A couple weeks ago my buddy, Tony Myles, asked me to write up a description of my daily routine — my “daily grind,” if you will — as an illustration for a sermon at his church. You can listen to his sermon on his church’s website. The message is titled, “Living, Praying, and Talking With Guts,” from July 5, 2009.

Below is what I shared with him.

• Wake up tired because I stayed up too late the night before.
• If time permits, my wife and I pray and read the Bible together (just finished Ezekiel). This ends up happening anywhere from 1 to 3 times a week.
• Head off to the church office where I try to prioritize my time. I’m usually multitasking several things at once, so I almost never eat lunch because I don’t want to interrupt “the groove.”
• Around 2 PM I start getting frustrated that I’m still in the office because I want to use the summer months to hang out with teens, but there’s always so much else to do. Sometimes I drop it all and go hang out anyway. Other times I keep plowing through to-do lists.
• If I stay in the office for the afternoon, I head home around 4:00 because I’m so hungry and want to see my wife. I go straight to the frig and try not to eat too much so it spoils dinner, but enough to calm my stomach.
• Depending on what night of the week it is, my wife and I go out to a high school small group, have jr. highers at our house, go to birthing classes at the hospital, have youth group parents over for dinner, hang out with kids, or other random youth leader meetings or church meetings. Although it’s a bit unusual, the past two weeks we had only one evening at home alone.
• Around 9:00 or 10:00 PM, my wife and I are finally alone at home and can relax for the rest of the evening. She’s pregnant and usually goes to bed earlier than I want to, so I stay up and enjoy the peace and quiet. I love that time to myself with no interruptions and the freedom to do whatever I want to do, nothing else going on, nowhere I have to be, no one I have to talk to. Because I love it so much, I end up staying up way too late, sometimes to 3:00 AM or later, which makes me tired for the next day again until Fridays and some Saturdays when I can sleep in and catch up on rest.

Can anyone else identify?

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I usually publish something every day except Sundays here at Life In Student Ministry, but over the next couple weeks I need to slow that down considerably. There’s a lot going on personally and in my ministry that needs extra attention for a while.

• I’m writing a book that will be published sometime within the next couple months. It’s taking forever to do that while continuing to write here at the same time.
• There’s lots of planning and vision casting that needs to be done for fall student ministry at my church.
• My wife is due with our first child on August 7 and there’s still a lot of prep that needs to be done.
• Some major changes are coming to this site within the next several weeks.

Throw in other things like my wedding anniversary and lots of late summer nights with youth group kids and it becomes difficult to maintain quality posts here every day. Something has to give for the time being. I’ll still keep the regular Time Outs, Freebie Fridays, and LIVE YM Talks going along other random posts here and there, but overall I’ll be slowing down a bit.

Dana and I would greatly appreciate it if you would remember to pray for us during this life transition stage with the baby coming, fall ministry approaching, and my side-projects of the book and a relaunch of Life In Student Ministry. Once the overhaul of this site takes place, I’m sure I’ll be back in the full swing of things here, especially with the Youth Ministry Mentorship gearing up for another round.

If you’d like to keep up with what’s going on personally for me and my wife over the next couple weeks, read her blog and follow both of our Twitter accounts (mine: rockinyp; hers: danadelynn).

Thanks for your prayers and support! Looking forward to serving you and your student ministry even better in a couple weeks from now.

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In some churches, when the Sunday morning worship service is over, the pastor stands at the back door and shakes everyone’s hand as they leave. Most people typically thank the pastor and tell him how wonderful the sermon was. Personally, I have a hard time with that.

Last week I “preached” twice: once at our community’s high school baccalaureate service and again at all three church services for Graduation Sunday. After each time, people tell me, “Tim, you did a great job!” Sometimes I feel they’re just saying that because they’re not sure how else to start a conversation with me after I was just on stage in front of everyone. Other times I sense that they truly are genuinely thankful for the message. But either way, I’ve found that I really wish I could remove myself from too much praise or criticism right after teaching. In fact, despite wanting to hang around after the baccalaureate service and talk with seniors, I left right away.

