How To Gain Some Momentum In Your Ministry

I have been messaged a lot lately about how to build momentum in ministry. There is a lot of that right now in our ministry. Awesome.

But how?

First, it takes time. It is that something builds. One event won’t do it. One meeting won’t do it. One series won’t do it.

Second, it takes some strategic thinking of when and where you are going to be spending time in building this momentum. Chances are, you have some areas in the list that follows. Some of the things you probably do really well and have thought through it, have people assigned to it and it’s doing really well. Others, you might not have thought through at all and it would be well worth it to look into it and come up with a strategy behind it.

I broke it down into practical steps:

PLAN WELL – Strategically calendar out your series and events. One of the biggest things I feel a lot of leaders miss is the importance of the placement of series and events. When you think through how everything is laid out, you can create some good momentum. For example, we usually start summer camp sign-ups in November. But we are putting on an in house Winter Conference in January. Summer Camp sign-ups will begin the last night of the conference to build that momentum. They will have this awesome camp-like experience and then will want to sign up for the bigger one in a few months.
MARKET WELL – Marketing should be huge in youth ministry. Get out the promo and make it memorable. Using apps like OVER or websites like Canva.com to make sure it looks good. Announce it in service, post it on social, get students to share it. If you can get your leaders excited about it and post about it, it gets students excited about it. The key is engagement over quality. How many students are interacting with what you are posting? It’s way more than just posting the series graphic.
CAST VISION WELL – Leaders and students want to know what could be. Tell them how it could be… clearly.
EXECUTE WELL – It doesn’t have to big on the budget but it needs to be executed well. Nothing is worse than cheesy and an event that should have been over 30 minutes ago.
CAPTURE WELL – Capture photo or video. The goal should be to make the ones not there feel FOMO. If you don’t have access to a pro, get a few students who are at least decent with it. The point is just to capture it to use for stories or promo later.
CELEBRATE WELL – Celebrate loud, hard and often what God did. Sometimes we suck at celebrating because we are on to the next thing. Take some time and celebrate the stories and the wins with your leadership, your leaders, on social and to parents.