Deja Vu

Today was mainly spent reviewing materials for the church. It never dawned on me that when I start working for a church I will have to get to know the people, the policies and start working at the same time. When I have done volunteer work for churches in the past I have had the opportunity to get to know people and policies gradually over time before jumping into whatever ministry I would help out with. But now as a pastor, or in this case a pastoral intern, I will need to hit the ground running so to speak. Fortunately I should be able to figure everything out over the next few weeks.

I also had the opportunity to talk with our youth pastor Lee about what I will be doing for him over the next six months. I am excited about working with the youth group to the extent that I am. Part of my job will be to contact the other youth leaders in the area and plan a large event that includes all of our youth groups. Lee is giving me free reign to decide the lesson, theme and structure of the event. It should be a great learning experience to do that amount of planning and organizing.

Later today I got an e-mail from our organizational coordinator. We are moving into a new building in September and she was asking a group of us to brainstorm some ideas for an ad campaign to promote the new build. Although I do not think I have any spectacular talents when it comes to marketing it was a great experience to design a possible poster for the fall. It was also cool to see what some of the others came up with and work off of each other’s ideas. I think I enjoy working as a team when it comes to projects like this. Here's what I came up with.
I also corresponded with Ed a little bit about the letter I wrote yesterday. He asked me to type up a letter that we can send out to the congregation announcing our upcoming service day and baptism event. Instead of holding our regular weekend worship gatherings, we are going to go out and serve the community through group projects. Some people will pick up trash, others will visit people in the nursing home, and others might just to and do random acts of kindness. Ed read over my letter and said he really liked it.

I think I am starting to realize that I am the kind of person that needs at least an amount of acknowledgement for the work I do. I want to know that what I do matters to people. When I am doing a job that seems to go unnoticed I have a tendency to get discouraged. So knowing that I require “props” for my work is important.