what is up huddle fam it is todd here it is martin luther king jr day and so i hope that you were celebrating uh that appropriately i wanted uh i'm in a different room for those of you who don't know i am actually in the state of texas uh we bought our retirement home and i'm on sabbatical for the next couple of months i'm on sabbatical through uh the end of february and then i'm going to be splitting my time back and forth between uh texas and california but i i i got a little bit of a new setup i'm in a different room than i've ever been in before and and so hey uh as you're logging in i see people are coming in right now just hey say hi let me know that you're here and at any time through this short little broadcast if you have questions about what i'm doing uh feel free to drop them in the comments section and that would be great so uh a few weeks ago uh i put in the church playbook academy a brand new tool a tool that i've been uh using for uh really the last decade or so hey pastor chris georges how are you sir uh but a tool that i've been using uh for the last decade or so on how to get my church my leadership team my ministry leaders all on the same page rowing in the same direction and it's called the 90-day win planner and it's 90 days because you know the the the truth is long gone are the days where you are um planning three to five years out and and frankly um even 12 months is too far out for effective goal setting and planning especially when it comes to leading an organization hey pastor paul or leading your church and so um really 90 days is the perfect amount of time to set a goal get your leadership team on board all pulling in the same direction and so in the church playbook academy this is a part of your subscription i'm not charging you extra for this uh is your uh pdf version of the 90-day wind planner you can and here's a great thing you can print it out a million times doesn't even matter okay so uh what we have discussed in the previous couple of videos is this section right here says start here and you're gonna ask yourself this question now by the way this is an exercise that you can do by yourself uh it is an exercise that's really done best when you've got some close ministry uh advisors um you know you know doing doing this with you uh ministry leaders elders deacons whatever people that do buy into the vision of what your church is doing um those are good people to have in the room but it said it says start here and and it has you ask this question what is one thing one category of ministry that we as a church could focus on for the next 90 days that would excuse me either make our church bigger or better bigger or better uh because sometimes bigger is not better sometimes uh better is better all right uh but if you're really trying to uh grow if you really try especially these days in in the days of covet 19. covid20 cobit 2021 or whatever um you know if you're looking at reaching your community and some some fun and exciting and creative and unique ways then bigger is what you need to focus on but sometimes better is what you need to focus on and so what category of ministry can we focus on as a church for the next 90 days that would make our church bigger better and so uh we talked about hey go ahead and pick one of these categories worship fellowship discipleship ministry evangelism uh children's ministry or youth ministry uh administration or other and honestly other a you know you kind of gotta throw it in there but you really don't need it but uh so you start there you pick that that uh ministry category that you and your church are going to focus on for the next 90 days now like i said before if you are full time in your church and you've got an established ministry team you might be able to get away with doing this process for three categories of ministry over the next 90 days okay if you're part-time at your church i really wouldn't uh encourage you to focus on more than two and if you're part-time or even volunteer even if you're full-time uh you can get away with focusing on one thing there is power in focus and there is power in shared experience so we've already talked about that uh then the next thing we we had you do was um on the back side of this sheet i want you to write down as many actions that you can think of that would make blank better now i'll have you know even though i'm on sabbatical from my church i as an example i just very quickly said okay children's ministry and and so on the back side of this sheet i wrote down in five minutes a bunch of ideas that can make our children's ministry bigger or better and and and here here's the thing we we talked about this in the last video that it's it's really not brainstorming sometimes brainstorming can push your ideas to the safe middle seth godin one of my favorite authors talks about this thing called edgecraft where you take a a seemingly uh just a plain basic idea and you push it towards the cliff and that's really where the remarkable ideas are found is on the edge not not necessarily in safe middle so so i said okay for for this just brief example i'm going to take children's ministry as my ministry category and then in five minutes i wrote down i don't know a dozen ideas or so and and really you want to take 10 minutes 15 minutes uh i have done this process for uh up to an hour with seven or eight people in fact i now i didn't have this tool created at the time i i gave everybody uh legal pads and i sent them out of the room for an hour and i said hey