The greatest mistake I’ve made!
I don’t have enough time to list all the mistakes I have made, but the greatest gift you receive from making a mistake is to learn from it and don’t make the same mistake again. The greatest mistake I have made is trying to do it all myself. In the beginning, I was able to develop all the lessons, copy all the materials, buy all the supplies and keep up with all the day to day activities in the Children’s Ministry, but I could not continue to do everything and have the Children’s Ministry grow in excellence with the church. I stressed myself out by doing too much on my own. You must learn to delegate the things that can be done by others. To do this, you must learn to inspect what you expect. You cannot give someone a task and never follow up with them to see if it was finished and finished correctly. If you use volunteers, you will have to train them and then train them again. Once you spend the time training them, you can focus on other priorities. Today, I spend the majority of my time in leadership training, vision casting and recruiting. You can never start too early, so begin to build a team of volunteers to run the ministry.
Create systems and structures that are easy to follow. The more complex you make something the easier it is to get lost. Inspect the ministry weekly to fix problems and create an environment of excellence. If your leadership team never finds any problems then have someone else take a look. There are always areas of improvement. Two questions to ask. Is this area safe? Was everything done with excellence? A few times a year reevaluate your systems and structures. As you continue to grow, some of the ideas you had at 50 kids will not work at 100, 200, etc. Begin networking today with churches larger than yours and start to learn from them. You will make fewer mistakes and make a much larger impact.
The greatest quality you can have as a leader is to never stop learning.
