A Day in the Life of a Children’s Pastor

“Pastor Jeremy, where do you work?”

“What do you do all day, Jeremy?”

“Jeremy, did you have a nice vacation at Kids Camp?”

These are perfectly valid questions. Questions I hear somewhat regularly. And although to some they feel like “attacking” or “sinister” questions, they are not. Adults asking these questions might be :), but children asking are just curious.

These questions are often asked because people simply do not know what children’s pastors (or any pastor really) do each and every day. So I thought I’d write down what it is I do in a day at the church office. The following activities were accomplished on Monday, October 15, 2012 and it is indicative of a typical day in my job.

A Day in the Life:

I started off by reviewing, categorizing, and submitting receipts from the month of August and September to the Main Office. Fun stuff.

Then I followed up with a camping facility on dates and cost on scheduling an overnight middle school boys retreat. I still have to hear back with an answer, then if it is favorable, we can get to work communicating and planning what we are going to do.

I finished up nailing the timeline posters that I had completed to the Main Street Theatre wall. I’ve got 40 stories posters created, printed, glued to foam board, then nailed to the wall. There are 78 stories in the Old Testament in our curriculum for Main Street, so I have 38 more to do. This will probably take me another month to squeeze in. I measured and strategized how to fit the remaining 38 in an orderly and informative fashion on the wall.

I gathered candy from the Trunk or Treat donation bin and released them from their packaging and placed them into storage bins for easy transferring during the event on October 31.

I took down the paper globes hanging in the Main Street hallway and replaced them with the Fall theme ones: orange and brown.

I updated our Trunk or Treat participant list. I had about 4 families volunteer on Sunday verbally to me. I placed a note in my phone and I updated the list in our database in the morning.

I am involved in an oversight board for the Wesleyan Church that oversees people who feel they have a call to vocational ministry. One of my roles on that board is to connect each ministerial candidate with a mentor. I had emailed a number of mentors this past week to confirm their involvement for another year. This morning I was reviewing who had emailed me back and made notes who had confirmed and who had follow-up questions. I emailed those who had questions and began dialogue-ing with them (a round-about way of answering them and hearing back from them again).

I am the director of a Kids Camp in the summer and our financials needed to be reported for the past 2 years (2011 and 2012). I handed off the receipts and checkbook to my secretary and am having her run through the records and create 2 financial reports.

I prayed for my 7th grade middle school small group prayer requests from last week.

I wrote notes and Happy Birthday wishes to any hwcYouth volunteer for the month of October (yeah, I’m behind on this one!).

As we get up to speed on our Child/Youth Protection Plan @ hwcYouth, each week we process a handful of criminal background checks and one of the pastors involved has to review them before they get checked off.

Our Trunk or Treat event is quickly approaching and I’ve always wanted banners and signs for Nyman Ave. and Hwy 70, so I created the graphics to send to the printer.

Last year we did not do any T-shirts for the Followers students and we want to for this year. Since we are using the Go Fish Guys curriculum for this year, I was able to purchase graphics for the T-shirts through them and I emailed them to Outdoor Creations here in Hayward and have Brian working on getting everything ready. All we have to do is get T-shirt sizes from the students next Followers and we’ll be able to place the order.

I met with a young man for about a half-hour… sort of one-on-one “big brother” kind of hanging out.

Our women small group leaders in msy (Middle School Youth) are planning a girls night at the church at the end of October. Instead of planning events at the church, we are assisting the events through the small group leaders. Subtle, but radical shift in how we do events. I created an “official” postcard for them to share with the girls and their parents.

Then I wrote this blog post at the end of the day before I left to pick my daughter up from school.