Not that a written recipe would have guaranteed success but we would have at least had a head start, something to use as a guide. It certainly would have spared my family some of mom’s less than stellar attempts at reproducing grandma’s special dish. And who knows how many countless Pinterest users might be pinning her recipe right now if we had it to put out there and share with the world?

Leading in ministry means empowering others. Jesus did it. Barnabas did it. Paul did it. You get the point. Yet if you’ve had about a week and a half of college ministry experience you can quickly list two dozen pitfalls of empowering young, inexperienced 18 – 22 year olds. So it can be with shaky knees and shaky trust that you delegate to them key endeavors in ministry.

You may ask them to help plan a retreat or a campus outreach event. While they may have attended similar events in the past, chances are good they’ve never planned an event involving numerous others. To put it another way, though they’ve been served some good meals, few will have the know-how to cook up a good meal for others. And this is precisely where recipe cards come in to play.

4 Things To Know About And Do With Recipe Cards

Written Recipes Make It Easier to Repeat Any Event: As a rule of thumb it’s always easier to cook from a recipe than to start from scratch. We all have repeatable activities in ministry. Some are once a year and some may be weekly tasks and services that need weekly attention.

Writing down a recipe card for how you’ve prepared and seasoned your specific event in the past can make it a whole lot easier to serve up a second time — and likely with better results. It gives everyone involved a head start on planning.

Also, good chefs continue to tinker with and try to improve their recipes. There’s still plenty of room left for creatively improving off of a recipe card, for honoring that part in all of us that mirrors our maker’s creative image. Please know recipe cards are not so much finish lines as they are starting points and helpful reference checkpoints along the creative way.

Vision Casting Is Easier For Your Rotating Student Leadership Base: Transition is a constant reality in campus ministry with students whizzing in and out of our ministries in four short years. Giving students a chance to learn from those who have attempted efforts in years past gives them a team, a cloud of witnesses if you will, to help them along.

Past successes can help to cast vision for current endeavors. You can also include a few sentences to serve as a semi-formal vision statement for whatever event or happening you are trying to put together. Vision helps to put everyone on the same page.

You can give tons of practical information in a recipe card. Budgets. Contact information for key people. Step by step processes. Time frame for starting projects. All of this and more can be included in a recipe card.

Google Docs Make Great (Free) Recipe Books: Google Docs are a super easy recipe cookbook. They are free. Super easy to share and thus allow for great collaborative efforts.

The only thing you’ve got to ensure is that things are being written down in the recipe card. That’s easy.  Simply gather the key participants in a room and just dump any and all information and work that you’ve done on the event. It doesn’t have to be neat and orderly, not yet anyway, just throw in anything that seems remotely relevant at the time.

It might be helpful, though not absolutely necessary, to set three of these 20-30 minute brain dump type of meetings.

First, when starting this process have a vision casting gathering. Whether you are creating a new card or reviewing an old one get the individual or team together. Take a few minutes to paint the big picture for what you are after. Take any time here to review or tidy up the card from previous chefs.

A second key interval is sometime before the event takes place, just randomly typing out all of the things you’ve done up until that point to make the event happen. Again, just put any and all thoughts in here don’t worry about editing just yet.

Lastly, after the event collect final thoughts especially ways things can be improved next time around. It may be helpful to have one of the organized leaders sift and sort through the information you’ve collected. This will enable the next team of workers to better make sense of the items in the recipe card.

Pass Along the Goodness: Recipe cards allow us to pass along lessons we’ve learned- often via mistakes we’ve made- to others. We’re all on the same team or, better said, in the same family. So let’s help each other out and share helpful ideas and projects.

Recipe Cards Make you feel like Superman!  Where to begin? Who should I call? Can we really do this? Recipe cards help quiet intimidation and give a sense of confidence that others have tried similar endeavors and pulled them off.

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Take Away Tip: Start somewhere. Make a list of 5 recipes that would be helpful for your ministry to develop. Wisdom you want to pass down through the staff and student generations of your work. Your ministry might well be the better for it. Happy writing and cooking.

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Disclaimer time. There are very few one size fits all solutions that work across all ministries. Please don’t think the case is being made here that the current suggestions fall into such a privileged class. For whatever it’s worth to others, our campus ministry has flourished a great deal with the use of recipe cards. Of course they aren’t the only ingredient — mechanistic bells and whistles never are. We’ve seen improved leadership from younger people in our ministry as we’ve developed more and more recipe cards for things we do around our ministry.

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