Okay, I just came across a new pet peeve of mine. I was hanging out in the check-in area on Sunday and it was about 15 minutes after the service started and I mentioned something about shutting down check-in. Someone responded that it was too early and people here are on Gateway time. That was the second time I heard that since I’ve been here. The last time was a few weeks ago. I was sitting in morph (a new discipleship program) and the speaker said something about only having a handful of registrations a week before, but now there were more than 60 people participating. He said something about this being the Gateway Way. All this sounded familiar.

However, I put 2 and 2 together today. I got an email from a previous co-worker at Cross Timbers. She was talking about how registrations come in slow and at the last minute. She said, "You know how it is on CT time."

You know what?I think I can even remember back to my first full time position at a church in IN. I seem to remember talking about how people arrive at the last minute or sign up for stuff late.

So, this is my pet peeve. Based on my past experience, people are late and like to wait until the last minute. Sure, not everyone is like this, but enough are. I really don’t think it’s that unique, based on my experience. How about you? Have you experienced this with your ministry, or is everyone always on time? I think I’m going to start standing up for this. The next time someone says that this is "Gateway time" I’m going to boldly stand and say, "No. This isn’t Gateway time… it’s reality. People are late here just like they are at every other church in this country (and let me tell you, go down to a church in some other countries and they’ll give you some real examples of "late.")!"

Yesterday I was doing a little research. I have a phone appointment in a week with someone who is attending our church and has left her Catholic roots. In the past, Church was always a "thing" to do…and not really enjoyed. But now she and her family look forward to coming to Gateway every week and they are growing in their relationship with Christ. She has two kids and she in a bit of a precarious spot. They know they’re in the right place here at Gateway, but due to her deep rooted past, she’s really nervous about not having her kids observe the sacraments (ie. Confirmation, Communion etc…). It’s just that part of letting go, but still being concerned with the "what if I’m wrong… am I screwing up my kids’ eternity?

So, I was doing a little research and I came across this web site.

You go St. Ignatius!

I don’t know if this is an effort of the Catholic Church to better engage with what is culturally relevant, or just an opportunity for some who are Catholic that want to show their faith in a relevant way. I give them props for making the effort. If I was Catholic, I’d be all over the brown "Sacred Heart of Jesus" Tee or the "Romantic Catholic" hoodie.

Bellow are images of some of my favorites. Oh and if I saw someone wearing the St. Francis shirt with the rope around the waist, I can’t say I wouldn’t laugh at them. Oh, and I’m kinda cracking up at the "today I’ll stay pure" shirt that is printed backwards to remind you to stay pure when you see it in the mirror.

I’m throwing this one out to my readers. I want to find out what you do.

When coming to a new church you usually inherit a lot of stuff. You also inherit volunteer schedules and routines. At Gateway I inherited one things I really like and one thing I don’t like too much. First of all, a majority of our volunteers serve every week. That’s just awesome. The thing I don’t like so much is that traditionally a large number of these volunteers would take the summer months off and a recruiting push would be done in May called "Summer Serve." The idea was that a new team is recruited to serve for the summer while most of the regulars took time off. The advantage was that many of those who signed up for Summer Serve would stick with it into the next year. The disadvantage, you’ve got a whole new team to train and enlist in ministry.

Have any of your guys experienced this? I can tell you that I don’t love it. I’m all for giving my volunteers some time off. I’ll give them time off whenever they need it. However, I don’t see letting all my team off for 2-3 months all at the same time. I understand the "why," but I don’t love it.

So, this Spring we didn’t do it… kinda. Well, I actually got her too late to do an official Summer Serve push. The announcement I made last Sunday was where we would normally do a Summer Serve push (about a month late though), but instead I made it about serving on a permanent basis.

Have any of you experienced Summer Serve? Was it a really successful thing or a necessary evil?