My buddy, Tony Myles, wrote something several years ago that has stuck with me. He said:

“I am most vulnerable to criticism right after a sermon, and tend to take [criticism] too deeply in that moment. Likewise, it’s the worst time for me to hear affirmation because then my ego just gets bigger.”

That is so totally true for me. After the baccalaureate I really had to distance myself from all the praise because I was hearing it too much. So I left. Preaching at church last weekend felt somewhat similar. Moments after I finish teaching, I’m way too emotionally attached to the message and vulnerable to really hear anything objectively, whether praise or criticism. I really need about a day to pass before I can respond to feedback with a level head. Otherwise I get too cocky or hurt, depressed, or defensive.

While attending Dallas Theological Seminary, one of my professors, Howard Hendricks, called “sermon praise” the “glorification of the worm.” I am, in fact, a lowly worm, a very inadequate vessel for communicating God’s Word. Anything good that comes as a result of anything I say is solely a work of the Holy Spirit, not me. I’m so thankful that He chooses to work in spite of me, never because of me.

Last week Adam McLane posted a short video where he challenges youth workers to step back and reconsider where we spend all our time, and if it really matters. Since I’ve been struggling through a lot of those thoughts anyway, I decided to take his challenge and publicly state how I spend some of my time in youth ministry and evaluate each task on a scale of, “Absolutely worth my time; it changes lives” to, “Not worth my time; it does not change lives.” Of course, this list is not exhaustive — I stopped listing things after it was a page long.

My goal in this was: 1) to refocus on how I can best spend the limited and valuable time I have with teens while they’re still in jr. high and high school; and 2) to find what was in common with the tasks I felt change lives and use that common denominator to help focus and refine the ministry for our big launch in the fall. Not surprisingly, most of the things in the “Absolutely worth my time” category are relational and are not task-oriented.

You may disagree with how I rated some of my tasks, and that’s fine. I go back and forth on some of them myself. If you and I were able to sit down and have a face to face conversation, you could hear my heart and why I evaluate some things the way I do. For most of them, I just went with my first gut reaction without wrestling back and forth a whole lot. Otherwise, it would get way too complicated.

Regardless, I’d love to hear your reaction to some of the tasks below. How would you rate them for you and your ministry? What day-to-day ministry items are totally worth your time and what items are just busy-work to appease tithers, your sr. pastor, or even yourself?

[ RSS and email subscribers, you may need to visit this post to see the embedded list. ]

This week is a crazy busy week for me. The culmination of a ton of stuff comes down to this weekend and next week.

• This Sunday 56 jr. highers are giving their testimonies in church via video that I have to finish shooting and editing.
• There’s an end-of-the-year jr. high party next week I’ve barely starting planning
• Sr. high ministry evaluations need to be written and handed out
• My youth budget receipts need to be balanced and turned in (they were due last Monday)
• The summer youth schedule needs to be handed out next and I haven’t even started putting it together
• A news email needs to go out with reminders and updates about things going on this Sunday and next week
• I need to write my lesson for Sunday night’s sr. high large-group meeting

And that’s just the beginning of it!

So this afternoon when a prayer meeting with other local youth pastors was drawing closer, I looked at the clock and thought to myself, “There is no way I can make it to that meeting this afternoon. I have way too much to do. I don’t have time to pray today.” Then I paused and thought, “Wait, did I seriously just think that?” I chuckled to myself and realized my priorities were totally out of wack. Just the fact that a thought like that crossed my mind was very convicting. What else could possibly be a better use of my time than spending time in prayer? Sure, I’m busy and a bit stressed right now, but shouldn’t that be the very time I stop to pray instead of trying to haul through it in my own strength?

