Sabbatical Prep

Well when this posts I will have been on sabbatical for 4 days.

When you are the one that leads the student ministry there is a certain amount of prep work to have your ducks in a row before going on a sabbatical.  In my case there were three months worth of Student Church to assemble and schedule.  This took some extra work but after doing it I thought I might do this same approach to every quarter of the year so I can focus on other areas of student ministry and plan and put more effort into message prep.

Thankfully I have an awesome team of volunteers that lead our student ministry.  During my absence several will take turns bringing the message at Student Church.  We are also currently using LeaderTrek's Deep Discipleship curriculum.  This allowed me the ability to go in and edit and tweak to fit our Student worship time flow.  I set up a file box and put a folder in the box for each week's Student Church.  Each folder contains:
Message Outline
Student Handouts
First Crow - our pre game team meeting guide
Next Steps - student decision cards
POD Leader guides
POD student guides

In the dropbox I put folders that contain our powerpoint slides, video and music videos for our worship time.  This dropbox is accessible from the iMac in The Loft for our tech team.

The two keys that made it easier to plan this sabbatical were an awesome team of volunteers with some who have the gift of teaching and LeaderTrek's Deep Discipleship.  A sabbatical is a great time off to rest, refresh and renew and there is a lot of work that goes into the planning and a whole lot of photo copying.

Then as you leave your office for the sabbatical there is that little voice inside saying, "did you remember everything?"  I guess in 86 days I'll know the answer to that.