I love sharing good resources. Conversely, I hate the idea of college ministry staff reinventing the wheel, taking up precious time recreating stuff that should be readily available.

So, as many of us in college ministry head into planning for the spring, I thought it would be helpful to compile in one place the best resources I’ve found on planning.

• Three evals that we do every December with our team:
  • Evaluating the Quality of Your Discipleship
    • each staff does this with everyone they disciple
  • Ministry Evaluation (or “how to avoid a brutal first day of team planning – slogging through a group evaluation of the movement”)
    • We email this out to our team a few days before we plan together (it REALLY speeds up team planning because, individually, you’ve already done the heavy lifting of evaluating the current reality of your movement)
  • Personal Staff Evaluation

• Planning for Year 2023
  • How having a 12 year plan has transformed our ministry
  • Having specific, faith-stretching goals forces your team to plan differently
  • Setting non-arbitrary goals – the year-by-year plan we follow for goals (over 12 years)

• The most practical advice I’ve heard in the past few years on planning (how Penn State Cru plans) – Buckets and Holes
  • Using what we’re good at to fix what we’re bad a

• A data driven way to plan (and my favorite way to do it): Putting Everything on the Wall
  • How do you take all that is going on in your movement (the good and bad) and all you hope to accomplish (with often conflicting team opinions on what we should focus on next) and make sense of it all to determine what your team needs to focus on in the fall?

• A compilation of quick resources you can plug into your planning content:
  • Key thoughts on planning
  • Analogies on planning (to help your team vividly see why they need to do the hard work of planning)
  • Questions to help you assess your movement in different ways
  • Quotes on planning (again, to help align your team to why we plan)

Your turn: would love to hear what planning resources you’d recommend – share the wealth in the comments!

photo courtesy of John Mallon Iphoneography

Used this last night in a talk and thought I would share it.

It’s an adaptation/sometimes-direct-quote of Keith Johnson’s great illustration found in the article Hearing the Music of the Gospel (which I highly recommend reading in its entirety).

Disclaimor: the Gangnam Style variation I used probably has a shelf life of 1 month before it goes the way of the Macarena. But the illustration obviously works without the current fad song.  

• Imagine you’re in the library (I know for some of you Business majors that is difficult to imagine).
• You’ve got your required study equipment on – headphones.
• And you’re rocking out/studying to a classic musical piece like Gangnam Style
• You’re studying. You’re riding a pony. You’re lassoing. You’re shuffling your feet under the table. You’re “studying”.
• Needless to say- You’re having a good time.

• Imagine (and this is very possible) a time traveler from 1960 comes up to your table. He sees the smile on your face. He sees you riding a pony. Lassoing. He has no idea what Beats by Dre are.
• He thinks: That looks like fun. I think I’ll try that.
• So he sits down next to you and begins to imitate you.
• Awkwardly at first, he tries to get down your complex, finely tuned dance moves.
• Riding a pony. Lassoing. Shuffling your feet
• With a little practice, he begins to catch onto it. He’s mirroring your actions pretty closely.
• But although he eventually gets better at keeping time, he concludes that it’s not as much fun or as easy as it initially seemed (especially riding the pony—very difficult to do when you’re not actually hearing the music).

• After a while, a third person enters the room and watches this scene. What does he see?
• Two people apparently doing the same thing, apparently listening to the same thing.
• Is there a difference? Absolutely. The first guy hears the music and his actions are a natural response to the beauty of the music’s rhythm and melody.
• The second guy is merely imitating the outward actions. He’s not listening to anything.

• There’s an important spiritual parallel here. The dance (outward actions) represents the Christian life, while the music represents the grace of the gospel.
• Though we come to know Christ through grace, we are often like the second dude who tries to perform the dance without hearing the music.
• Our spiritual life is reduced to a series of dance steps— external behaviors and activities—devoid of God’s animating and transforming power.
• God’s desire is not to get us to do the dance but to get us to hear the music of the gospel, with the dance (godly actions, character, and activities) flowing naturally from it.

• So when we read the Bible or hear a sermon, the primary question on most of our minds is “What does this passage teach about what I am supposed to do?”
• But that’s looking for dance steps.
• If we merely read the Bible looking for dance steps (“What does this passage tell me to do?”) we will fail to hear the music of the gospel. To hear the music of the gospel, we must first ask a different question: “What does this passage reveal about my spiritual brokenness that requires God’s redemptive work?”