According to a recent study, the most productive time of the day is actually 10:26 AM. This time was derived by a survey of more than 400 individuals. The same survey stated that the most unproductive time of day is at 2:55 PM, about the time your lunch has settled and you’re feeling ready for a short coma. The second most productive time is listed as 4:16, when the day is almost coming to a close and everyone’s trying to get everything done before it is time to go home.
True, this is just a survey of 400 random people. More than likely, your times of productivity and less that productivity are close to these times as well, but it’s entirely possible that you’re the exception to the rule. What’s most important is that you do have times of higher productivity as well as times where you’re more likely to be checking facebook or walking around the office looking for someone to talk to. The point of this post isn’t about how closely your times line up with the norm. I just think there are two questions we should each ask ourselves.
Continue Reading
I’m pretty plugged in as far as connectivity is concerned. I’m pretty much addicted to my phone as is the rest of the country. So, I’m embarking on a little experiment this week. I’m unplugging. Hardcore. All the way.
I’m taking a nice two week vacation of Spring Break. The first week I’m taking the family to SW Texas. After speaking for a few days at a family camp in Rocksprings TX, we’re headed to Alpine, TX and Carlsbad, NM. I’ll have a second week of vacation at home where I’ll just rest and work on little projects around the house.
However, I decided that our trip out west is as good as anytime to attempt a media fast. There were several contributing factors:
Continue Reading
One of the very best things we can do in our ministries is to create a safe place for kids when they’re with us. Yes, we want environments where kids can have conversation in confidence when that is needed, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Our actual environments need to be safe. We have to have a place where parents know and feel that their kids will be happy and whole when they come back to pick them up.
I wrote a post a few weeks about about this very issue, but from a slightly different perspective on the Lead Small Blog. Yes, if our environments aren’t safe, families won’t come back. We all get that. But sometimes perception is reality. You may have a safe environment and your volunteers might follow all the procedures, but there is a perception issue that is going to trip up some of your families. It’s important to recognize that our culture is becoming more and more skeptical and what may have worked five years ago doesn’t anymore.
Continue Reading
Here’s a totally random but potentially useful idea to use in your kidmin.
A little over a week ago, I took my family on a really cool adventure. I’d come across a website that shows you when and where to look to spot the International Space Station. No, really. You tell the website where you are and it tells you when you’ll be able to see it. It will tell you where in the sky it will enter your view and where in the sky it will leave. It will also tell you how long you’ll be able to see it.
To really make this an adventure, we drove almost three hours away to Enchanted Rock… a famous outcropping of granite in the Texas Hill Country that would give us a completely unobstructed view of the night sky. We got to the top of the rock about 15 minutes before the scheduled sighting. When the time came, we were not disappointed. It was the brightest light in the night sky and for the next four minutes, we watched it zoom across the night sky. We then hiked down the small mountain in the darkness which only added to the adventure.
So, what does that have to do with kidmin?
Continue Reading
A few years ago I did something unintentionally that has probably allowed me to be far more productive than I ever thought possible. Seriously, it was the easiest thing ever. It took all of 2 minutes and it’s still paying off 5 years later. Are you ready for this, it could change your life too?
Continue Reading
I recently came across this blog post. Yes, it’s written to the student ministry audience, but it could just have easily been written to the kidmin community. For whatever reason, those of us in kidmin just love writing curriculum. I’m not sure what our reasons are. I say “us” and “our” because I spent the first several years of ministry writing much of the curriculum I taught. Granted, this was in a time where there were also very few options… not today when there are so many options for every kind of ministry genre.
Seriously, read the post, “The problem with ‘We do our own thing.’”
I want to point out the three main points of why you shouldn’t write your own curriculum:
- It’s arrogant to write everything.
- Curriculum is cheap, your time isn’t.
- It communicates isolation when your students long for connection.
Continue Reading
The work environment is rapidly changing, even in the church. I live in Austin, which is a major tech city and it seems like many of my friends/peers no longer work (or have to work) in traditional offices. Many work exclusively from home or a combination of home and a local office. Even some who work in an office work with a team from all over the country. The days of a traditional office are over.
Several months ago, Gateway made a pretty significant transition in office culture. For years, we’ve not had enough office space. With a small farm of cubes in addition to small offices, everyone was super crowded. As we continued to grow the staff, things continued to get more uncomfortable. Then we realized something.
Continue Reading
Yesterday I had heard that Perry Noble, the pastor of Newspring Church in South Carolina, had started a message series focusing on kids and the next generation. While driving yesterday, I listened to the audio of the message given last Sunday, “The Hunger Games: This is how we change the world (part 1).”
I’ve been following Perry Noble for many years. He’s a senior pastor who’s crazy passionate about reaching people who are far from God, and he’s a little crazy. What I love about him the most is that he’s a senior pastor who really believes in ministry to the next generation. I’m not saying he’s a pastor who says the next generation is important, but doesn’t fund or support the ministry as much as the generational staff feel they need. No, Perry is a champion of kids and student ministry. He invests HEAVILY and he even get’s confrontational about how significant investing in kids and student is.
This message is a home run. What would happen if every church believed in investing in the Next Generation as described in this message? What would happen if every senior leader championed the kids and student programs at their church like it really could change the world? Well, it might actually change the world.
Watch/Listen here: Hunger Games: This Is How We Change the World (Part 1)
Continue Reading
A few months ago I read an article in Wired magazine that was quite shocking. The article is based on a book, “It’s complicated, the social lives of networked teens” by Danah Boyd. We all know that teenagers are overly connected to their electronic devices. Between twitter, instagram, snapchat and texting, they seem to always be glued to their devices. We’d even go so far to say that they’re addicted to their devices.
However, that’s not the view of this book/article. They suggest that teens/tweens aren’t addicted to their social devices, they’re addicted to each other. They spend so much time on social media because they usually don’t have any other way to connect. The suggestion is that if parents gave their kids more freedom, kids would be less connected to their social devices. It’s an interesting idea and worth exploring. More than ever, we’re more protective of our kids and we have them busier that any generation before. What if our kids had more time and more freedom to be together?
Check out the full article here.
Continue Reading
Because you’re in ministry, you’re taxes are more complicated. You have a housing allowance, you may or may not have exempted out of social security and for various reasons, every church processes the taxes of their pastors differently (I know from personal example). You have have had taxes down at your last church, but now you’re totally confused.
Most of you only have a couple of tax options:
- Do them yourself.
- Go to the local tax prep office
- Go to a CPA
Let me evaluate your three options.
Continue Reading
