Essential Tools for Enhancing Your Multiplication Ministry 

“Well done, good and faithful servant.” If you are reading a youth ministry blog, then I assume these are the words you hope to hear from Jesus when you enter His presence. But do you remember where that commendation comes from? 

In Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus taught His followers that the kingdom of God can be compared to a ruler entrusting his servants with various amounts of money while he went away. It was their job to manage his money well. And how did he measure success in this management? Multiplication! What can we learn from this parable? Successful biblical stewardship (a.k.a. discipleship) is multiplication! 

But multiplication ministry requires more than just showing up and ensuring no one gets lost or hurt (see the steward given one talent). It requires intentional administration and planning, constant coaching of your students, and ongoing communication. Unfortunately, this blog is not long enough to share exactly how to administrate, coach, or communicate. Word of Life offers many resources geared toward teaching you and your team how to do these things, so check out the rest of Word of Life’s blog posts and video training courses. Better yet, find your local Word of Life Ministry Coach to guide you through these topics. 

This post, however, will share helpful tools to put in your toolbox for the job of multiplication. 

Communication Tool 

As a ministry coach and evangelistic event planner, I am always looking for the best ways to communicate with a large group of people. I can’t tell you how many emails I send out, but I always fear that my emails will get lost in the endless jungle that is the spam folder. I also send plenty of text messages, but I want to avoid sending large group conversations that light up everyone’s phones with countless notifications, causing people to silence their phones and miss the important details they need. That is why I love services that can send out mass text messages as individual messages. You send the message once, each person receives it from you, and replies come back to only you. Personally, I use Remind because it can be used on a smartphone or computer, and it can schedule your messages so that you can set it and forget it. 

Coaching Tool 

If you want to see your students grow qualitatively and your ministry grow numerically, it will take intentionality. You need a system to track each student, their contact info, their interests, and their spiritual status (salvation, maturity, gifts, etc.). Technically, the only things you need for this are a heart for Jesus, a heart for your students, and a brain. But the more involved we get in our students’ lives, the more we tend to forget, so having some kind of “little black book” to keep all this information becomes vital. 

Early in ministry, I literally had a little black book where I would keep track of the students in my small group. I would note decisions each student made, spiritual disciplines, and prayer requests so that I could consistently follow up with my guys and help them take their next baby steps in their walk with Christ. 

Now, Word of Life offers Multiply+ for all ministries subscribed to a Word of Life Youth Ministries discipleship program (Gopher Buddies, Olympians, Fifty1). Multiply+ allows you to keep track of each student, recording their contact information, birthdays, hobbies, interests, and prayer requests, along with their CAUSE Circles and Four Chair Discipleship status. On top of all that, for students in Fifty1 and Olympians, you can track all their spiritual disciplines for the accountability programs. All of this happens on computers or smart devices so you and your leaders can coach your students without worrying about misplacing any of this important information. 

Administration Tool 

Planning meetings are one of my favorite parts of youth ministry (yes, I am that guy). They take our hopes and dreams of ministry and put them on paper so that we actually pursue them. But you can spend all that work and effort planning in a calendar just for it to get lost or neglected. That’s why I have fallen in love with Multiply+ and its planning tools. 

With Multiply+, you can do the following: 

• Pick and choose which lessons to redeem for use. 
• Easily see which redeemed modules you have already used. 
• See when you last taught any given lesson. 
• Schedule your weekly meetings with your redeemed lessons. 
• Schedule your weekly meetings in detail. 
• Assign each part of your weekly meetings to any leader or student in your ministry. 
• Drag and drop assignments to easily change your schedule order. 
• Schedule special events or service events with date, time, and extra information. 

The beautiful thing about Multiply+ is that you can add each of your ministry workers so that everyone can see your calendar at any time from their own device. Multiply+ has been developed to serve you in managing your ministry for multiplication in such a way that you spend less time administrating and more time building relationships to point young men and women to Jesus Christ. 

But perhaps you are saying to yourself, “It took me all my technological knowledge just to get to this blog post. How am I supposed to learn a new tech tool like Multiply+?” I am so glad you asked! Word of Life has ministry coaches excited to help get you set up and using Multiply+ like a pro! If you do not know who your Word of Life ministry coach is, click the link below to get started!