On Youth Sunday, our senior preachers expressed deep thanks for the love and faith shared with them in our church. We saw young people take important roles in our worship that Sunday and so often give thanks for the many children and youth in our church. This is a happy, noisy church, with a flourishing community of children and youth and dedicated clergy, staff, and programs that support them. At the same time, leaders at St. John’s often ask good questions about our level of staffing for those ministries, about the breadth and depth of our program, and about volunteer commitment to sustaining them. Could we do more? Should we do less with more intention? Those questions have recently coalesced into a Vestry decision to find a way to step back from the busy ministry of our church and hear from God and each other about the state of our formation ministries. We sense we need to dream together.
To do that, St. John’s recently agreed to a 12-month contract with Ministry Architects, a leading consulting service for churches seeking to deepen their ministry with children and youth. Ministry Architects staff will be at St. John’s June 2-4 for our initial three-day assessment. Their lead consultant is Andy Fox, who is the Director of Youth & Community Formation at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Greenville. Andy and associates will spend the first half of the visit listening to as many stakeholders as they can. From youth to their parents, staff to volunteers, they will listen and learn. They will then compose a multi-faceted report that reflects the consensus of where the ministry is today and where the church believes God is leading. They compare specific key metrics to national norms and name the assets and challenges currently present. They end the report with a detailed list of recommendations and provide a strategic timeline, outlining how to move forward. Ministry Architects will then be with us for other stages of the process, as we implement our shared findings.
We’ll have a more detailed schedule soon but the days of our assessment go like this:
Day one: Ministry Architects meet with clergy, staff, and hold three to five, hour-long, listening sessions in the afternoon/evening for key stakeholders, youth, parents, etc
Day two: Ministry Architects holds another 3-5 listening sessions in the morning, then the consultants spend the afternoon and evening writing the assessment.
Day three: Consultants finalize the assessment report, meet with clergy, and typically hold an evening presentation of the assessment report.
Vestry member Ashley Jaillette and Fr. Beasley are the initial leaders for this effort, though they will draw others into the work soon. We need you to save those dates, June 2-4, and make being part of these sessions a high priority. We are investing a lot of time and a fair amount of money in this self-study; the investment of your time and participation will make it worth it. The results will give our church a vision for growing young disciples of Christ, a gift our church already has and can grow further into by God’s grace and guidance. The answer to the question in this article’s title is that we are doing well in children’s and youth ministries but always desire to seek God’s will, for our whole church and certainly for these vital ministries.
Learn more about other important updates in the latest church newsletter: The Epistle – June 12, 2025