Needless to say, I put everything on hold and went to that prayer meeting. It was great! Us youth pastors met at a local church and car-pooled to a park where we talked, shared, and prayed together. Then, to top off the day, I destressed by meeting up with brother and cranked out a 37 mile bike ride with him in the country farm land. Nothing like riding through God’s creation to put everything back in perspective again.

Are you too busy to pray today?

It’s easy to be short-sighted in ministry. We work so hard on the day-to-day tasks that we often lose sight of the bigger picture. We go from program to program, event to event, series to series, and at the end of each one we’re often so close to the ministry, staring at it from 5 inches away, that we unintentionally lose the bird’s eye view. How do we even know if we’re moving in the right direction when we spend the entire journey staring at our feet because they’re in better focus than the distant horizon?

This exercise is a bit morbid, but very insightful for bringing the horizon back in focus for your ministry. You’ll need half an hour or so to do it properly.

1. Write an obituary for your ministry 10 years in the future

Project the ministry forward 10 years. Imagine that the Lord takes you home with Him having accomplished the vision He placed on your heart. Write a short obituary about your ministry as you’d like other people to have experienced it.

Keep in mind that your ministry has been as “successful” as it can be and the Lord calls you home at the peak of its game.

• What do you want people to say about the ministry?
• How do you hope it will be perceived?
• What will people respect about it the most?
• What new ground has it broken for the Kingdom?
• How has it partnered with the Holy Spirit for life-change in people’s lives?

Take some time to write this obituary and dare to dream big.

2. Write an obituary for your ministry as it stands today

Okay, back to the present. Let’s just say that your life on earth ended today. Perhaps you were killed in a car accident, maybe silently in your sleep, or maybe you choked playing Chubby Bunny at youth group – it really doesn’t matter – the exercise remains the same.

Write an obituary for your ministry as you see it now.

• What do others say about it?
• Will it continue without you?
• What difference is it making in people’s lives?
• Is it breaking new ground for the Kingdom?
• Is it a reflection of what a healthy ministry should look like?

The key to it is to look at the two obituaries and compare them. Reflect on the differences.

Once you’ve compared your two obituaries, the next step is to spend a considerable amount of time in prayer, asking the Lord to enable you to move from the present reality to the big dream for the future. These sorts of dreams don’t just happen because you spend more time in the office, invest more money, or try harder. Rather, they are the result of spending time with the Lord, allowing Him to continually work through you, and often taking faith risks that may feel very uncomfortable.

If you’d like to share your obituaries (or at least what you discovered in writing them) in comments below I’d be interested to read what the Lord lays on your heart.

I did this for 2007 and thought it appropriate to reflect back on what I learned about ministry in 2008.

1. Communicating a clear vision for my ministry is probably the most important thing for my leadership, building trust, and the kids’ spiritual growth.
2. I need to utilize parents in every aspect of the ministry as much as possible.
3. Saying “no” to teenagers and parents is very critical to the health of our ministry.
4. I must always lead by example. I should never expect the teenagers to follow my challenges until I am first modeling it in my own life.
5. I will not always have a great relationship with every teenager, and that’s okay.
6. Everyone has different expectations of the youth ministry and most of them I can respectfully ignore if the vision is clearly communicated.
7. People don’t naturally follow until they know where they’re going and why.
8. I need to keep my teaching to jr. highers much more concrete with only one clear “big idea.”
9. It’s okay to let parents and teens take personal responsibility for raising funds for youth trips and events.
10. I am very intolerant of people who distort the Gospel.
11. Most kids really do want to go deep into God’s Word more than they want to play games, even unbelievers.
12. I can do almost anything if I have my wife’s love and support.

It’s been a couple months since I’ve posted about this and, since Life In Student Ministry has hundreds of new readers since then, I wanted to share this with everyone again, especially the new-comers. Welcome!