A few weeks ago my blogging friend Sam wrote a very intriguing post here. I was disappointed that there were only two comments… both of them mine. However, I’m pretty sure I know why no one had much to say. I think it’s rare for us to link the Holy Spirit and recruiting together. It kind of was for me too.

A few weeks ago I finished writing an article on the Holy Spirit’s role in recruiting. Writing this article was amazingly refreshing and a great reminder of the things I often forget or neglect. Here’s all I can say. They Holy Spirit wants to help and we need to remember to let him. He proved it to me in a beautiful bit of confirmation that I’d love to tell you about.

I finished writing this article just before the weekend… about letting the Holy Spirit help in your recruitment process. After service that Sunday, my wife came up to me and said, "Remind me to tell you about the person I saw in the garage (our coffee/bookstore) today." It wasn’t until later that night that I remembered to ask. She then went on to tell me about someone she saw earlier that day. There was this man who came up to the husband of my Early Childhood Director. He seemed very outgoing and fun. More importantly, he really engaged with his kids… he had them eating out of his hands, so to speak. Sara said, "you gotta get this guy on your team."

So, I then sent an email to my Early Childhood Director’s husband. I prefaced the email saying, "This is a highly unusual request." I went on to tell him what Sara saw and that I’d like to connect with him if he’s not serving somewhere else. He wrote back within minutes. He said that this guy had served in the Children’s Ministry for years and totally loved it. Even more, the guy had even said that day that he was thinking about plugging back into the Children’s Ministry. Now tell me, does the Holy Spirit want to help or not?

Here is a handout card announcing our upcoming baptism class. I’d love any feedback.

We’ve got a very big promotion coming up at Gateway Church. Very Big. Actually it’s so big that we’re going to host four parent meetings to explain all that is happening. To be honest, we don’t really need the parent meetings, but its another opportunity for me to speak vision to our parents, so we’re going to anyway.

• Currently we have four nursery rooms that are almost at capacity every weekend.
• Our preschool is overflowing. We have 20-25 kids in our Clubhouse (large group teaching area) and over 40 four and five year olds in our Cottage room.
• We have Kindergarten-5th grade split between two rooms.
• We offer Middle School only during our 12:30 service.

Our 9:30 and 11:00 services see similar sized crowds, but our 12:30 service has a fraction of the participants.

So, on August 24th, were making some big changes.

• We’re bringing in two portable buildings (yeah, they’re trailers) which will give us 4 more rooms.
• The kids in the clubhouse will move out to the portables
• The 40 kids in the cottage (who would be promoting kindergarten) will move to the portables.
• We’re launching a significant small group component to our 1st-5th grade rooms.
• We’ll be offering middle school during all the services (we’re giving them the cottage room)

It’s big changes for us, but we’re really excited. We’ve got a lot of fresh faces to recruit. It isn’t really any more kids (well, maybe some), it’s just more rooms and opportunities to serve. I’ll be keeping this blog up to date on our promotion efforts.

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that on my blog home page, my title is jumbled up some how. I noticed it but didn’t do anything to fix it as I’ve been busy. Finally I decided to take a look at it. So, I deleted the title of my blog to see what happened. The result?

Apparently my template decided to give itself a name. Yes, my theme has a very "Apple" look, but I am not running the "One more thing" site. If you click on any individual blog posts, it’s blank.

So, until I figure out how to fix it, I’m either title-less or I’m the "One more thing" other site. I may have to go in and edit the code in the template… I just don’t know why it showed up now for no reason.

Just the other day I came across another resource. It’s called cmconnnect. It’s a social network for Children’s Ministry. At first I was like, come on… another place for me to socially network. Right now I’m having trouble keeping up with Kidology, Facebook, Twitter and my ever-expanding blogroll. Sheesh, when is it going to end. However, once I jumped in, it looked kinda cool. Actually I was intrigued for two reasons.

