Create A Parent Advisory Team?
21 December 2009
9 Comments
I have decided to create what I’m calling a parent advisory team. Other names might be “board” “committee” or something similar to that. The reason that I’m doing this is to give my youth ministry some parental guidance and for parents to begin to take some responsibility in the youth ministry.
Here are some pros and cons to consider:
Pros:
- Gets some parents involved – Many youth leaders or youth workers need more parents involved and one way to get this started is by allowing some parents to meet monthly to help you plan and coordinate activities. It also opens up future parent involvement because the parents that currently help on the advisory team will understand that it takes more parents to be involved to get your youth ministry vision and goals to fly.
- Gets you great ideas – There is nothing like having some insight from other parents to see where they are coming from and also the ideas that they have in their brains. You may just be surprised at what they come up with.
- Covers your back – You know what is better than having your senior pastor backing you up? You guessed it: Parents! It’s great to have some parents that can defend you and your ideas because they have been working on and struggling with you in your efforts to tweak and carry out your vision in your youth ministry.
Cons:
- Other Agendas – Sometimes you will find people that only join things to push their agendas. What I mean is that you may have a parent come on board only to try and push you to do something that his or her son or daughter really wants to see happen in the youth ministry which leads to my next one.
- Too many ideas but no action – I share about ideas on this site but sometimes if you put together a committee or board you get a lot of ideas but narrowing down and deciding sometimes becomes a very tough thing to do. So don’t forget about your vision and mission and share it each meeting to help focus others ideas to reach your goals.
- Wrong Parents on your team – It just may happen that you get parents on the team that are just going the opposite way as you and that can really be hard to deal with so be choosy on who is on your team. Or you could just have parents that don’t want to do anything but sit and have you make every decision without much input. You do want parents that believe in the vision and goals of the youth ministry and you shouldn’t have much of this problem.
What are some other thoughts and ideas that you would like to share about creating a parent advisory team that you could enlighten everyone else with? Share some things that have been good and bad. Add some tips that you would like other youth leaders to know.
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We have essentially this, but it’s called a youth parent/worker planning team. While we are trying to move them into positions of leadership, currently, they are more about event planning. They make sure our events are offered at dates and times that don’t conflict with school events or other events. They also can put things on the calendar so if I need drivers, or food, or other things for a particular event, they can be there to support it and I can just refer back to the meeting minutes and remind them a week or so before the event that they had committed to drive or bring food or whatever.
Do you have any input as to how we can move them into more of a ministry team, rather than just a team of drivers and food bringers? Good post.
Jason – I think that you can have the advisory team and get together as a group once a month that will make it feel more like a team, but I think you can also develop a separate staff team that is involved on your youth nights. Is that what you mean?
I am moving towards establishing a similar group…my main thought is parent advocacy…4-6 parents who will have the inside track and who can advocate to other parents…my main motivation is to have parents reach parents, because I have been largely unsuccessful in reaching many of the families…would love to hear about any progress you are making…great idea…graceandpeace.
Jeff – thanks for sharing. I will try and update my process. My purpose is both to get more parents involved and to be able to provide a more well balanced youth ministry experience. It would be great to see more and more parents start getting involved in some way. Good luck to you!
Since we have about 60-some adult youth leaders, it’s impossible to get everyone together and think we’ll make any progress with decisions, so I have an “executive leadership team” that consists of about 7 leaders and myself who make the big decisions and give overall direction. I could share a lot about this group, but pertaining to this blog post, the cons are avoidable by only placing people on the team who do not have other agendas and are team players. We have other stipulations, too, but this team can be ESSENTIAL to a youth ministry if done right the first time (you don’t get two chances to form this team).
Thanks Tim for sharing this. Definitely need to limit and be selective of your team. I also think trying to have some parents on the team would be awesome because we need parents involved – it’s biblical and think we should not just outsource it to college students. Having a good balance is good though.
Yeah, sorry, didn’t clarify that every leader on the “executive team” is also a parent that serves as a youth leader. In fact, I don’t have any college-age leaders at all.
[...] parents to be involved with their student’s spiritual development. I just wrote about Creating A Parent Advisory Team which is one way to start getting parents involved. Rick simply said that you start with a couple [...]
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