Project Management for Children’s Pastors
Scope – Keeping Your Focus
Hitting the Target Goal
Every Children’s Pastor should know the basics of project management. Project management is a system to handle the many facets of a project including scope, time, resources, and cost. Some major projects a children’s pastor might have throughout the year that project management skills might help with are Vacation Bible School, benevolence projects, missions projects, Christmas program, fun and evangelistic events, and other major projects.
Unfortunately most Children’s Pastors try to manage these major projects with to do lists and time management systems meant for every day occurrences. As essential as project management is, most children’s pastors have never been trained in it and have no clue what to do.
In the next couple of weeks, I’ll post about some of the essentials in project management and how you can use them in managing your children’s ministry events. Today I’ll cover scope.
Scope is a term used by project management to define what a project’s objective is. Basically you’re are stating your vision for the project. I’ll give you an example.
What is the main goal or objective for Vacation Bible School. There may be more than one. Is it to excite children in your church about God? Is the main goal to see children saved? Is discipleship and missions a big part of your VBS? Is your main goal to get children to attend your church?
All of these goals are good, but you need to focus on one of these as a primary goal. If you try to focus on all of these things, the result will be confusing and haphazard. Once you know your main goal, it will influence everything else about how you manage your project.
For instance, if your main goal is to see children saved at your VBS, you’ll want to pick a curriculum that is strong in emphasizing that. You probably won’t want to emphasis mission giving as much. You’ll want to advertize outside of the church, and you’ll want to encourage children to bring their unsaved friends.
If discipleship with a missions emphasis is your main goal, you’ll advertise mainly inside the church. You’ll want to choose a curriculum that emphasizes discipleship and missions. You might want to encourage children to save or do fundraisers for the offerings taken. That emphasis will affect every choice you make.
If your goal is to increase your church attendance, you might want to reach out to the entire family, maybe have a class or fellowship group for parents while their children are in VBS. Follow-up will be one of your most important tools for this goal. And you’ll want to make sure every parent receives information about what happens normally in the children’s ministry and other ministries in the church.
Every children’s ministry event you have should start with Scope. Defining vision and objectives will help you focus your project in a way to make it more effective. If you have too many targets to aim at, you probably won’t hit any of them. Scope, just like the scope on a camera or a rifle, helps you keep your focus and hit the target you’re aiming at.