This article is specifically tor college ministry or campus-based church leaders:
College ministry is a grind. Day in and day out your staff go on campus laboring to build God’s kingdom. They initiate with the lost, share the gospel, lead Bible studies, recruit to events, meet 1-1 with disciples, manage leadership roles, do their development, and more.
And that’s all the stuff they WANT to be doing. That doesn’t count the responsibilities they don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time on like putting out fires of complaining students and managing their dating drama. Often they can feel like they are struggling to keep their head above water.
With all of that going on, it’s easy for your staff to get distracted. They become reactive rather than proactive. These seasons make it easy for staff to lose focus on doing what matters most.
You’ve sensed the tiredness and frustration of your staff. And you can feel it when they start to drag.
So, what can you do about it?
A Rhythm of Creating Clarity
You, as the team leader, have a chance to limit those struggles and inefficiencies by creating clarity and alignment towards some focused goals. Most campus leaders set goals at the beginning of every semester. But a semester is too long to stay energized. You need to break down those goals into monthly, bite-sized portions. This makes them more actionable and helps your staff focus on shorter seasons of time.
That’s where the Monthly Alignment Meeting comes into play (this idea is adapted from Patrick Lencioni’s Monthly Strategic idea). At every Monthly Alignment Meeting you are going to help your staff focus on a couple of monthly wins that will move the ball down the field towards your semester goals.
Each month of the college ministry calendar is different. Just like a farmer cultivates, plants, and harvests at different times of the year, the goal of the Monthly Alignment is to point your staff towards what matters most for that season of ministry.
Monthly Alignment Meeting
What makes the Monthly Alignment different from your Weekly meetings will be that you have more time to build conviction, provide resources, work on skills, and set wins for the coming month. The wins set at this meeting will help guide your staff meetings for the following month.
Here is a sample outline of how I like to plan Monthly Alignment Meetings:
1. Devotional & Prayer
The first 20-30 minutes of each Alignment meeting we’d spend getting into the Scriptures. Usually, I would have some passage that would relate to what we were about to discuss. I wanted God’s Word to guide our thinking and discussion. I wanted to remind our team our goal was to live out Biblical principles and not just our own ideas or opinions.
This isn’t a formality. Pick passages and stories in the Bible that will inspire your staff, encourage them, and drive them towards greater dependence on the Lord.
Most of the time I would lead this section because I had a clear idea of the main Biblical idea I wanted to get across. You can also delegate this to one of your staff to lead.
2. Review Goals
In any meeting that looks forward, I find it is helpful to remind ourselves of the past. I always printed out our teams’ goals for the semester and spent a few minutes updating them on where we stood.
Your staff get discouraged easily. This is often a good reminder that God is at work! More is happening across the entire team than in any individual’s ministry.
Also, if it was obvious we were falling short in any semester goal it would help bring that to mind before planning the next month.
3. Seasonal Training
This section is the bulk of the meeting. Each month you must decide the focus. I would try to brainstorm what the biggest objective was for the month ahead. For us, a typical flow of a year looked something like this when it came to objectives:
- September — cultivating relationships and kicking off small groups.
- October — almost always evangelistic.
- November — an emphasis on recruiting to a winter conference or following up new believers.
- December – support raising, helping students grow over break
- January – plugging existing students back into the movement and sowing new relationships
- February – evangelism and recruiting to the summer project
- March – establishing leaders and inviting to leadership training
- April – building into next year’s future leaders
Once you identify the major objectives in the upcoming month, you can start planning the content that will help you hit that objective. I’d ask myself a few questions like,
- What are the opportunities we have coming up we can capitalize on?
- What are the obstacles or challenges that will keep my staff from being successful?
- Who are staff or student leaders that are skilled in this area?
I’d also brainstorm through 5 categories that would form the content of the development:
- Scripture – what passages will help reinforce this idea?
- Articles – are there resources written that will help us process what to do?
- Tools – are there illustrations or 1-1s my staff can use in this upcoming season?
