Execute, Evaluate, Celebrate!

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by Rick Kindschi

You may have be just starting out in youth ministry — or maybe you've been around for years. Regardless, there are times when the challenge of working together seems more of a burden than a blessing. Excitement fades, life gets busy and the focus blurs your vision for effectively reaching and equipping teenagers in your community.

So, how do you mobilize your community to help your ministry network to make it for the long haul?

A Teenager Leads the Way

People focus on what needs to be done; God focuses on what can be done. This becomes obvious as people from multiple congregations work together, unite in a common cause, and faithfully depend upon pervasive prayer. God wants to work through His people to exceed anything mortals could ever accomplish alone.

Believers in New London, Wisconsin, learned this firsthand as a high school senior initiated and led a major community outreach event. Brooke Prahl, 18, organized "Mission of Hope" in New London as an effort to unite the community in providing health and community services, haircuts, family portraits, groceries, kids zone, and prayer. More than 80 volunteers rallied around Brooke's vision - and more than 600 low-income residents were served on August 25, 2012. Brooke also raised more than $14,000 through donations from individuals, churches, and civic organizations.

The ministry in New London is an example of a ministry network that created a Community Action Plan (CAP) and executed a God-given vision to unite congregations and their community.

And now that the dust has settled, they believe the ministry won't stop there. Brooke Prahl would like to see similar events in the future. Those who participated said the goodwill of the "Mission of Hope" was contagious, raising awareness of other needs in the community, which they are also resolved to meet.

What stands out - and is transferable - from the ministry in New London, Wisconsin?

Prayer is Central

Communities have the capacity to reach youth and empower them for ministry when leadership from multiple congregations gather for prayer on behalf of their community. For the leaders in this city, prayer is not confined to the opening or closing moments of the meeting; prayer is the meeting. Furthermore, they recognize that trans-denominational prayer is at the heart of God's desire for reaching the entire community, and believe that reaching every young person is both reasonable and attainable. Lesson: Prayer must be elevated in stature and priority in our congregations and networks.

In New London, intercessors had been praying for their community for more than a decade, led by Moms In Prayer and other church leaders.
About six years ago, a group was prayer-walking the downtown district of their small city. There was an abandoned lot with an empty shell of a building. With this vivid metaphor in front of them as they prayed, they sensed that God was telling them that their city would be filled with His Spirit and transformed from the inside out.
Three years ago, the congregations in the area banded together to host a TeenServe work camp. Following the week of ministry, a small segment of their group refused to disband, convicted that their community needed them to remain engaged. For two years, they continued to meet regularly for prayer.
At one point, Brooke, then 17 years old, made an initial presentation to this prayer group - and they bathed her dream in prayer. They felt led to come alongside her vision, and continued to pray and plan until it became a reality. Remarkably, the Mission of Hope outreach site was on the same property (it's now a park) where the intercessors had heard God speak to them six years earlier!

Create a Community Action Plan

Communities have the capacity to reach youth and empower them for ministry when they set their sights on the needs of our community. Every community needs resources - both volunteers and finances. As we widen our spheres of influence beyond our local congregations, we intentionally increase our capacity to impact our community.

Planning a CAP necessitates developing measurable benchmarks. Diligent planning factors in everything that is sought to be accomplished. Remember that God gave specific dimensions for the ark to Noah when He spoke to him!

Execute the Plan

Even with a unifying purpose, it can become challenging to work with people from different churches, agencies and walks of life. The secret is in breaking down the mission in to workable goals and tasks and then effectively delegating those tasks. In New London, they used up-to-date Internet tools to track their Community Action Plan. Cloud-based technology greatly simplified the task of mobilizing believers from multiple congregations so everyone could do their part. All participants knew their jobs and did them.

Evaluate the Plan

New London's team used their monthly planning sessions to provide a time for evaluation so as to ensure the team stayed aligned with their objectives. After the event, their "cloud" system allowed for all volunteers and vendors to evaluate the event immediately, as well as to make it possible to tabulate and post specific outcomes right away. The community non-profit agencies were then able to easily share their success in their monthly newsletters and report to their donors. Within a month, the leadership convened for intense evaluation, and to determine if Mission of Hope would become an annual event. With real data from their online survey, the answer was a resounding "yes."

Celebrate the Plan

While events are important, for a movement to be sustained, organizers need to celebrate community impact with volunteers and recognize those who supplied resources. This solidifies the eagerness of participants to remain connected and continue to serve the community. In New London, the celebration took several forms:

Information: Telling all volunteers, donors, and participating organizations within 24 hours of the specific results.
Planning ahead: Meeting within a week with community leaders (police, mayor, Chamber of Commerce, etc.) to schedule next year's outreach. Civic leaders were thus assured that churches were there for the long haul.
Celebration: Throwing a pizza dinner party for all volunteers within three weeks to share stories and show event pictures.
Rest: Workers determined to enjoy a few months for sabbatical before adjusting their plans and reconvening monthly meetings. Of course, the prayer meetings continued without interruption.

Persevere

Leaders in Wisconsin have learned that a vital network is one that is united in prayer. Praying together fosters relationships of trust, creating courage to serve the community cross-denominationally — for the long haul. This - along with solid planning - leads to a "staying power" and long-range fruitfulness, rather than exhaustion that can result in collaboration coming to an end.

An effort like the one in New London often leads to unexpected, supernatural fruit. In August's outreach, people from a congregation that had gone through a divisive split (which resulted in a second split) gathered together to serve in the prayer tent - in unity! Division and schism were momentarily set aside in light of the need for common service to our community.

Pray, plan, execute, evaluate, celebrate, and press on. The same cycle of expanding fruitfulness can happen in any community - maybe even yours.