Sharing Your Life With Your Team

One of the best ways to build unity in your youth ministry team is to share life with them. This practice is best seen in the life of Jesus – His disciples eating meals and having great discussions together. If you want to build a great team – care for them, coach them, train them … and open your life to them. Here are a few ideas.

Host a meeting in your backyard
Opening the door to your house is symbolic gesture to how you are opening up the relationship to them as well. The next time you gather everyone up for a training, fire up the grill and toss on some Sam’s Club burgers for everyone to enjoy. Grab a student leader to watch everyone’s kids upstairs and order them a pizza to keep them quiet. Open up your life by opening up your house.

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CHALLENGE your students to take the
Parable of the Talents literally for 9 weeks?
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Find excuses to gather for fun
A few weeks ago we hosted a huge NFL Kickoff party at my (Kurt) house. It was an incredible night and a great game (go Green Bay!). Find excuses like that to rally your team together for a night of food and fellowship. Various youth ministry “business” rarely comes up, and that isn’t the goal. We get together every Monday night during football season because we like to hang out together. Plus, the buffalo wing mac-n-cheese is to die for.

Give away your phone number
I (Josh) hate talking on the phone. I have fallen in love with texting and email but the rest of the world seems to be a little slower at adapting to my new lifestyle. Give people access to your phone – you might be surprised at how respectful people are of it and only call when there is a legitimate need. If you need some time off, go dark (but be sure to change your voicemail to let people know).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
CHALLENGE your students to take the
Parable of the Talents literally for 9 weeks?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Still have clear boundaries
All this talk about football games and cell numbers could make you think wrongly that opening your life up to your team means not having boundaries. Far from it! Maintain your boundaries [we’ll be going into more specifics in a future SYM Today], but make sharing life with your team a purposeful part of your ministry strategy.

We gotta run….just writing this article makes us want to go hang out together.