8 Critical Components Of An Effective Adventure Sports Ministry
What took us 27 years to learn is now available to you in this article!
8 Critical Components Of An Effective Adventure Sports Ministry
1. APPROVAL BY CHURCH LEADERSHIP
2. A QUALIFIED LEADER
3. AN INSPIRED & TRAINED VOLUNTEER TEAM
4. REGULAR & ACCESSIBLE DAY EVENTS PLUS ANNUAL MULTI-DAY ANCHOR EVENTS
5. ONLINE EVENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
6. MARKETING/PROMOTION INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CHURCH
7. RESPONSIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANCE TO THE LEADER, VOLUNTEERS & PARTICIPANTS
8. CHURCH ASSIMILATION PLAN
INTRODUCTION
Does a church really need to have all eight of these components to have an adventure ministry? Are we trying to raise the bar beyond reach? Yes and no. The purpose of this article is to guide those churches desiring to build a fully functioning and effective adventure sports ministry.
A church can have a simple mountain bike group designed for the fellowship of believers and others who want to join. A church can have a camping ministry designed to provide a retreat-like setting for families and individuals from the church and community. A church can build a ministry using FaceBook or Meetup to promote multiple activities for outreach and connections without having liability releases, a database that allows for follow-up communication, along with a paid staff training and developing the volunteer team to grow the ministry. All of these can happen and are happening at some churches now.
This article is aimed at the goal of helping churches develop a ministry that will impact the whole church, from children’s ministry to senior citizens; from seminars and presentations about protecting God’s creation to Epic Adventures around the world like trekking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, whitewater rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and trekking to Everest Base Camp (all trips that we have hosted).
This article is for churches that want to develop a ministry that provides a steady, year-round stream of non-Christians or non-church people coming into their church and provide life changing relationships within the church for people who bond around outdoor experiences that once were just items on a “bucket list” but now become possible and become more powerful because of those trips being combined with the fellowship of the Body of Christ.
These eight critical components come from the 27 year successful history of Bayside Adventure Sports (BAS), a non-profit church-based adventure ministry in Northern California. This list is an outline, an overview. To learn how to fully develop each of these components and find out how your church can be part of the first ever network of adventure ministries, please connect with me, Greg Weisman, at gregw@g1outdoors.com or 916 847-4734.
1. APPROVAL BY CHURCH LEADERSHIP
Without the approval & support of the church’s senior leadership, a ministry isn’t going to survive. There may be church members who have heard about Bayside Adventure Sports and have a strong desire to help get a ministry started, but if the senior leaders won’t support it, it is just not going to happen. The enthusiastic members can start their own hiking or mountain biking groups and get their own FaceBook pages and invite people to join them, but it won’t become a recognized ministry of the church. For this reason, it is crucial that the Senior Pastor or Executive Pastor is convinced that launching an adventure sports ministry is a wise move for the church.
2. A QUALIFIED LEADER
The one consistent factor to every successful ministry I have witnessed over the last 35 years in the church was a good leader. Yep, nothing groundbreaking in that statement. But because we are talking about what many perceive as a “recreation ministry”, we have had many church leaders think anybody who has a love for the outdoors, lots of friends, and who goes to church can do this. NO! It won’t work. Below are seven basic characteristics needed in the leader of this ministry.
Before we get to those seven characteristics, I do want to mention that we realize most churches want to launch their ministry without hiring a staff person to run it. They want to have the ministry run by a volunteer. That’s covered in #2 below but we do acknowledge that the launching of the ministry could be done with a volunteer team with the goal of hiring an employee to run it when specific goals are met, such as:
~ At least five sports are active with volunteer leaders for those sports
~ At least ten events have been successfully hosted with minimum numbers met
~ At least 15% of the attenders to the events have been from outside the church and some of those attenders have actually visited a church service
~ There are at least 20 other events planned for the next six months. If there are at least five divisions or sports functioning, that’s just 4 events per sport.
~ There is momentum showing with the volunteer team and the ministry as a whole.
OK, now on to the seven basic characteristics needed in the leader:
The Adventure Sports Ministry Director (Director) must have the spiritual maturity and ministry experience to lead a ministry. This is not a “program”, it is a ministry. It is not an adventure sports program run by a Christian, it is a ministry that happens to be using adventure sports as a means to fulfill the Great Commission. Therefore, the Director must be a veteran in ministry, not a rookie.
The Director must be an employee of the church or given employee level status. Six of six churches we have coached that have attempted to build an adventure ministry with a volunteer leader have experienced failure. Why? Four reasons: A) The ministry team must know that the church values their ministry enough to pay a leader; B) The leader must lead from the core of the church leadership so it is prioritized and planned as part of the church calendar and structure; C) The leader must have a direct relationship within the hierarchy of the church staff like every other ministry program. This includes encouragement, accountability to goals/objectives, and celebration for successes; D) The leader must be serving consistently year-round to keep the volunteer team healthy.
