The Main Event: Follow-through

This is where you find out who your key players are. Your good leaders will follow up and follow through with the kids that came to your event; the kids that visited for the first or second time or the like. So what does this look like? You need to know the protocol for your ministry and it has to be ingrained into the heads of everyone on your volunteer and paid staff. If you have interns then they need to know what you expect of them. For the parents, they have assignments unique to them. The college kids, same things. If you have high schoolers helping out in your junior high ministry then they will also have something to do to make stuff work. It's gotta be in line and you have to know what you are going to do way before the event even starts.

Here are a couple of examples of stuff that our ministry has found to be helpful in our quest to get kids to want to come to church. Your leaders should be calling each of the students who are considered new to your ministry. And this needs to be done before the next activity that your church is putting on. If you have something on a Wednesday nite that is huge and off campus maybe, then your leaders have only a couple of days before the service on Saturday or Sunday or both. It depends on when your leaders come to help out. Do they lead groups on both weekend nites... just one of the two? Remember, the new kids want to come to church and see familiar faces. This includes the other students already in your ministry, preferably their friends, other leaders of all ages, etc.

you have some kind of list that all the kids signed up on when they came to the event and this is the basis of your master plan. Once you know which new kids were in particular groups, you need to distribute that list to each of the leaders so they do not forget about the new kids. Whether your leaders have two or twenty students in their groups, they will forget. Trust me, in their busy lives they do not always think about your ministry. I know, I know... crazy! But that is why you are the leader, that is why you are the youth pastor. It is your job to make their jobs easier. The more you do for your leaders the more responsibility and ownership they will get in the end because they will not be able to let anyone slip through the cracks. In fact, you will be the one to forget and one day a leader will come and ask you if you still have a certain student in the database and you will be like “oh yeah... I forgot about that kid.” but the group leaders will not.

If you want to make it even easier for the leaders, you can make some pre-stamped and addressed postcards with the information of the new kids ready for them by the end of the big event. Before the leaders go home, they fill out that postcard and give it back to you. Then you are the one to send it out for the leader and by the time that the leader forgets about it, you will have called each of your leaders to remind them to call the new kids from the event before the next activity. And when they call the new kid, he or she will have already have gotten the postcard and the leader is a hero! I know, too easy. But this will do wonders for your ministry. The better you make your leaders look and set them up for success the more they will want to put in for the ministry. It will not be a burden for them because they will know you are on their side. These are the simple decisions that will make or break your ministry. Do it right more than you do it wrong and you will see the fruit.