I made this a few days ago for the Missional Team Leaders Conference I was just at. I hope you appreciate it. 

My last post reminded me of the chapter in Scott Belsky’s book Making Ideas Happen on Prioritization. Scott answers the question, “How can you maintain long-term objectives rather than suffer at the mercy of urgent tasks? It is call prioritization.”

Here’s some tips to consider that are incredibly applicable to college ministry…especially in the operations context that I live in.

Keep two lists: I wrote about this a while back here. Two lists, one for urgent items and another for important ones. Do not let the urgent items compete against the important ones on the same list….the urgent will always win.

Make a daily “focus area.” Somehow designate up to five tasks in your to-do list that correspond to a priority project. Regardless of whatever crops up that day, the focus area must be cleared before bed.

Don’t dwell. Scott says that wen urgent matter arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. Do not dwell on possible negative outcomes. Break urgent items down into action steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy to the important as soon as the action steps are completes.

Don’t hoard urgent items. Even if you delegate well you may find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. The project your working on is important to you and you want to solve things yourself. “When you are in a position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items.” Scott says. The cost of not doing this is that our energy gets shifted away from the long term goals.

Create windows of nonstimulation. Window of time dedicated to uninterrupted project focus. Preserve blocks of time during your days as precious opportunities to make progress on important items with little risk of urgent matters popping up.

All of this requires discipline. Which I’m still working on.

Is the obstacle you’re facing actually an opportunity?

If you’re like me then as a college minister the words “commuter campus” probably suck the life out of you. Major hurdles of student availability and lack of relationship amongst the student body seem like insurmountable barriers to building movements.

Portland State University (our major hub of ministry) has, in the neighborhood of 20,000 students that commute to the downtown campus everyday. Students ride bikes, light rail, drive and bus to get to campus. Students from every corner of the metro area descend on campus to get learned.

Having a highly commuter campus is an obstacle to ministry right? But wait, what if that perceived obstacle is actually critical to seeing the city of Portland transformed?! What if much like a heart pumping life into the far reaches of the body, the lives that are transformed in the hub of activity at PSU are sent all over the city to influence families, churches, neighborhoods for the kingdom! I’m am convinced that seeing God transform the campus of Portland State University is going to be a critical step in seeing the city of Portland transformed.

Yes, the realities of a commuter campus are hard to deal with sometimes, but for the first time today I saw the barrier of a commuter campus more as an opportunity to see God at work all over the city.

What about you, what barrier is actually an opportunity in your life and ministry?

Is any portion of your ministry effort devoted to justice ministry in your context? Here in Portland we wrestle with what our campus ministry’s contribution should be in this area.

Do you seek to balance proclamation with demonstration of the Gospel at all where you are?

If so how, and what are the principles that guide you?

This is isn’t a right or wrong editorial on the topic…for now . I just want to hear others thoughts on this. What have you done as part of your ministry, what’s worked and what’s been hard?

Full Disclosure: We’re committed to having a sliver of our ministry being a blessing to the city we live in. We partner with Portland Rescue Mission by taking involved students and their friends to serve the city’s homeless once a month.

Photo courtesy of tonythemisfit

Do you need innovation? Do you need to make some space for your team to dream? Try a Fed-Ex day!

The only rule of Fed-Ex day is that you have to deliver over night on a new ministry tool, idea, solved problem or anything else remotely tied to our organization. We just wrapped up the presentations of the Portland Metro staff team Fed Ex day. Here are the idea that were presented!

• A new evangelistic tool that starts with the common Portland belief about man being inherently good.
• A realistic look at the possibility of a Portlandia Summer Project.
• A better way of managing our volunteers.
• New ways to integrate International students into our day to day ministry
• Tweaking our Regional Stint/Intern kickoff weekend to launch them into support raising better.
• Launching a Portland spring break trip in conjuction with GAiN. (This will probably happen as a result of this time!)

The brain power and creativity on display amongst our staff team was awesome. It was fun to dream and allow for those dreams to be worked on. Plus the presentations were fun (think crazy fire transitions between Keynote slides) and developmental for our staff.

Do you do anything like this on your team?