The Director must be great at building the volunteer team. THIS IS CRUCIAL!!! This includes recruitment, training, inspiring, and building cohesiveness. This is way more important than being able to actually do adventure sports. The volunteer team is everything! The Director has to be able to inspire adults to a vision of using adventure sports to attract and attach people to Jesus. There are many adults who want an excuse to get outside and play, but they need to be inspired because of what Jesus will do in and through them. A Pastor’s job is to equip the saints to do ministry. If they are not good at this, then they should not be on the pastoral staff. Because many of these volunteers will be single or married adults who are empty nesters (40’s and older) because they finally have their weekends free, the leader must have the maturity and personality of someone these adults will follow. We will cover more about who these volunteers are below.
The Director must be an excellent event planner. Each and every outing is an event that needs to be organized, promoted, hosted, and critiqued for improvement the next time. In addition to being a potentially complicated event, these are events that involve adventure sports and therefore will involve potential safety risks. An improperly run event doesn’t just lose money or have people falling asleep during a presentation, people can have life-altering or ending accidents. Imagine putting a number of first-time skiers on a black diamond mogul hill at a major ski resort and yelling, “goodl uck!” as the leader skis off. The leader will be modeling how to plan and run complicated events for the volunteers who eventually will be planning the majority of the events.
The Director needs to be an active, outdoor enthusiast who models for volunteers and participants a love for God’sCreation. The director does not have to be in perfect physical condition and able to excel in all adventure sports, but they have to be respected by those volunteers for all of those sports on the team. Obviously, the more sports that the director can and wants to participate in as ministry events the more effectively he/she can watch and encourage those volunteer leaders.
The Director should be able to directly lead the largest and most complicated of events that the ministry hosts. Multi-day camping trips involving kayaks, SUPs, bikes, motorcycles, climbing, diving, or other sports with 20 to 100 people means many hours of preparation and the skills to lead on the ground. These trips (see below) are core to the building of the ministry, relationships within the ministry, and the momentum of the program.
The Director must be a capable speaker. He or She must be able to share the gospel, keep the attention of adults, teens, and children when leading a devotional or speaking at church, around the campfire, out in the desert, or on a boat. This also includes the ability to train the volunteers to speak well on their events so that they become comfortable representing Jesus Christ and inspiring people to follow Him.
Who’s Qualified? Adventure Sports Ministry can be thought of as “Youth Ministry for Adults”. A veteran youth pastor from a large church (750+) would have all of the characteristics listed above. At about age 40, many successful youth pastors begin contemplating another position in the church. Many become Missions Pastors because of their love of evangelism and knack for running trips (a great fit!) and many become Outreach Pastors, Senior Pastors, or Executive Pastors.
3. AN INSPIRED & TRAINED VOLUNTEER TEAM
Every Christian has been commanded by Jesus himself to “go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
Many churches operate with a scarcity mentality and therefore are concerned that an adventure ministry will adversely affect the volunteer staffing of the other ministries of the church like children’s, youth, singles, the choir, men’s or women’s. They believe there are only so many people in the church willing to volunteer (they are scarce). With an abundance mentality we realize that in most churches, the reason 20% of the people do 80% of the volunteer work is because only 20% of the people have regular church ministry gifting. There are many many people left in the congregation who would never volunteer for those typical churchy ministries but if you give them the opportunity to connect their passion for adventure sports to their love for Jesus, they will volunteer for their first ever ministry. This ministry doesn’t reduce the current number of volunteers, it attracts brand new people and increases the percentage of people serving at the church.
When new people begin volunteering, they transition from being consumers to partners with the church. For the men in this group, they finally feel like they deserve to be there as men feel far better about receiving from the church and pastors when they can also be giving of their time and talents. For many of these people, it will be their first volunteer experience which will quickly qualify them for other volunteer roles as their leadership skills and servant hearts are recognized by others in the church.
The Great Commission was aimed to move Christians to “Go” outside the church walls and share Christ with others yet our churches continue to operate with a mentality of only sending professional missionaries to foreign countries with very few others participating in the “Go”. With an Adventure Ministry, every volunteer becomes a missionary to the adventure community outside the doors of the church.
How many volunteers should be on the team? The only limit on numbers of volunteers is the ability of the Leader to work with them. The more volunteers, the more trips or events can be offered and the better supervision on those trips.
Volunteers need to be trained up for the various job descriptions within the ministry. When there are leaders for each sport and assistants for those leaders, the events can be well covered. Other volunteers will serve behind the scenes with organizational job descriptions as they support the ministry.
