My challenge for you today is straight-forward. 

• Identify the tasks in your ministry that suck the time and enthusiasm out of you.
• Identify the tasks in your ministry which are pure joy and give you energy.
• Next, send the list - good and bad - to some of your former students. Ask them this, "Rate these items on my list from greatest impact on you to least." You can do this anonymously with Survey Monkey or something like that or you can just ask them to give you the feedback.
• Take those results to heart. Use them to re-evaluate where you invest your time and energy.

You see, if you're like me you are grieved by a lack of impact you have on your community. My assumption in the reason for this lack of long term results breaks down like this:

• We struggle to fit ourselves into a ministry model built around another person's strengths, weaknesses, and talents. The problem with ministry models is that you are taking a model for ministry that has methodology developed by someone who isn't you and doesn't know your community.
• We end up wasting time on things that matter to our model, to our boss, and to expectations set for us, but don't mean jack to your students.

Be encouraged. By re-organizing your ministry around your passions and your maximum impact good things are going to happen. More importantly, you will be more fulfilled. Your impact on students will give you unlimited energy!

I know this exercise could have radical ramifications. Some of us, like I did, will realize that a vocation in a church ministry may not reconcile with where God is gifting you to be most effective. I don't know where this exercise may take you. Just be encouraged by my own story of implementing this in my own life. When I was willing to accept and act on how God was gifting and blessing me my ministry exploded. I was filled with joy and effectiveness! What I was blind to, at first, was that God was merely waiting for me to acknowledge that I needed to say no to the stuff that was wasting my time in order to bless me with much, much more.