For over a year now I’ve been getting free stuff from freebie sites online. The list of prizes I’ve received is too long to name each item individually, but here’s a start:

• FREE Xbox 360 Elite, 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, Halo 3
• FREE 16 GB iPod Touch
• FREE 32 GB iPod Touch
• and thousands of dollars in cash from the iPhone site, PS3 site, Wii site, and more.

Check out those links above for pictures and screenshots of the free iPod Touches, Xbox 360 Elite, and PayPal cash payments as proof that I really do get this stuff for free. For example, here’s the 16 GB iPod Touch I got for free and the Xbox 360 Elite I also got for FREE (click to see full-size):

Interview with co-owner of Bonus Network

Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to interview a co-owner of the Bonus Network, the company I use that gives all this stuff (and more) away. Watch it below:

List of Bonus Network sites

*The login you create at one Bonus Network site is valid for all the other sites.

Prizes	Sign-up Link	100% Legit
iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, cash	BonusiPod.com
iPhone, Apple gift card, cash	BonusiPhone.com
Wii, Wii Fit, cash	BonusWii.com
Xbox 360, Halo 3 edition, Xbox 360 Elite, cash	BonusXbox360.com
PlayStation 3 (40 GB), PlayStation 3 (80 GB), cash	BonusPS3.com
Laptops from Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, more, cash	BonusLaptops.com
Plasma TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, more, cash	BonusPlasmas.com

How it works

1. Click one the sites listed above and sign up there to create an account.

2. Complete 1 or 2 trial offers (like Blockbuster, Netflix, a credit history check for $1.00, etc.) to reach 100% credit (found under the “Offers” tab when logged in to the Bonus site).

3. Use the your referral link found on the “Status” page of your account to give to other people to sign up for the site and also complete 1 or 2 trail offers.

4. Once they do so, receive your prize for FREE!

My story

It honestly isn’t any more difficult than that. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I promise it is 100% credible. I’ve received so many prizes that I actually stopped blogging about each one as to not annoy you all with it each time. Seriously, just try it out. I guarantee it works and is completely legitimate.

My total out-of-pocket expenses for all the trial offers combined that I’ve completed is about $100. Not bad for an Xbox 360 Elite, Xbox Live Gold, Halo 3, two iPod Touches and thousands of dollars in cash! Some of the offers are even completely free and others cost only $1.00. Just try out an advertiser’s service for a period of time, get some friends to do the same through your Bonus Network referral link, and you get your free prize. Here’s a summary I wrote a while back about my experiences with some of the trial offers I’ve completed so far. (Note that not all of the offers I mention are still available.)

Here are 10 ideas for getting referrals, which is exactly how I earn them myself. And after your first prize shows up, it becomes very easy to earn more because now you have proof for anyone who is skeptical. After I got my Xbox 360 Elite, I tried for an iPod Touch and it took only 5 days to get all the referrals I needed because everyone actually saw my Xbox and knew it would work, because it does!

And as Fehz said in the video above, Bonus Network guarantees that you will receive credit for any trial offer you do with an advertiser through them, even in the rare case that something goes wrong with it. All you have to do is send Bonus a copy of your confirmation email from the advertiser and they will gladly give you full credit for your efforts, so there’s really no risk in trying it.

Common excuses

Most people would love to earn some of these free prizes, but there’s three common excuses:

1. It’s a scam!
2. I’ll get hit with a ton of spam mail.
3. Completing offers costs more than the prize itself!
4. I don’t think I can get others to complete referrals for me.

For #1, check out the links above. I’ve done it several times and received several prizes, so I know it’s not a scam. Concerning #2, I have not received one single shred of spam as a result of completing these trial offers or freebie sites, not via email nor postal mail. These companies actually have pretty aggressive privacy statements. Number 3 also is not true. As I said above, I’ve paid about a total of $100 out-of-pocket for all these free things combined. The most I ever paid for a single offer was $24.98 for a sheet of photo stamps. Most offers cost between absolutely nothing and $5. And about #4, check out this post I wrote that gives 10 ideas for how to earn referrals for your freebie site. They work for me, anyway!

