If you have any volunteers in your youth ministry you should highly consider doing regular staff meetings. I currently have a staff meeting once a month. When I say, “staff” I’m speaking of student and adult helpers in my youth ministry.

Staff meetings are important because they allow a platform in a group setting to voice and gage how we are doing as a team at “ministering to youth.”And because I just had a staff meeting this past Sunday I wanted to provide a few helpful tips:

1. Make sure that you have an agenda. Yes I know that this is youth ministry and you have probably experienced staff meetings where people show up and the leader says something like, “so I suppose we should talk about something.” Having an agenda is great because it keeps the meeting from wandering off into talking about how many people were shot from trying to buy a PS3. Ok, you may still talk about PS3 slaughterings, however, at least you can come back to the subject at hand and then continue. Make sure your agenda has aspects of the youth ministry that need to be talked about.

2. Make sure that you give an action step to what was dicussed. Not every item is going to need follow-up, but you would be surprised when actually thinking about what was discussed something can be done to help improve it. Be careful because your volunteers will expect you as the leader to follow-up with everything. Many times this is the case and you probably should be the person doing these things, but you can get your volunteers involved in helping you accomplish this. Don’t ever get trapped into thinking that you are the one that has to do it all. That mentality will lead you to not using your volunteers to their full potential.

3. Make sure someone is writing down what is said. Having a record of what is said is very important. If you are like myself, my brain is very full and can’t remember all that was communicated at staff meeting time. Also another helpful tip: Have someone else take notes. Extra tip: Someone with great hand writing, or better yet, someone who can just type it up as you discuss.

4. Decide on how long you want your meetings to be. It’s nice to know a timeframe when you are meeting. Don’t let your staff guess how long it’s going to take for the staff meeting to be done. Make sure that you allow adequate time to cover what you need to. If you find that your feeling rushed to talk about everything in your staff meeting, try extending the time an extra half hour. If you find that your mostly talking about other stuff than what’s happening in youth ministry, then shorten your meetings up.

Have a happy next staff meeting!