i want you to write down as many ideas as you possibly can and and then i had this giant 4x8 white board um you know on wheels and i said okay here's what we're going to do and i said i'm going to i'm going to write down everybody's ideas on the whiteboard and so i'm like okay you go first and then i wrote all their ideas in the whiteboard and then i said okay to the next person now you go next and any idea that was a duplicate i might have put like a little check mark next to it just to show everybody in the room that we're all kind of thinking along the same lines here but i didn't write it up more than once and so i got everybody's ideas up on the board so you're mimicking that with the back side of this sheet on the back side of the sheet write down as many actions that you can think of that could make your and in this case i put children's ministry bigger or better okay and and so here are some rand don't judge me okay because a lot some of these ideas are just super silly um but here are uh some random ideas that can make our children's ministry bigger or better um i i said uh download excuse me uh download elevation uh children's worship videos off of youtube okay um uh form a worship team made up of teenagers you know like from our student ministry um hire a preschool staff uh or staffers to run our children's ministry you know because they go to school for this uh they're already doing it five six days a week a lot of these gals work for uh minimum wage uh but they they know what uh they know what works i'll i'll tell you the um the the time that my children's ministry actually ran the best was when our church was still in bible study format we were renting a tiny little church from a a charismatic church in town and i said we just need a worship center for the adults and we need uh you know a space for the kids i hired for 20 a sunday sunday school teachers sunday school teachers that had already taught in our biggest and best churches in san diego and i said hey i want you just to bring the lesson that you've already taught today i'll throw you 20 bucks and um and a lot of these ladies had been doing children's ministry for decades and they would bring crates of all of their own uh craft and art supplies that went with the bible lessons it was the best 20 bucks i ever spent and so you know here you know that same kind of same thought hire preschool staff to run uh our younger version of our kids ministry here's another one hire a freelance sports program director to run our our older uh kids ministry and and the thinking behind that is this 10 year old boys are choosing what church families uh go to so if you have a new family that comes to your church they've got a 8 9 10 11 year old young man here here's the thing you could preach your guts out best sermon ever most holy spirit inspired lead worship if their 10 year old son thinks your sunday school sucks guess what mom and dad is like hey we're going to go try another church okay and so you really need to have something again this is just an example but you really need to have something um that is going to make 10 year old boys stick gals are way less picky than the boys are okay so uh here's another one and again these are silly ideas fill a vending machine full of free candy have clowns greet kids on their way in and out of sunday school i install a video game room partner with the church plant so these church plants typically are younger in age and you can you can do a trade hey uh i know you guys need a place to meet uh say on sunday nights if you'll run my children's ministry on sunday morning you can have this space on sunday night let's see another idea was oh subscribe to orange curriculum here's here's the biggest issue i've had with children's director they love kids which is what you want and they will spend 80 percent 90 of their week writing sunday school curriculum and it's like no no i want 70 to 80 percent of your time engaged with the adult volunteers who are going to be teaching your sunday school classes there are people that are way better equipped that have already written the best curriculum and so don't even worry about that if if if you can if you can read you can lead so here's the curriculum and you know uh you just lead our adult volunteers and love on our kids okay so um we've we've picked our initial ministry category then on the back side we've written down is and again you want a hundred ideas okay i just wrote down a dozen or so just to use this as an example but on the back side write down as many ideas you can think of here's where it gets fun okay now then so we it says start here then we go to next then we go then okay and again you might want to download the 90-day win planner it's it's a part of your subscription in the church playbook academy just so you can follow along but then it says this in the brackets below fill in the numbers of your top 16 ideas so there's a couple of ways to do this so you can go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ten eleven twelve okay so you can number your ideas like that and then in the brackets you can go one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve okay now there's 16 brackets so what you want to do is you want to take your top 16 ideas through four rounds of competition until you're only left with one idea now what i did is i didn't put numbers in here i just kind of wrote a little abbreviation of what the idea was and if i ever get lost i can just look on the back of the sheet and find the