Life and Priorities.

Life

My boss, Chris Herrington, called me this morning to tell me that he and his wife were rushing off to the hospital to give birth to their new baby. WooHoo! Please pray everything goes well with the birthin'.

Priorities

I was reading on Marko's blog this morning some of his notes from the Jr High Youth Ministry Summit he hosts each year and I found something interesting. There was a little brief thing about priorities in ministry and how the thing you value the most should be recieving 70 percent of your focus, time and resources. However, many times the thing we say we value the most gets the 30 percent instead.

This got me thinking how we do things here at camp and I think that we would all agree that we hold a high value to small group relational ministry within the context of our summer program. However, I think that our large group sessions recieve way more of our finances than things that foster community and relationship.

I know that within program ministry, large group "sessions" are really important, to have low quality bands, speakers, lights, sound systems etc can really distract people from the message you are trying to get across, however does it need to take up the resources that we throw at it? This applys to camp as well as to church and even family budgeting, what do you value? What gets your money?

I don't know what camp could look like if we spend more of our budget on community building projects (games, community spaces, etc). Would we suffer as a ministry? Or would we thrive by allocating funds for our primary values rather than a piece of the pie that is typically uses for attracting people? Just a thought and I look forward to where it could go. Cheers.

Chris