If you don’t know how you would do something, how or why would you do it?
Maybe I am being a little naive, but at the same time I think that there is a lot of truth in knowing what you are doing. Maybe it is something that everyone knows and I am just now really starting to think about it.
It stems back to youth ministry. Mainly because I want to be able to hold a conversation about how I do things and not just say from experience, but from knowing and trusting my own “philosophy of youth ministry.” For some reason, I feel like I am not sure if I have ever put down on paper what my reasons for executing in youth ministry really is.
I was asked the question a while back:
“What are you doing for programming?”
It was easy for me to answer because I knew what we were doing. The lingering thought in the back of my head was “why?” It is a really annoying thought to have once you answer a question, one that can lead to evaluation and understanding. During the conversation, I listened and heard this other youth minister’s philosophy on why he did and when he did it. It made perfect sense. It made all too much sense. I was more intrigued and more surprised by the amount of thought and understanding he had on his programming for his students.
Why didn’t I have that philosophy off the top of my head?
I guess my thoughts have been going through all of these questions over the past several months, which has lead me to this point where I think it is time to put in writing what my philosophy is on youth ministry. However, I do believe that within youth ministry, you have to be flexible.
Students, trends, music, movies, books, technology and everything that surrounds youth ministry changes drastically in a matter of months. Which means that no matter what the program, event, trip or anything else done in youth ministry needs to be flexible to meet the students where they are.
I guess my questions are:
Do you have a philosophy for your ministry?
Have you written it down somewhere?
Do you think it is necessary for youth ministry to have a philosophy behind it?
You and I are asking very similar questions right now. I have always had a philosophy of ministry–it was a required assignment for a class in college. However, I looked at it last week, and I realize that I have not worked very hard to accomplish this philosophy. Some of the philosophy needs to be reworked, but much of it I think is very good.
I’d be interested to here what your philosophy is now, and how it is evolving.