One of my favorite baseball players growing up was Darryl Strawberry. I even traded a Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card for a Strawberry 1984 Topps one time (now the Griffey is 10x its value). Anyway… One thing I loved about Darryl was that he hit for power and could steal bases. He was consistently in the 20/20 club and was on the verge of a 40/40 season one year (that is home runs and steals). For some reason this combination has fallen from the spotlight in baseball.
What do you think about this about a stat… Names and contact work trips in a semester (season). So you could be a member of the 10/5 club after you learned 10 new names and went to do contact work five times. Here are a couple details:
Names – They cannot be names that you already know. This would be only new names.
Contact Work Trips – This would be times when you do contact work and encounter kids outside of club or campaigners. There is a value to texting, Myspace and Facebook connection, but for this plan it would not include those. This could include shopping at the mall where kids hang out and intentionally going through the food court where they all hang out (Level 1 Contact Work = Be Seen).
I have a couple questions:
1. How could you keep track of all this? When? Where? How? Before club? Email?
2. It would be fun once a month (Area Leadership) to have awards for certain plateaus. What would be good levels? What would be good awards?
Is this a good idea or too focused on numbers?
6 thoughts on “The 50/20 Club”
Bro that content on the Collaboration post is awesome. I see four embellished videos. For the firefighter I see that Jim Carey character of the firemarshal routine, for police an over zealous Reno 911 good cop bad cop skit, I could go on. Great stuff. The verse, how could I forget that verse. It’s perfect. Sick!
i don’t know about your area but there are a lot of leaders into the office right now and i think it would be cool to win a “Dundee”
I was actually having a conversation with one of the leaders in my area today about how to promote contact work and hold some element of accounatbility to the ministry. Both he and I agreed that a method like this would definitely lack authenticity and in many ways the Holy Spirit’s reshaping and leading of their lives.
I wish it were as easy as building an incentive for leaders to strive for, but I feel like this is in many ways the opposite of what we’re striving for. My hope is not that we would be an area defined by a great ability to check things off the list, but that we would genuinely be reshaped at our core and our disposition toward life would be ‘different’, (i.e. contact work would be an outflow of our personal surrender and growth).
I could defnitely see a time and place where this could be light-hearted and enticing, but for my area right now this would just seem to rob the sincerity and relationship of the ministry.
Sidenote: I really appreciate this site and just the fact that you guys are working hard to improve the way we go about this things. Thanks so much for putting your hearts out there, and equipping so many people with great ideas.
-Tom
Great comment Tom. Authenticity and motivation out of personal surrender to Christ is the best reason to do and grow in outreach and contact work with kids.
Also, thanks for the encouragement!
i don’t do YL but i do something similar in DC. there are days i would not get out of bed if it were not for the paycheck. (i keeps it ril.) my heart is for Christ and the youth but sometimes the tangible, cold hard fact hits me that i won’t get paid if i don’t go. my core motive is to be a part of God’s work. my immediate motive is to get paid. maybe that is the way God designed us, maybe not. incentives other than eternal ones may be pointers to/reminders of our core reasons for doing what we do. maybe using incentives can work if they are used wisely and infrequently.
james
My leadership team and I figured out a good way to collaborate on contact work goals. It’s similar to the PPL, for those of us on staff, but using Google Docs, you can easily create a form to input names of kids, notes, etc that is then added to a Google Doc spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would have to be shared with the leadership team if you want others to be able to see the whole thing. This also makes a good prayer list!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzgaUOW6GIs
Mine includes these inputs: Kid Name: School: Relationship Level: Primary Contact: Date last asked to attend Camp or Fall Weekend: Notes: