Curating > Creating in Effective Ministry
Big Idea: Curating & Contextualizing can make you a better ministry leader than always creating from scratch.
There’s no question about it: in 2021, there are far more ministry resources available to church leaders than there have ever been before. However, in some circles, there’s a stigma when it comes to utilizing a lot of those resources...especially when it comes to what happens during a main service teaching time.
I’ve heard some even go as far as calling it plagiarism whether you are a senior pastor doing a North Point series or a student pastor using a curriculum like XP3. There’s a belief that these leaders are being lazy or deceiving their congregation. To be honest...I get it.
Because there are so many resources out there, it makes it easier to ‘mail it in’ than it’s probably ever been. However, I believe that in order for us to be as effective as we can be in our ministries, we have to learn to be great curators & contexualizers rather than creators.
Let me first clarify what I don’t mean.
I don’t mean that there’s no need to create. I just think, in most cases, your creative energy is better spent contextualizing resources that are already available so that they best fit your community & culture. I’m not saying just mindlessly steal stuff others have done or plug & play whatever you can find. It still takes a lot of creative initiative & time to contextualize something.
I’m also not trying to replace the work of the Holy Spirit when it comes to preparing content for our community.
But whether it’s weekly curriculum, strategy pieces, retreat ideas, games, small group leader job descriptions, parent resources...whatever it is, there’s a good chance someone has already made available something that is better than I could have created myself. So, the most effective thing I can do now becomes to discern what best fits our group & where the Spirit is leading us, find it, then spend my energy editing, tweaking & customizing it to fit my culture & context.
In the long run, this allows me to do only what I can do & invest more in my leaders, my students, my parents, building systems & refining strategy.
COLLABORATING NOT PLAGIARIZING
In my mind, curating & contextualizing resources for my faith community feels far more like collaborating than plagiarizing. Now that I work on this side of the Orange Students team, I know that it takes a team of 40+ contributors from diverse backgrounds around 500 hours to complete a 4-week series.
When I’d sift through & prepare to use an XP3 series, my focus was not on making my job easier, but collaborating with an amazing team with experiences & skills different than my own to create the best experience possible for my students, leaders & parents.
This also helped me make sure that what my faith community was getting wasn’t biased, colored or limited by my own experiences, understandings & giftedness. To me, this was never removing the Holy Spirit from Its role in my ministry, but rather giving It more tools to work with.
COLLABORATING MAKES ME BETTER AT CREATING
Even though I’d advocate that curating & contextualizing is a huge win, there will be circumstances when building something on your own might be necessary, whether it be a resource for parents, a series or something else. Doing this at strategic times can be a huge win. In my experience, the more you curate & contextualize, the better you actually get at creating because you’ve been introduced to new ideas, new structure, new design, new strategies, etc.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
I have a hesitancy to talk about things like ROI when it comes to church & ministry issues, but there’s something about ROI here that makes sense to me. When there is so much to do week in & week out as a ministry leader, we have to be intentional & strategic about where we’re spending our time.
If I’m honest, there have been too many weeks where I spent way too much time on something with a lesser return than the hard work of investing in leaders, duplicating myself, creating healthy culture, shoring up broken systems, etc.
That doesn’t mean that the message, the resource, the social media piece, the game, my teaching slides, etc aren’t important. But, did the additional 7 hours I may have put into doing those things myself have a greater impact long term vs what I could have used that time for? Even if that time was spent taking care of myself?
WHAT’S THE ROLE?
I guess maybe it comes down to what we feel like we’re trying to accomplish.
In some ways, that sort of begs the question of what the roles of pastors & ministry leaders are in 2021. While I won’t pretend to have the end-all, be-all answer for that question, here are a few observations:
your content doesn’t matter as much as your culture.
resources matter, but resources without relationships are spam.
the leaders you develop will have a bigger & more long-term Kingdom influence than what you create.
Are those 3 things always true? I’m not sure. I just think enough has changed about life & ministry that the more comfortable we get with collaborating with one another, the greater the impact our ministries will have & the healthier leaders we’ll become.
