Ready or not… a new year of ministry has begun (or will soon begin).
And the reality is that some of us… are not ready.
Many more of us find ourselves much less ready than we’d like to be.
Some of us find ourselves in a place of spiritual, emotional or mental distress.
We don’t feel ready for a new year.
Not for the return of students, the start of classes or the work of serving as pastor to a rapidly moving community.
The beginning of the school year is often one of the busiest times in the life of college ministers. Every moment […]
I don’t know about you, but after the past couple of weeks I’m about done — yet today is the first day […]
Do people ever ask you about what you do? And you can tell from the way they ask the question, or […]
Most campuses I know of seem to have some sort of formal programming and process for welcoming students to campus, helping them to get moved in, and then oriented to their new community, before classes begin.
Most of us went through this process as a first-year student… once upon a time… and it may be that we have forgotten some of the emotions and overwhelming feelings of disorientation that often accompany this time of transition.
And on move-in day specifically, new students and parents are about one thing and one thing only — getting into (and then settled in) their dorm room.
So let me encourage us — each and every one of us — to be about that one thing as well.
For a number of years now I’ve been operating off of a metaphor for ministry that is no longer working. It may […]
A former female student of mine recently shared this TED talk on Facebook with the comment, “this sucks!”
I agree.
I’m just becoming familiar with TED talks, so this video may have already “made the rounds,” but if you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it (it’s under 5 minutes in length) and then share your thoughts about how we might better assist the guys on our campus.
While at a conference last summer I had the chance to sit in on a session led by Creighton Alexander, Campus Pastor at the University of Alabama Wesley Foundation, where he talked about coming up with a strategy for ministry on campus.
He shared a lot of good stuff, but there was one idea in particular that seemed to jump out at me — and has stuck with me ever since — and it’s the idea of “mapping our campus.”
There’s a good chance that many of you already do this — in fact, we all do to a certain extent because we all have “strategic relationships” across campus (and if we don’t, we should!) — but Creighton’s idea, while simple, was profound to me.
Is it just me, or does it often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the things that we want (or need) to do?
As pastors we can find ourselves sought out for a variety of reasons.
And we can give ourselves to a lot of different ministry-related tasks and to-do’s.
Some of this happens for good reasons, some for the wrong reasons and some due to no decision of our own.
But I find myself wondering how frequently many of us get sidetracked, or even sidelined, by giving too much of our time and attention to the wrong things.
As The ‘Back-to-School’ blogathon has drawn to a close I am extremely thankful for all who contributed and participated, for the great […]