idea and remember what i was thinking now here that i'm telling you this is the secret sauce of finding your best idea finding the goal that your church ought to be pursuing for the next 90 days it's this tournament to the death and and it's for me it's fun uh but it's it's it's tough i've i've had i've had ministry leaders get into arguments over this but that's how you know it's working because you and or your team have to work to figure out if if we were to take all of our resources and focus on this one thing for the next 90 days what should it be okay so here's what you do on the back side of your sheet okay and again i've got them numbered one two three is i write my first idea um and and and i don't i don't i don't write them down one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen no no no you write down one at the top left hand corner and then you come all the way down to the eighth slot and you write number two and then you come all the way back up and you write down your third idea and you come all the way back down to the seventh bracket and write down your fourth idea and you alternate one two three four five six seven eight now the reason that you do that and we talked about this in the last video the idea set a timer for 10 minutes 15 minutes 30 minutes doesn't matter and just write keep writing keep writing keep writing and even if you don't know like even if you uh have writer's block or idea block you can still i hey i don't know what to write i don't know what to write until the next idea comes up and you write that down okay now when you get in the zone of writing like for example i said my number my first idea was download youtube videos uh elevation kids worship okay and you can either have that playing as kids walk into the room so that there's you know some you don't want your sunday school rooms to feel like a library when kids walk in like it should be fun i'll tell you i've read more books about how a walt disney thought that in terms of the kind of experience he wanted kids to have see it should be a sin to bore kids with the gospel and so i i want kids to to think church equals fun so that they look forward to coming to church and as they get older and they mature they realize that there is more to church than fun but it should be a sin to bore kids with the gospel and so um my first idea was hey you know download uh elevation kids worship tunes and again that could be a part of their their worship it can just be in the background as kids are walking into sunday school okay my next idea was form a worship team made up of teens now here's the thing okay that's similar so when you you're the the top two brackets are gonna duke it out well i don't want that i don't want similar ideas fighting it out okay my third idea hire a freelance sports program director to run kidstown well right above that i wrote hire a preschool staff to run kidstown i don't want those two to compete in the first round so you alternate on both sides of the brackets one two three four five six seven eight and then on the other side 9 16 or 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16. okay so then here's where it gets fun so you fill out the brackets again alternating your ideas top and bottom and then it's round one of the tournament and these ideas are going to fight to the death okay because we're we're choosing what we're gonna focus on for the next 90 days and so my ideas one and two is um and and again we're answering the question in the next 90 days what can i do to make my children's ministry and i'm just using that as an example for this video what can i do to make this children's my children's ministry bigger or better in the next 90 days so idea one download elevation youtube kids worship videos idea number two hire a freelance sports director to run my children's ministry now what is going to make my children's ministry bigger and or better okay well i can tell you right now that downloading some children's uh worship videos um might make my children's ministry better it's not going to make it necessarily bigger but if i hire a freelance a a christian a guy that loves jesus freelance sports director that um you know typically might have sundays available anyway he is going to make my children's ministry both bigger and better and so i'm going to cross off i'm going to cross off the first idea and i'm going to promote to the next round sports director okay all right so i now have a winner between excuse me between ideas one and two and idea number two one and it got promoted to the next round then here's my third idea uh create a student story kind of think like dave and busters or chuck e cheese that that kids can play games they get tickets they take those tickets to the store they get a stuffed animal or a toy or whatever so the thinking behind this is hey i want my kids to memorize the um uh the verse of the week oh okay so if i if if i'm going to get him to to memorize their bible verse of the week word for word and i want him to engage with the scriptures monday through saturday not just on sunday hey i'm not above uh incentivizing that kind of activity okay um you so you get a ticket for memorizing the verse you get a ticket for bringing your bible to sunday school you get a ticket if you invite a friend you can incentivize whatever you want by the way i'm telling you that sports director guy he would be all over this because he likes to keep score anyways right so um so i my next idea student store versus um hire a preschool