- Skills – what will my staff need to be successful? How can we practice these skills together?
- Testimonies – can a staff or student leader share stories that will help or inspire us?
If it was time to prioritize evangelism, I wanted to practice sharing the gospel to sharpen that skill. During recruiting season, we’d read and practice having conversations explaining the benefits of whatever we were inviting students to. Sometimes 1 of these categories is enough to get the point across and get your staff ready. Other months I’d pull a resource from 3 or 4 of categories to bolster their training. I wanted my staff to walk away feeling inspired and equipped to initiate in the month ahead.
4. Troubleshoot & Brainstorm
Inevitably there will be issues that you need to troubleshoot in your movement. Often times it’s too much to discuss at a weekly staff meeting. The Monthly Alignment meeting is perfect to take a few extra moments to brainstorm and discuss issues.
I’ve used these times to discuss how to grow our Bible studies, brainstorm evangelistic strategies/tools, or new events we could plan to help recruit to upcoming conferences. Those are just a few examples.
A key to this one is to prepare your staff for the discussion. Give them a heads up this is on the agenda and have them come prepared to give some answers. If you just show up and ask people to contribute you won’t get their best thoughts and discussion can be slow. A few days before the meeting I’ll send out the topic with some questions and tell my staff to come ready to share answers.
5. Calendar of Events
I always tried to have a calendar of events either printed in the packet or on the wall in our staff meeting room. Inevitably a staff would come up with an idea. I always wanted our ministry to be flexible and mobile enough to pull off some events with short notice. We’d add these to the calendar and review the events coming up that we had already planned.
Your staff can easily get caught up in the daily grind and forget the big picture of a semester. Reviewing the calendar and getting everyone on the same page heading into each month helps create clarity and alignment.
6. Wins for the month
The last page of my Monthly Alignment Meeting packets always had blanks for the wins of the month. Our staff would take time to write out their 3 Big Wins for that coming month. Sometimes I would give them direction and other times they would come up with them themselves. We’d share our wins and pray for them.
You want them to be actionable. So instead of letting your staff say, “Lead 5 students to Christ” or “Get 10 students signed up for the conference” have them say, “Have 25 evangelistic conversations” and “invite 50 students face-to-face to winter conference.”
If you’ve done a good job with your meeting, it will be very easy for your staff to get on board with the monthly wins. They’ve seen the need, been convicted from Scripture, and they’ve received specific training. They’re ready for the month ahead!
7. Prayer
Once you’ve come up with the wins, spend time praying together. You want to end the meeting looking to the Lord to provide for the month ahead. Give these plans to the Lord and ask for His favor.
It should feel exciting! It’s inspiring! Your staff will leave with clarity about what is coming up next. Amidst the grind and daily pressures, a Monthly Alignment Meeting helps your staff take a step back and remember what matters most. They will head into that next month with a refocused attitude to do the things to build the kingdom. They will do it expecting God to do big things.
A few other tips:
- These meetings should typically last about 3 hours. We’d hold them 9-12 on a Friday when most of the week’s responsibilities were complete. It helped our team focus more.
- Print out a paper packet. This helps focus the staff. It removes the need for devices and also gives them something tangible to take with them that reminds them of your goals. It also communicates that this is well thought out and prepared. This isn’t a meeting you are winging. I’ve found it communicates more seriousness, in a good way.
- Bring food to start the meeting. It helps with energy. Often times I would ask my staff what type of coffee drink they’d want and bring it to the meeting.
- Delegate some training. These meetings are also great development opportunities for your staff. If you plan ahead enough and give them enough time to prepare, let your staff lead some of the trainings and conviction builders. Sometimes I’d have a staff member who was particularly good in a specific area and their expertise benefitted the rest of the staff.
- Turn their “Wins” into a scoreboard. I did this a couple of different ways. Sometimes I’d tell them to rip out their “Wins” page and put it up near their desk. Other times we’d write them all down on the whiteboard to keep in front of us. The scoreboard helps with alignment and clarity.
