To excel at something, you constantly have to evaluate. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? What can I improve upon? Below are five specific questions all youth ministers (including myself) should be asking, at least on a yearly, if not monthly and daily basis. 

1. Am I Still Effective? Let’s be honest, it’s about Jesus and His power to save, not ours. But all too often we are not looking at our own strategies, programs, and attitude in ministry as being effective enough to reach kids with the Gospel message. Is your heart just not in it anymore? Are you finding yourself saying “those stinkin’ kids” more and more? Do you dread teaching class or planning youth events? Then you might be burnt out, and burnt out ministers aren’t effective. 

2. Am I Communicating Well? Communication in any relationship is key, and communication in youth ministry is no exception. I would venture to say that you need to communicate more effectively with parents and with the leadership of the church than anyone else, including the kids in your group. Do you use more than three forms of advertising for events? Do you send out emails informing parents of upcoming meetings and activities? I’ve found that you can never have too much information out there for parents and kids to see. There’s so much information being thrown at them that sometimes you have to be insistent about making sure they know about the events and activities. Communication is in and of itself a full-time job. You must constantly working at it. 

3. Am I Focusing On My Work? Something I’m struggling with is side projects. Speaking engagements, blogging and writing, and other things. How much am I focused on my work? Meaning: how much am I focused on being a youth minister and not a preacher? Or speaker? Or writer? Or getting another degree? We can easily get wrapped up in the busyness of what we’ve been asked to do and not focus on what we were hired to do. I am very fortunate that the Elders at the congregation I work for have allowed me to fully focus on the youth. They don’t ask me to coordinate education duties, preach, or do too much outside of my youth focus. The kids and their parents need you to be focused on the youth group. 

4. Am I Taking Time Off? Right now, I have 5 ½ days left on the books to take off this year, with just over 40 calendar days left to do it. If you get to mid-December and you have 12 days left to take off, you’re doing something wrong. TAKE YOUR TIME OFF. You need it, and your family needs it. If you rate a day off during the week and can’t remember the last time you actually had that day off, you’re doing it wrong. Take your time off. The work will be there to do when you get back. 

5. Am I Christ-centered? The most important question you should ask, and this one should be asked every day. Firstly, are you taking care of your own spiritual needs and feeding your own spiritual appetite, and second - are you teaching the Gospel to the kids in your group? In youth ministry, everything we do should be to get kids to come to Christ. If that’s not our objective, we need to do some earnest thinking about just what it is that we're doing. 

What about you? What questions do you think youth ministers should be asking. Sound off in the comments. 

I am the first to admit - I'm pretty horrible at communication sometimes. But I have made a conscious effort in the last few years to communicate better and more effectively with my wife, my kids in the youth group, my church, and my church leadership. 

So how can you be more effective at communication? Here's some tips to help out.  

Minimize channels. Some of us have lots of ways we communicate. If you're tech savvy at all, then you may have more. Right now I can think of 4 emails, 6 different social networks, and 3 websites that I get communications from. All of my notifications come to one email. The sometimes overflowing river of emails and notifications comes all to one email address. If I don't do any serious communication on Google+, for example, then I set up my notifications to be virtually non-existent from Google+. I unsubscribe to 3 or 4 "accounts" per week to minimize how many emails I get a day. I even have pre-written TextExpander snippets to reply to emails and Facebook messages I get for routine things like speaking engagement requests and tech requests. But I have taken all of my networks and things and minimized it to one channel that routes everything to me in an organized fashion. Gmail is also a great product for organization and archiving as well. Outlook.com is a great free webmail client as well. You can have multiple email addresses for work, recreation, and organizations but route them all to one main email. 

Act on incoming data. Sometimes we can't respond right away to a question or request in a Facebook message or email, but you can act on that notification. Find an application (mine is Drafts for iPhone) that will remind you to get back to that message the next day. If someone has something urgent, they should call you. Otherwise, emails, messages, and other internet communications cannot expect less than a 24 hour turnaround. So whether you take a few minutes to respond to a request or mark it down for later, just make sure you act on it. Looking at a message on your phone or computer and making a mental note to "do that tomorrow" doesn't work. You'll forget someone's request or message and they might wonder if you're ignoring them. 

Get organized. This relates closely to our first tip. If you have a lot of speaking engagements, have an old fashioned paper calendar to write them down on in your office, or at least input them into a calendar app. Use Contacts Cleaner to fix up your iPhone or iPad's contact list. Give people ONE email, even if it is coming from different sources. Use Drafts to jot down quick bits of text and info for saving to Dropbox. Organize your desktop and computer to make it easier to find things on said computer (I used Alfred for finding whatever I need - I probably have 1,000 folders on my computer). When was the last time you organized your filing cabinet? Buy a pack of manila folders and get labeling. Case in point - my wife and I are buying a van this week, and we all know that minister's taxes and salaries are a little wonky, and having an organized, labeled filing cabinet let me grab files very quickly that I needed instead of searching for them. I was also able to pull down several things for our VBS this week and save myself a lot of time having to redo layouts of certain things - they were already done last year and in the VBS 2012 folder, so why do it again? Everything on your computer must have a folder, in my opinion. 

Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and become better organized and be a better communicator. Preachers, summer is a good time to get organized, and youth ministers, August may be a great time to reorganize for you.