staff now um i'm already thinking okay you know it's like well okay no i i don't really want to think about the second round i got to stay focused on the first round what is going to make my um children's ministry bigger or better and i'm like okay wait a second if it's about the 10 year old boy then the hiring and preschool staff isn't going to help that so i'm going to actually cross off preschool staff i'm going to promote to the next round the the student store okay uh the next round um or the next ideas that are duking it out to the death uh filling a vending machine full of candy for free versus hiring a new kids director remember i i have the the same idea in kind of a similar vein a handful of times on the back of the sheet i can you tell that i think i might need to hire new kids ministry director and um here's the deal i'm going to cross off vending machine and i'm going to promote hire new director okay and then the then the last round or the last set of ideas that are duking it out on this side let's see um have balloon arches uh you know fun colorful vibrant again think disneyland uh as kids are walking in um you know create that sort of wow moment as they walk into sunday school uh or form a worship team made up of uh students that are part of the youth group now this is great especially if your church is on the smaller side you've got some students maybe you don't really have enough to necessarily start a youth group but you've got some uh and and a lot of them can sing a lot of you know play piano or or guitar or whatever um you know that could that could really be a great way to keep your kids uh your teens longer so uh let's see here so i'm going to cross off uh balloon arches and i'm going to promote teen worship team okay and then now i did not even uh complete this side again i was kind of in a hurry i just wanted to use this as an example so on the other side i've got clowns greeting kids as they come in and out or subscribe to orange and and i clowns would be fun for sure um but honestly uh getting that orange curriculum uh is going to make my children's ministry better so i'm gonna promote that and then uh the next round i will um let's see here you know we'll cross i just have it full of like you know question marks so we'll cross that off and then uh let's see here install video game room or partner with the church plant now now listen when i was a youth pastor we did have a video game room and that actually that really really helped but if you're in a need for staffing um it it would be really it would be great to maybe collaborate with the church plant and a lot of these church plants in order to get funding have to show that they have a team what a great way for a church plant to get practice dress rehearsal before they've launched to the public and so maybe you come up with a three month or a sixth month plan where hey i'll let you guys actually get practice doing church uh in in a in a way that's safe you can make mistakes and learn from them um but i want your children's person running my sunday school for the next three to six months and in exchange for that will let you also use our space on sunday nights uh and and so uh you know and we'll make a trade so that i think would be better than the video game room and so we're gonna promote uh church plant okay so round one is done round one is done now listen rounds two three and four man that that's when it really gets tough this is when ministry leaders duke it out they fight for their ideas that don't don't let that make you nervous because that just means that they're engaged in the process so so now we're gonna go round two uh hire a freelance sports director to run children's ministry or create a student store now let me tell you the right children's ministry director will have already thought of the idea to create a student store i didn't think of that my children's ministry director did think of that and so i'm going to cross off student store and i'm gonna promote the sports director idea okay um then uh the the next one uh hire new kids director versus uh form a teenage worship team now again uh the right children's ministry director is going to have these ideas and and they're going to be the one to run with them so uh we're going to take teen worship team off the board we're going to promote hire uh new uh children's ministry director okay on the other side uh it's uh orange curriculum versus uh a blank uh spot here and so uh we're gonna go ahead or yeah so we'll put orange there um church plant versus question mark so church plant wins okay and then we've got uh we're down to round three now uh hire a freelance sports director uh to run your children's ministry versus hire a new children's ministry director and and so here's again if you've got other leaders around the table when you're going through this process it's really up to that the people around the table is it more important to hire a new children's ministry director or specifically hire a freelance sports director to come and run your program on sundays and i'm going to go ahead and say it's important for everybody around the table to understand hey it's about the eight to ten year old boy we need to hire new children's ministry director that understands that okay so if they don't have to be a sports uh director that could be a huge win for you guys but i'm going to go to cross off sports director i'm going to promote hire new director okay and um and then here's the thing that that higher new director made it