Finding and Using Admin Help

Let’s face it, Youth Pastors are good at many things, but admin is not something many of us are strong at. To test this theory out, I want you to take a piece of paper and on the left side write all the things you love about youth ministry.  Then, on the right side, write down all the things you don’t enjoy so much about youth ministry.  Where did administration fall?  Unless you are a complete Type A personality, I bet 90% of you who honestly did this would put administration on the right side.  If you did, the good news is that is ok!  After all, the reasons why you got into youth ministry were not for fliers, letters and prep work you had to do.  It was because you desired to build relationships with students so that Christ can make an eternal impact on their life.  Therefore, since so much of our time can be taken up with making reservations, putting together fliers and meetings, it is important that we have some administration help.

Who?

Although I am sure a majority of us would love to have some admin help, the big questions are not why but whom and where.  Who can help you and where do you find this help?  After all, working at small to medium size churches, it is not easy to find administrative help considering that there are always budget constraints to worry about.  The pool of talent are not readily available in which you can just pick up the phone and hire someone fully trained and qualified in administration to help you immediately.

Through the years, I have discovered that just like volunteer leaders, finding admin help often has to come from within.  Whether you are at a small church or large one, I believe there are people who can help and want to help right around you.  So, where can you find administrative help?

You can find administrative help from 3 groups:

• Parents. Sue was just a regular parent who had a gift and wanted to help me out.  There are parents in your church or ministry that would love to help you out as well.  In some circumstances, these parents may come up to you and offer to help, but that is not always the case.  One way to find out who might be able to help you out is to go to the other members of your Church Staff and inquire.  In my experience, my Senior Pastor and Church administrator have both recommended certain parents to me who they thought would be good to help out.  This could be a good starting point if you are drawing a blank on parents.   Remember, most parents want to help in some way, they just do not know how or what your need.  This is just another way they can help.  All you have to do is ask.

• Volunteer Leaders.  Most times, volunteer leaders help you minister to students by building relationships with students and helping them grow in their relationship with the Lord.  But, there are some leaders out there who have administrative gifts and would love to help in this area.  I had one female leader who really wanted to help out beyond just building relationships with students.  She had some good administrative and planning gifts and knew that I was overwhelmed in those areas.  So, as I needed help, I would give her a call and had her help me organize and plan some events coming up.  It was very helpful for me because I am not very detail oriented so having her plan with me helped me not miss some minuet details of the events.  Plus, it gave her more ownership of what was going on.  It was a win-win for both of us.

• Adults in your Church. Even though Parents will probably be your primary group to draw from, there are other adults in your church who are looking for areas to serve and would love to help.  Just because they do not have children in the youth program anymore does not mean they don’t have a heart for what you are doing and the youth.  I have plenty of adults at my church who still desire to help with youth activities who no longer have students in our program.  But, just like anyone else, they cannot help unless you make it clear what your needs are.  Get the needs out and let them decide if they can help or not.

This is a good starting point for you to begin to look for someone to help you administratively.  But, be thorough in your search.  As with volunteer leaders, do not limit who can help based on what they look like and who you think they are.  Do some interviews and get to know them before you commit to having them work with you.  One of the reasons Sue has been beneficial in helping me was because I knew I could work with her and there was a comfort level there.  Make sure you are comfortable with this person before you bring them on.

Areas they can help

I believe that having admin help is vital to doing successful, effective ministry because it allows you to focus on where you are gifted.  You can hand off many of the things you are not gifted at.   There are many things people can do for you administratively.  They can:

• Organize a database of students so that you can keep track of who is coming and get information to new students.  This is extremely important.  Tracking the number of students as important as tracking who is coming and how often they are coming.  If you notice that a particular student is not around for a period of time, you can follow up with them and see what is up.  Also, having a database is great for sending out mailings to students who need to hear about upcoming events or opportunities.
• Send birthday cards to students.  Every time a student got a birthday card from me it was because Sue handed me a card and said, “Sign this”.  She was great about keeping birthdays up-to-date and making sure every student that we had a birth date for got a card.  Now, a word of caution, make sure you have a the right date.  I have sent one or more to students for the wrong birthday.  Just make sure you have the right date.
• Make fliers or promote upcoming events on Facebook to the students.  I am definitely not a very creative person.  Therefore, making fliers to promote events has always been difficult to me.  But students need to know of upcoming events so fliers are a must.  Creating Facebook events has really been a great way to promote an event as well.  In fact, it has become a primary way we communicate to our youth now.  But even thought I love technology and feel like I’m pretty adapt at navigating and doing things on the web, creating Facebook events can sometime be very draining to me.  I don’t mind doing them, but this is a place an administrator who is Facebook savvy can help.
• Book and do all the behind the scenes work on securing a place for a Youth Retreat.  Of all the things Sue did for me, this is the area that was probably the most helpful for me.  In regards to booking retreat centers and mission trips, she took care of all of that and did all the behind the scenes work.  Now, I definitely had input and was aware of what was going on as I had the final say in decisions that needed to be made and made phone calls or sent emails if needed.  But unless something came up, Sue took care of all the phone calls and worked out many of the details.

These are just some of the areas in which having administrative help has been a blessing to me.  My encouragement is for you to take full advantage of the fact that even though database organizing doesn’t sound like fun to you, it may get someone else who is gifted organizationally all charged up.

Final Thoughts

As a Youth Pastor, we are gifted in many ways.  Oftentimes, administration skills are not one of them.  If you can find someone to help, I want to strongly encourage you to bring them on.  But I want to give out two cautions.  First, just because you might be able to bring in someone to give you administration help does not mean you give up full administration ownership.  There are things you still need to do like communicate to parents, leaders and students regularly through email updates or simple letters.  Even though many Youth Pastors are not “gifted” in a lot of admin areas, you cannot pass every detail off to your administration help.

Secondly, even though I had Sue helping me out, it took a while for me to hand over everything to her because I didn’t want to overload her and I didn’t know exactly what to give her and what I should be doing on my own.  After all, I was getting paid to do this.  But, rid yourself of that burden.  People who are helping you are helping you for a reason – because they want to. You are not burdening them by giving them work to do.  Allow them to use their gift mix for the glory of God.

TAKE A MINUTE and…

1. Think through your parents or members at your church or ministry.  Is there someone who has administration gifts that can help you?  Try to identify a 3-5 adults.
2. Make a list of administrative needs you have and make up a job description for this future volunteer to have so that they know exactly what is going on.
3. Pray that God orchestrates the right person to help you out and then begin to interview potential candidates.