If you have any questions about the process, I’ve done it many many times, so feel free to ask in the comments below. Fehz, a co-owner of the Bonus Network, will also be around this post in case you have any questions for him, too.

I have been waiting to write this post for a LONG time. I can’t believe it’s actually here! As of 9:00 AM on Tuesday, November 9th, 2008, we paid off our last debt, Sallie Mae, and are now officially DEBT FREE! This video is our story about how Dave Ramsey encouraged us to take control of our finances and the resources that the Lord entrusts to us.

My wife has a better blog record of our financial journey than I do, including the day we met with the financial adviser from church and started this process, the day we finally paid off the credit cards, and her debt-free post from this week. Now, here we are and we don’t owe a dime to anyone. Instead of sending our paychecks to other people (with interest), we get to use what God has blessed us with to bless others and our future family.

It really is an amazing feeling to be in control of your money, to eliminate financial stress, and to be good stewards of the resources God provides, no matter how large or how small they might be.

The process was very difficult for me, especially since Dana and I live on a youth pastor salary. Our bare bones monthly budget hardly balanced with my income! But as we started they journey in obedience to Him, the Lord really honored that and blessed us beyond our dreams. Over the course of the year, a got a raise at church and a health insurance situation that increased my income by $10,000 per year. Plus, the Lord provided work for Dana, prompted random people to give us financial gifts, my website started making money (even though it’s all free), and He gave us discipline to live on very tight budget: no eating out, no seeing movies, limited travel, and saying “no” to things that normally would cause us to splurge. It was tough, but as Dave Ramsey says, “Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else,” and that’s exactly what we did!

A lot of people criticized our plan. Debt is unfortunately such a normal part of the American psyche that most people never consider what life might be like without it. Many “smart investor” people also told us that’s it’s foolish to pay off debt for many different reasons. The funny part is, they’re all broke! I’ll never take financial advice from a broke person! If they lost their jobs, they’d quickly start missing payments and within months would be filing for bankruptcy. Owing different companies a lot of money does not make you rich nor financially secure. In fact, this entire world would be a very different place if people followed this simple plan: Spend less than you make!

Dana and I paid off $21,521.66 in 15 months. When we started we estimated it would take over 2 years. Obviously, we did it in about half that time, not because we have a huge income, but because God blessed us once we started getting on track with our finances.

Our next steps are to save an emergency fund of 3-6 months worth of expenses. Once that is complete, we’ll start investing, saving for retirement, and especially saving for a down-payment on a house. Mathematically it will take us 2 or 3 years until we’re in a position to buy a house, but God has already proven that math doesn’t work right when He’s involved with the finances — He blesses like crazy!

I know he’ll do the same for you! Start by reading Dave Ramsey’s book, Total Money Makeover and checking out his website at DaveRamsey.com. I also HIGHLY recommend subscribing to his free podcast in iTunes and listening to 40 minutes of his radio show (commercial free) as your time permits. It will change your life.

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Every year each ministry in our church writes an overview of the past year. A couple of us (including myself) also give an oral report at our annual meeting. Here’s a brief (believe it or not) excerpt from my written annual report about where the youth ministry has come this past year.

A Focused Vision

This year our philosophy of ministry was greatly simplified. No more mission statement, purpose statement, vision statements, core values, strategies, etc. It was confusing for most people and very difficult to communicate. It left the vision for the ministry’s forward spiritual movement very fuzzy and unfocused for students, adult leaders and even me!

Now all those statements are boiled down together. The purpose is the mission, which is also the vision, which is also our core values and strategy all wrapped up into one, easy-to-remember vision: “Deep and Wide Youth Ministry.” We want to take teenagers deep into the Word so they become spiritually passionate believers who take the gospel wide to the lost people around them.