to the final round then on the other side um uh we're going to get orange curriculum versus a trade with a church plan now um and again you could uh you know um you know i i will cross off church plant and say you know get orange curriculum and and again i'm just i'm just showing you guys how easy this is um and so in the final round uh it is uh hire a new children's ministry director uh that would that could make your children's ministry both bigger and better versus um you know subscribe to orange for children's ministry curriculum and um and that might make your children's ministry better and and that's good enough but i'm going to now here's the thing if you already have a great children's ministry director then we're we're going to cross off hire new director that would be super awkward if they were in the room right um and and say hey you know what um you know we really need you to be focusing on our volunteers and our kids not creating curriculum we're going to outsource the curriculum to orange we want you to be focused on the people in that case we cross off hire uh you know new uh director and we're gonna go with orange for the next 90 days and see how it goes okay if you need a children's ministry director then it really doesn't matter what kind of curriculum you're using because you really need a leader in that position so in this case i'm going to cross off orange curriculum and my top idea is to hire a new children's ministry director okay and you you put it you put it in the box and so here's the deal here's the deal okay today is uh january 18th the time that i'm recording uh this video so i'm just gonna say uh 30 60. so um uh the next section okay because so remember we we started here we we went to next then and we went through this process and then we're gonna we're gonna finish with this uh today here um almost there write out the following statement we will and and this is you know uh you know the name of your church the name of your team whatever we will hire a new uh kids director by okay and and we're going to hey kevin uh we're going to pick a date that's hi lucinda we're going to pick a date that's 90 days from today okay so we've gone through this process and then it write out the statement we will fill in the blank with your top idea which in this case was hire a new children's ministry director and then you pick a date 90 days from today so today's january 18th so we're just going to go ahead and say 30 60 90 so by april 18th 2021 okay here's the thing listen i don't care who's in the room it could be your board of elders could be your committee of deacons it could be your ministry leaders uh you know your worship director your your small groups or your your christian education director uh whatever whomever is around the table by writing down this statement what you all are saying is that for the next three months our top priority as a church is we are going to hire the best children's ministry director we can get our hands on and we're gonna do it in the next 90 days and so hey uh worship team okay uh you nee you you i i want you to start finding ways to provide support to our children's ministry so we can make sure that their space is ready that the audio video lighting is ready so when we hire that that new children's ministry director their their rooms are ready to go okay that is going to be your focus for the next 90 days in addition to creating uh worship experiences that that the whole family can love you're going to provide support to our children's ministry for the next 90 days to get them ready okay hey social media director guess what you're going to announce in in conjunction with the people around this room you're going to announce hey church guess what we have great news big announcement you don't want to miss this we've decided as a church that we are going to uh find and and and and hire the best kids ministry director we can get our hands on we promise to keep you posted stay tuned right here on our instagram uh and and youtube and facebook and clubhouse and whatever um but that's your job for the next 90 days is to to keep this goal in front of our church on social media okay hey pastor you know every sermon every other sermon you need to drop at least one sentence to keep this vision in front of the church for the next 90 days when when you say we will hire a new children's ministry director in the next 90 days you're saying that the number one thing that we're going to focus on is this this is what's most important to our church okay and and so um hey we'll we'll go over the the rest of your 90-day planner and how i like to use it over the next few days but i just want to remind you you can down this is a part of your subscription go to the church playbook academy right now download it download 50 copies and just practice with it have some fun with it the other thing that you will find is the one page planner and it's the exact same format but it's dedicated to you personally so it will help you set the right goals for your family your health your your friendships your finances your your job uh mental spiritual other all of that good stuff so um hey drop your questions comments and or concerns in the comments section i'm going to get off of this video right now because lord knows i've been on here long enough as it is but uh i did want to continue this little video series that we've been doing on how to use the 90 day win planner for your church and hey i'm excited for you guys and we'll see you soon god bless