xphiles

Pastor Hack - Juggling Liturgies

"Pastor, can you explain to me the meaning of life?"

It's a joke one of our lay leaders has gotten in the habit of making.  As he is taking on an increasing role in leading our worship life, he is becoming more and more aware of how much "focus" is needed in the pre-service moments, AND of how likely it is that someone will, within 90 seconds of the start of a worship service, come up to a pastor/ leader and ask a question on par with "I need to know the meaning of life NOW." 
 

But it's a reality of ministry life.  People don't mean to be rude, but they try and engage about the meaning of life, a profoud pastoral care concern, or an important church decision right before worship, sometimes literally as I'm walking into the sanctuary, with my mic on!  And then you try and write yourself a note to follow up with them...  Where's the pen?  (Under your vestments, of course!)  Piece of paper, piece of paper...  Well, there's 3 of them stuck into each of the 2 worship books you're carrying, with announcements that need to be made, a prayer list, etc.  Can't keep track of them, never mind which one I can use as scrap paper...  Ugh.  Oh yeah, and the person who's supposed to help lead worship didn't show up, so do I have an extra copy of the prayers???

So any little advantage you can get in this situation, to help you serve your people in and outside of the worship service, can pay off big time.  Here's one little trick that takes a fair amount of time, but is easily worth it in my book: a weekend "worship book" with everything you need right in your hands.

Pastor Hacking - Keeping Track of Images & Illustration Ideas

Yeah, I'm a geek.

But ministry life requires managing so much information, in so many different modes, you just need to have some good tools to keep on top of things.  The right "geeky stuff" gives me freedom for the essentials of ministry: relationships with God and others.  I'm starting a new blog category, "Pastor Hacks," to share some of the stuff I've found to help make ministry more fruitful & balanced.  Disclaimer: these are "techniques," and as such are profoundly superficial, even if they may be quite helpful and useful.  Faithful ministry isn't about using the right tech or geeking out productively.  But as long as "productivity hacks" or "life hacks" are recognized as tools, not ultimate solutions, there's no reason to flee from them. 

First Pastor Hack is a techie one: a Mac Pastor Hack.  Lots of people have complained about Spotlight, a new feature with Mac OSX "Tiger," being an immature technology.  Sure.  But it's still an incredibly powerful search tool, especially when combined with tagging.  The Mac Finder allows you to add "spotlight comments" to files, tagging them so that they can be easily found with Spotlight's quick search.

Spotlight & tags are becoming huge parts of my sermon preparation.  One of our services, in addition to my twice-monthly confirmation class, make use of PowerPoint/ Keynote slides projected.  Now, I try to keep the slide stuff simple.  I shoot for "elegant," and with practice, I'll get there.  But uncluttered; not a lot of text, and a few, high-quality images.  See here or here for the idea.