Major Mistake in Permission Giving

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Hi, Bill. For the past 2 years, our church has been working through the process of discovering our DNA & God’s vision and mission for us. We’ve been working our way through Growing Spiritual Redwoods, Moving Off the Map, and now Unfreezing Moves. We’ve been investing our energy in helping adults mature spiritually, and have not made children and teens a focus. The result is that we now have a non-existent teen group (No Youth leader at all!) and virtually non-existent children’s group. We’ve been praying for God to give someone the passion to work with our youth, but so far almost everyone who’s worked with our children have left the church. We have been encouraging our people to follow their passions in ministry, and have been just patiently waiting for someone to step up, instead of ‘assigning’ someone to a position or task. This idea of how to ministry is very liberating in theory, the problem is, we have some young teenagers who need spiritual guidance NOW. What do we do?

Response from Bill Easum

Every church has to cover ALL the bases one way or another. You personally need to see that those bases are covered (youth and children) and raise up some folks specifically for those ministries. Yes, your primary focus needs to be on adults, but permission giving does not mean just focusing on Adults to the exclusion of the rest of the church. It means giving primary focus to the adults -raising up adults who take responsibility for the whole church- as well as deploying adults to work with youth and children and the other essentials for your church.