Asking Great Questions for Great Children’s, Youth and Families Ministry
A while ago I was speaking with a colleague about a situation I was facing, fully expecting to have a long and complex conversation about what to do. About 3 minutes in, my conversation partner cut straight to the core of the issue by asking “who else do you know that’s done the same thing?” Immediately the answer came into my head and I knew exactly what I had to do next. All this change happened despite my conversation partner being a non-expert: they didn’t have subject-specific knowledge or skills in this area, but they were highly skilled in asking great questions.
Asking great questions is at the core of a new project that RNG are running several times this year called Action Learning for Youth Ministry (ALYM), where we gather a group of 4 people who work with each other to help them overcome the challenges they face in their children’s, youth and families ministry.
Here are some of the questions we use every time to start our conversations when we run an ALYM Set to help them go further, faster. Some of you may recognise them if you’ve worked with 3D Coaching at all:
- In the next X minutes, what issue are you bringing to the group today? This reveals to the group our subject for the day and how long we have to talk about it.
- What do you want the outcome to be? This gives the person presenting to the group a clear answer for when they will know they’ve achieved their aim. We might sometimes follow this up with ‘how will you know you’ve got there?’ — this provides someone a chance to come up with specifics, for example: “I’ll know because I’ll have ideas about what I want to say about X to my young people…” or “I’ll know because I’ll feel relaxed about recruiting 3 more volunteers — I’ll know how I’m going to do it.”
- What’s our role in this conversation? This gives a chance for the presenter to say to the group what they need. They might say “I need you to be really challenging and ask me the hard questions,” or “I need you to point out the bits to this problem that I can’t see,” or “I need to move forward on this issue, but I need you to go easy on me.”
We’ve found these questions incredibly useful in our work — they help us and others go further, faster. I wonder what might happen if you use them in your next conversation about your children’s, youth and families ministry?
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If you want to learn more about Action Learning for Youth Ministry and the next ALYM Set that meets between October and November 2018, visit https://www.lichfield.anglican.org/alym