Beginning to Implement the Vision

The implementation of Deep & Wide is starting to work itself out in a variety of ways.

• Sr. High C3 renamed to Impact: “We come to be spiritually impacted so we can go out there and make a spiritual impact.”
• At Impact, we’re going through 30 core questions of Christianity, essentially summarizing 30 key areas of systematic theology.
• C-Groups continued to be a place where high school students can build relationships with other believers in a small group setting and be challenged to go deep in the Word.
• All teenagers were trained to share their faith using Pray, Pursue, Persuade: pray for 5 unsaved friends, pursue a relationship with them where you bring God up in conversation, and lovingly persuade them into a relationship with Christ.
• All teenagers also were taken through the G.O.S.P.E.L. Journey, where we traced the Lord’s plan of salvation through the entire Bible.
• Jr. High went through an in-depth study of the entire New Testament in The Journey small groups. This year they will go through the entire Old Testament.
• The Belize missions trip was geared to take kids deep into the Word by spending an hour alone in the Lord every morning, teaching times, and through debriefing/reflection together on what God was doing through us. They were also challenged to go wide with the gospel as we shared our faith with adults, children and teenagers alike. Many came to faith in Christ as a result!
• M.U.U.U.C.E. served as a good kick-start for getting into the Word this school year and introducing new 7th graders to each other as they got ready to go through the New Testament together in The Journey.
• Wake ‘n Ski did not meet its “go wide” focus. It is being evaluated for next year.
• 30 Hour Famine was organized and let by high school student, Sara Wadi. She did an outstanding job of coordinating the event to raise funds for providing food, education, clothing, medical attention, and the gospel message to starving children in other countries. The money we raised literally “went wide.”
• Since our vision for Deep & Wide Youth Ministry was still taking shape, our winter ski trip to Big Sky in Montana did not really fall into it any specific way. That will obviously have to be evaluated if we do the ski trip again.
• M.O.V.E. 2008 was a great opportunity to serve the community of Minneapolis by cleaning a facility that provides furniture to individuals and families entering society (immigrants, ex-convicts, etc.). We also assembled a lot of donated furniture for them, as the hands and feet of Jesus.

As we launch into the upcoming year, we intend to make Deep & Wide much more pointed and integrated. The transition began last year and it will continue throughout next year, too, as we evaluate everything and seek the Lord’s direction for our ministry. Hopefully by 2010 Deep & Wide will be be the driving force behind everything that happens in the youth ministry. The life-change and growth we’ve experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg of how God wants to bless His work here.

Where the Vision is Going

Our goal is to become more Christlike, as scripture commands (Rom. 8:29; 12:2; etc.). This does not mean that we only strive to become more perfect with less sin, as many Christians think. It actually means that our heart for lost people must continually grow because, ultimately, that’s the very reason why Christ came to earth in the first place – out of a love and burden for lost people. To become more like Christ means that our hearts share His desire to see sinners come to faith in Him. This evangelism aspect of discipleship should be a part of the spiritual journey every believer takes. We want to see teenagers become more Christlike, in both spiritual maturity (Luke 2:52) and in a heart for lost people (Matthew 28:18).

We believe that evangelism and discipleship are not intended to be separate. Traditionally, small groups and Bible studies are seen as discipleship opportunities and evangelism is usually reduced to a special event or a project where students outsource the gospel message to someone on a stage. Matthew 28 says to “Go and make disciples.” Evangelism is a vital part of discipleship and personal spiritual growth.

• This next year I will intentionally to share the gospel clearly at every youth meeting so our kids hear it, know it and share it. And also for any unbelievers who might be present because nothing else we talk about in youth group means a thing if someone present doesn’t know Christ.
• This next year I will take teenagers deep into the Word by teaching theology and pushing them to be obedient to the application of the Word to their lives as they go wide with the gospel message. That means internalizing these principles myself first and modeling it for them.