My New Role - Part 1

As I have been given a new “seat on the bus” (thanks Jim Collins), let me take a few posts to share why I’m excited and what I’m going to be doing.  First of all, one of the only reasons I felt I could take this new role is it is not a complete departure from student ministry.  Yes, I am no longer the hands-on, in the trench, leader of our middle school ministry.  However, I am still the pastor of student ministry.  I have the chance to interact with and lead a great team of people and provide some veteran (or maybe just old and crusty) leadership to our student ministry.  This gets me excited because I can still participate in a lot of the fun part of student ministry (in fact, I’m writing this from the hotel room of our middle school winter retreat – we are at CIY’s Believe in Tulsa, OK and I have three sixth grade boys staying with me in my room – what a riot!).  I will get to lead some combined events and be a resource for our student ministry leadership.  Would you love it if you had a reliable person to fill in for you if you were sick or needing a vacation?

So, as the months go on, my role with the students will change, but it will not go away.  In fact, as my youngest child becomes a sixth grader in June, I’m planning on being a volunteer in our middle school ministry and lead his small group.  Stop and think about this for a minute.  You could think “wow, do I really want the former youth pastor on my volunteer team?”  That’s a fair question, but you could also look at it in a different way.  What would you think if the executive pastor at your church showed enough interest in the student ministry to be a volunteer?  It might intimidate you at first, but how cool would it be for the students to see a “big church” pastor showing an interest in them?