• It was a Ning social network. My favorite podcast mentioned this a few weeks ago… I think it was ranked by webware as one of the best Web 2.0 services this last year. It’s a service where you can create your own social network. I remember looking at it and being interested in how you might take one of their templates and make a social network. Well, cmconnect has done it… and it looks pretty good, actually better than I expected.
• There were a bunch of people I didn’t know. Actually, there were several people that I knew of, but have never connected with them on kidology, facebook or any of the other standard CM gatherings.

So, I’m on cmconnect. I’m not sure what will come of it, hopefully an opportunity to connect with people I haven’t met in some of the other venues. If you make it there, look me up and I’ll be your friend (thrilling, isn’t it?)

I mentioned yesterday that we’re recruiting volunteers and developing leaders for the fall promotion on August 24th. We actually did a push from the stage yesterday, but we’re looking for way more volunteers than we can get from that. I’ve been talking to my staff about how we can "saturate" the vision in as many venues as possible. Here are some of the ways we’re going to (or hoping to) get the word out among our church.

• Parent Communication: It’s fairly common for me to send out an email to all the parents who’s kids attend regularly. Next week I’ll be sending out an email to inform them of all the events and activities coming up this summer. In that email I’ll mention some serving opportunities they can take advantage of.
• Parent Meeting: So much is changing in the fall, so we’re hosting a parent meeting. Actually, we’re hosting 4 of them around two different weekends. We’ll be talking about what the ministry will look like next year. Since I’ll have so many parents face to face, I’ll share a little vision for joining a serving team.
• Men’s Ministry: I’m hoping to speak at a men’s breakfast or gathering over the summer. What better way for men to impact the next generation of men by leading a small group of boys? Oh yeah!
• Singles Ministry: Gateway has a lot of these. I’d love to infuse the CM with some younger singles, so we’ll try out this group.

My team had a few other ideas as well we’re going to look at for the future. The key though is to saturate. We need as many people as possible to know what’s happening this fall with the kids.

What other ways can we saturate the vision in the next few months? Any ideas?

Last Sunday (yeah, I said last Sunday… I’m behind and catching up) I stood on stage and recruited new volunteers.

GASP!

Yeah, I know. It is something I speak against, but I’m not going to apologize.

Actually, it was my first opportunity to be introduced to my church. Two weeks earlier it was announced that the previous Children’s Pastor had resigned and would be moving to Colorado in two weeks. A lot of people thought that I was his replacement. So, it was a good opportunity for me to introduce myself and explain my new role.

Second, I had the opportunity to share a little vision. On August 24th we’re promoting for the next year and also launching over 30 small groups in our elementary program The relational element has been missing here and is certainly a felt need. So, I got to share how we’re launching small groups and how our passion is that every child be connected relationally to a small group of peers and an adult leaders.

Last of all, I told people that now is the best time of all to join the CM team. There was a piece in the program that they could fill out and drop in the offering or they could come and meet me in person after the services. We had a good response and about half of those who responded did so in person. I got to put some names to faces and shake some hands.

Here’s the deal, I’m at a huge disadvantage as I know very few people. On Sunday, I connected personally with about 20 people who are dying to plug into the kids ministry. That was great for my situation. However, I also understand that many of those people won’t make it to a serving team. A push from the stage just isn’t nearly as effective as a personal invite. So, I’m meeting with as many as I can over a meal, coffee or whatever to increase my odds and build my network.

We’re probably going to do one more of these style pushes in the early fall. Then no more. We’re banning ministry recruiting from the stage. We’ll use other methods… more effective methods. My goal though is to make some kind of presentation 4 times a year from the stage. Simply a video or testimony that shows how ministry to kids is totally rockin’! No ask… just showing off. If anything, I want serving in our ministry to be attractive to the casual attendee, not something we’re begging for help from the stage several times a year.

Oaky, so go ahead. I still did it, even if I did have a good excuse… and I’m probably doing it one more time in the fall. Feel free to tell me what you really think, I can take it.