A Summary of the Basics of the “Rhythmic Week”

The Basics of the “Rhythmic Week” are concepts originating from Mark DeVries

Page 115 in Sustainable Youth Ministry
by Mark DeVries © 2008 InterVarsity Press
p. 79 of The Most Important Year in a Man’s/Woman’s Life
by DeVries/Wolgemuth © 2003 Zondervan

1. Each day has 3 slots….Morning…Afternoon…Evening…Often times a meal accompanies each slot.
2. Start by carving out your Sabbath….which is a recommended 3 slots.
3. Next carve out a recommended 6 slots at home with your family. (3 of these 6 can also be your Sabbath slots)
4. Next carve out a full slot for “balcony time.” *See article below
5. Next plug-in the regular meetings…staff..Wed night…etc..worship, Sunday School and any other regular occurrences.
6. Next come all the things that are crucial to your ministry but are probably the things you like to do least. For  some folks these are the recruiting calls, follow-up calls. Some people really dread the lesson prep and writing time. The idea here is that we all have these routine tasks that we tend to push off…procrastinate…b/c we dread them. So, it is best to pick a slot(s) each week that you can dump all these undesirable things in. It’s good to choose a time of day when you’re at your best to tackle them. Then after this slot….plan a weekly reward of some type…perhaps lunch with a special person, or have it be the day you take off early and go home, perhaps you take a few hours on this day to do whatever you want. Something like that.

by Mark DeVries

Everything on this youth worker’s to-do list screamed “URGENT.” He was emotionally overloaded—I could sense it as he described the looming mountain of tasks before him. He shook his head in frustration and mumbled, “I’ll never get it all done!”

He was just beginning to understand.

1. Effective youth workers know that they’ll always have too much on their plates. What’s astonishing to me is not that almost every youth worker I know has too much to do, but that so many of them are surprised by it.

Far too many of us are like a 5-year-old walking her 100-pound dog. The unpredictable, yelping demands of our biggie-sized schedules are just dragging us along—we feel incapable of actually guiding our ministries. Our work is reduced to a series of erratic steps that take us nowhere.
The few who’ve stepped off this treadmill have one thing in common: They almost all practice what I call balcony time.

2. In balcony time, we step out of the wild, rushing current of doing ministry and step into a place where we can actually work on the ministry. It’s the principle that Tom Watson, former president of IBM, understood well when he said, “We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.”

The youth worker who shuns the balcony will be perpetually driven by other people’s agendas and is a likely candidate for burnout. It’s in the balcony that we find the leverage to move our ministries forward; it’s in the balcony that we move out of a victim mentality and into the mindset of a leader; it’s in the balcony that we learn to say no to the secondary priorities so we can attend to the essential ones.

I know what you’re thinking: “Balcony time sounds great, but exactly how do I do it?” You can begin by carving out a block of at least four hours of balcony time this week. Promise yourself that, during this time, you will not answer the phone, respond to emails, plan this week’s programs, or accomplish anything on your bulging urgent list.

During your time in the balcony, you might develop strategies for achieving your ministry’s three-year objectives (or work on a process to create them), create a list of potential leaders to recruit, work up job descriptions for leaders, or schedule time to meet with (or find) your own spiritual director.

Balcony time is not the same as sabbath time or devotional time. The balcony is the place where we take a look at our calendars to ensure that our sabbath time and quiet time are protected. It’s not the place to work on this week’s top priorities; it’s the place where we determine what those top priorities will be. It’s the place where we make the hard decisions about our time.

Show me a youth worker’s schedule and I’ll show you the future of his or her ministry. Without balcony time, the future will just be an older, more tired version of what they see right now.

So climb on up. The view may just surprise you.

Mark DEVries is the founder of Youth Ministry Architects, (www.YMArchitects .com), a hands-on youth ministry coaching and consulting service. And he’s the Designated Youth Ministry Balconeer at a church in Tennessee.