Last week I shared some thoughts about how I need to determine my focus as it’s been a bit off lately.  I want to spend a couple minutes looking at where I think worship leaders and musicians in the local church should be focused.  I’m hoping that in the next couple months (no, more like weeks and days – don’t want to put it off!) I can shift my mind to being laser-focused on these areas.

• Extreme passion to see God magnified and to see His Word proclaimed.  All other focus areas flow from this.  If God is magnified and His Word proclaimed in every area of life, all areas will be blessed.
• Being the best husband I can be for my wife and the best father I can be for my daughter (and future children.)  If everything else in life is going smoothly but my family life is suffering, my focus is incorrect.
• Being a servant leader in music ministry and as a worship leader.  Instead of letting my experience and expertise define my leadership, I want to focus on letting humility and service combined with my experience and expertise define my leadership.
• Amazing support for my pastor and other church staff and leadership.

What about you?  Have you needed to redetermine focus in your ministry?  Do any of these things resound with you or are there more you could add to the list?

I just wrote about the fact that my life has become fractured and my focus was every which way but where it should be.  Today I want to spend some time on what I need to do to determine where my focus actually lies.  Next I’ll look at where it should be.  Hopefully this process can help many of you who wear many hats in ministry as well.  Here are some steps I’m going to take to determine what my current focus is (particularly in music/worship ministry):

• What do I spend my time thinking about?  Do I think about how to encourage, teach, and build up – or do I think about where I’d like things to be in the future and how they’re not there yet?  Vision can’t happen without small steps in the meantime.
• What do I spend my time thinking about?  I know that’s the same question – but this time I ask it wondering what I spend time thinking about when there’s “nothing else” to think about.  Those places can be dangerous and I need to evaluate them regularly.
• Do things I need to do well become an afterthought for something else?  For instance, does spending quality time planning and scheduling become an afterthought for being able to arrange some music or chart out a song?  What’s more important?

There are many more questions I’ll be asking myself to determine where my proper focus should be.  How do you step back and evaluate what needs to be changed in how you approach ministry?

My life has been fragmented a lot for a quite some time and I’m not sure what to do about it.  I work out of town at a full time job that requires my brain to connect and interact with hundreds of customers I don’t know.  I spend time doing volunteer work for my amazing congregation.  I try to lead the music ministry team (need to do much better there), plus try to advance our efforts in marketing, web design, social media, and more for the church.  I spend time trying to stay connected with the hundreds of people I know on Facebook.  I spend time trying to connect with the hundreds of people I wish I actually knew on Twitter.  I watch my favorite television shows.  I spend time encouraging and nurturing my relationship with my beautiful wife and amazing daughter.  Sometimes I spend time in God’s Word.  Whoops.

Something’s wrong with the paragraph above and it’s summed up in a word:  focus.  The focus of my life is backwards and it has been for some time now.  Many of the things listed above should be reversed.  Some could possibly be cut out completely.  The most important thing, for me, has ended up last in the list.

So where do I go from here?  It seems like I’ve asked myself that question many times before facing the exact same issue.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Determine what my current focus actually is, then determine what it should be.  I can determine my current focus by seeing where my time is spent and what my mind is thinking about.  I can determine what it should be by first understanding who I want to be.

Over the next few blog posts I’d like to spend some time on proper focus.  Will you join me in the discussion and perhaps evaluate your own life as well?

As I sit and listen to my wife and daughter enjoying bath time and think about the fact that tomorrow we celebrate our 7 year anniversary, I can’t help but wonder about why I didn’t spend today in better preparation for tomorrow. Some questions linger in my mind:

• Why do I let feeling tired become an excuse for inexcusable behavior?
• Why do I not stop and make sure to look over the music and the service order more often during the week, including today?
• What is my mental block that keeps me from getting as excited as I should for tomorrow’s service?

I think I can sum up the answer to these questions in one word: focus.  My focus has been on myself lately, and that’s not good.  As I get back into blogging and back into seriously thinking about what it takes to be not only an effective worship leader in my congregation but also a husband, father, employee and friend I’m looking forward to spending some time thinking about where my focus currently is and where it should be.

Tomorrow I look forward to letting my one focus be magnifying God and His greatness without distraction.  What about you?  What distracts you and what steps do you take to regain proper focus?

After being a skeptic for a very long time, I finally decided to give Planning Center Online a go.  We were using 37 Signals’ writeboards for service planning, which worked for a time, but the fact that we had to make a new writeboard in a new place every week and keep track of a whole bunch of links just wasn’t working for us.  So, I looked specifically for a free online planning tool that was specifically geared to churches and worship services.

I ended up seeing that Planning Center Online had a light, free, version.  “Cool,” I thought.  “Let’s check this out.”  I was instantly hooked.  Even with the free version there are powerful planning features available.  After using the free version for a couple weeks, I quickly convinced my pastor that we should upgrade one level.  Then, after using the first level for a couple weeks, he suggested that we upgrade to the next level.  It is very much worth it.  Here’s a quick run-down of the great features available:

• All your services, people, songs, and media in one place that is central to everyone.  There are a lot of planning tools that have a database of people and songs that are available on a computer at the church, but with this, everything is available for everyone online which is very handy if you have multiple volunteer leaders.
• CCLI reporting.  Planning Center is able to do your CCLI reporting for you, which is awesome.
• Confirm, decline, and blackout date scheduling.  Everyone involved has the option to black out dates on their calendar, as well as confirm or deny positions scheduled right in their email.
• Facebook Integration.  Planning Center just added this.  For the post-email generation – they don’t even have to leave Facebook if they don’t want to – it integrates perfectly.
• Comments and subscribing to comments.  It is so helpful to have a section for comments and the ability to subscribe to comments so communication is made a bit easier.

I really enjoy this tool and would highly recommend it.  I’m so glad we decided to go for it and am looking forward to how it wil help us even more in the future.