Do you ever feel like spring is a tougher ministry semester to plan for than the fall?
Fall is simple and straightforward. You build relationships. Meet new people. Start studies. Help your leaders plug back in and start laboring. It’s the same year after year.
Spring is more ambiguous. Are you sowing? Well, yes. Are you kicking off studies? That’s a priority. Are you helping leaders? You better be!
But it just feels different. What is it about spring that makes it feel different?
You have more people!
The spring seems harder because you feel the tension of how to spend your time with more people.
If you’ve labored hard in the fall odds are you have more people involved in your ministry. It’s more complicated. And as much as many want to create systems that automatically help students grow, ministry is about people. People are unique and have individual needs.
So, how do you maximize your time this spring semester and spend it helping the right people in your ministry grow?
You need to dust off an old resource you probably haven’t looked at in a few months.
Spring is the perfect time to get out your Ministry Cake!
Remember that thing? The Cake is essential in the spring because it will show you exactly where your students stand and what to do to help them grow in this next season.
The Ministry Cake
For those unfamiliar, the Ministry Cake is a visual tool that organizes students in your ministry by their stage of spiritual maturity. In doing so, it helps disciple-makers determine and prioritize the next steps they need to take with their disciples.
Wait, this sounds very structured and systematized…shouldn’t I just love people well?
Proverbs 27:23 says,
“Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds.”
Proverbs 27:23
The Cake is about knowing and caring for the people involved in your ministry.
If you are sowing broadly and meeting with lots of students, it’s impossible for you remember exactly what each student needs next. Using the Ministry Cake is an extremely loving way to care for your students’ spiritual needs. It helps show you exactly what challenges each individual student needs to take the progress towards becoming a disciplemaker.
Planning is caring. There is nothing more loving you could do for your disciples than to individually help figure out what would help them grow the most.
How does the Ministry Cake work?
The Cake helps you categorize students by stage of spiritual maturity—either lost, shared with, follow up, disciple, or disciplemaker.
Spiritual growth is a process. You can’t treat every student the same. Otherwise, you’ll either over challenge students who aren’t ready or you’ll under challenge and lose students who are ready to step up.
There are a variety of ways to structure a cake but this is the one I’ve found most helpful:
- Lost – these are relationships you’ve built with students who don’t know the Gospel. The next step with them is to share with them. Try to discern who is the most spiritually interested and who God might be drawing to Himself.
- Shared with – once you share the Gospel with someone they enter into this layer. Here you can discern holdups to the gospel. Engel’s scale reminds us that most people hear the gospel multiple times before trusting Christ. This layer ensures you aren’t a one-and-done evangelist but can actually reason and revisit the Gospel with students the way Paul often did with people in Acts.
- Follow up – once someone trusts in Christ they enter this layer of the cake. They shouldn’t stay here long! You need to prioritize these people by meeting with them and following up their newfound faith. Your goal here is to help root them in the Gospel and the promises God gives a new believer. You want to get them started on their process of becoming a disciple.
- Disciple – this layer of the cake is where you establish. Just like all newborn babies need the same things (milk, touch, clean diapers, sleep), all new believers essentially need the same things (Word, Prayer, Fellowship, Evangelism, Gospel). Don’t reinvent the Wheel J here. Take these disciples through basic establishing topics early on and then start prepping clear objective-based discipleship lessons for them to help them know and live God’s Word. Throughout this process you are taking them with you as you do ministry down the layers of your cake.
- Disciplemaker – Jesus says these people are few (Matthew 9:36). One a disciple proves themselves reliable (2 Tim 2:2) and has passed along the Gospel to others, he/she enters this stage of spiritual maturity. Now they can multiply and reproduce the life of Christ into another. They join you in building and growing their own ministry cake to see the process repeated.
Why the Cake is easy to neglect
If the Cake is so helpful why don’t you use it?
If you’re like me, you keep great track of your ministry, contacts, and students in the fall. You’re on top of it.
But something happens. Towards the end of the semester the ministry is smooth sailing and you don’t feel like you need it anymore. You get out of the habit.
When you come back from winter break you think you’re going to slip right back into that rhythm. But things have changed. That disorganization is what can make spring more challenging for staff.
Don’t let this be you this spring.
Spring is a great time to use your cake consistently because it’s the time when you have the most students involved and growing.
Neglecting this ministry tool is killing your effectiveness. You’re missing out on opportunities to share the gospel with students you got to know in the fall. Also, students who might be close to becoming disciples are slipping through the cracks because you aren’t remembering to engage with them on a regular basis.
This is your week to fix it!
Use your Ministry Cake and keep all of this in front of you.
PUT IT INTO PRACTICE – How to keep your Cake in front of you
Most staff who use the Cake know it is extremely valuable. It’s simply a matter of revisiting it on a regular basis.
That needs to be your goal this spring. It can’t be something you fill out once at the beginning and never look at it again the rest of the semester.
Keep it in front of you!
The way I’ve learned to do that is to put it on my Sunday Planning Checklist. Every Sunday I sit down to plan I’ve added an item on there to remind me to look at my Cake. That’s how I determine who to try to get time with that week. It keeps “the flock” in front of me. I’ll add to it or move people around as needed.
I highly recommend printing out your cake. Keep it with you or in your Bible. Make it part of your prayer time in the morning.
Download your copy and print it here.
The last few semesters in our disciplemaking groups (DMG) we’ve printed out larger 10×14 Cakes and included them with their content. Each week at DMG the students would pull out their Cakes. We’d discuss students’ next steps and pray for them. It was incredible!
If you do decide to keep a digital version on your computer, create a hyperlink on your Sunday Planning Checklist that you can click and automatically open the file. That way you don’t overlook it because you don’t want to take the time to find and open the file.
Summary:
Spring is an important time to evaluate and know the condition of the “flock” of students God has given you in your ministry.
Use the Ministry Cake consistently each week to maximize your time and best help students in your ministry take their next steps toward spiritual maturity.
Discuss:
- What makes keeping up with your Cake consistently difficult?
- How can you start to keep it in front of you regularly?
- How can using your Cake each week help you make the most of this spring?
- Who is one student on your Cake you need to pray for and try to meet with this week?
- Meet with your leader or staff and go through your Ministry Cake.