An On-Boarding system of applications, interviews, and training will help the volunteer team get to know one another and work well to provide safe, reliable ministry opportunities.
Because the volunteer team is so crucial to the success of any adventure sports ministry, I have a detailed article specifically about recruiting, training, encouraging, and organizing the volunteers. For this article, it’s important just recognize that an inspired and trained volunteer team is a crucial component of the ministry.
4. REGULAR & ACCESSIBLE DAY EVENTS PLUS ANNUAL MULTI-DAY ANCHOR EVENTS
Multi-day events are the most effective for ministry, relationship building, and memory making. They are the most work but the most powerful. These will include overnight, weekend, or longer trips. They may be centered around mountain biking, Dirt Bike Riding, SCUBA Diving, 4 Wheel Drives, Fishing, etc. Any multi-day trip gives far more time for ministry to happen.
Having annual trips that can be refined and repeated give predictability to the calendar and the participants. Many families make these trips part of their annual vacation schedule as they return year after year. These people gain confidence in the ministry and become raving fans as they post photos on Social Media, tell their neighbors and co-workers, and experience family highlights annually with the ministry.
Every Sport can and should have one or more annual multi-day events. These trips can be as basic as tent camping or as deluxe as hotels, busses, and guides. These decisions will be made based on the clientele of the church and the opportunities available in the area.
Regular and accessible day events are the backbone of the ministry. Having monthly day hikes, mountain bike rides, road cycling options, paddling opportunities, or shooting classes build regular attendance for people and keep those volunteers active year-round. There are many different other types of events that can be utilized, including:
Instruction classes/seminars
Early morning runs, cycling, or even fishing or water skiing runs.
Evening walks
Guest speakers sharing about past trips
Weekly open Bible Studies or discussion groups
5. ONLINE EVENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
A User-friendly online event management system must be available in order for the public to participate and for the volunteers to be able to own and operate their own sports or divisions and events. It must have an easy way for them to post their events, add them to an easily accessed calendar, allow for simple registrations and cancelations, it must have a system for registrations requiring payments, and it should build the database so that the leaders have the ability to communicate with all participants.
Many churches use a system for managing giving, registrations, volunteers, and posting of events. But some of these are specifically designed only for church members to access and for church paid staff to post on. This can make it very difficult for a non-church member to access and virtually impossible for a volunteer to post on. When Bayside Adventure Sports started, it used Meetup for posting events, taking registrations, and as an easy way for volunteers to manage their ministry. But it also had many challenges to deal with. We will deal with this topic in more detail in a later article or chapter. For now, please recognize that people have to be able to register for events, pay money for them, and a database must be built from those registrations.
6. MARKETING/PROMOTION INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CHURCH
An adventure ministry needs more marketing than any other ministry in the church because it is not expected. When a family visits a church, they assume there is a children’s program, youth ministry, worship services, worship teams, women’s ministry and other programs. They will ask about them and seek them out. But no one walks onto a church campus and asks if there is a ministry for people who ride dirt bikes, like to hunt, or go ice fishing.
Therefore, the promotion must be far more proactive and strategic to let people know it is available.
A weekly, staffed presence on the church campus for weekend services may take the form of a kiosk or table with posters, flyers, or a monitor showing videos of past events. Someone should be at that location to answer questions about the opportunities.
Permanent and regularly updated promotion should be available wherever possible such as in the worship service bulletin, church website, church social media, a poster in the bathrooms, coffee area, or classrooms.
Utilizing a separate website for promotion to the community is advantageous because non-church people are not going to be searching for adventure opportunities on church websites. Having specialized social media like a website for the ministry, FaceBook pages, Instagram pages, TikTok, X, or using Meetup, etc. will widen the reach for the ministry. What’s important is thinking about how adventure people can most easily find out about this adventure ministry if they don’t go to church. It may turn out to be that there are just a couple of primary retail stores in the area that most of the adventure people frequent, so getting to know the owners and posting some flyers may get the ball rolling.
Regular Social Media postings need to be organized so that people can follow what is happening through the ministry. These also are very easy for people to share with others thereby broadening the reach even more. Sometimes it’s helpful to design and print special event flyers that can be posted, passed out, and included in mailings.
We have tried many different approaches to promoting Bayside Adventure Sports. Yep! Another article to follow specifically on this topic!
7. RESPONSIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANCE TO THE LEADER, VOLUNTEERS & PARTICIPANTS
Because an Adventure Sports ministry is active all year round and often every week, volunteers need access to assistance for promotion, software, registration systems, info on insurance, or communication. Having a trained, servant-hearted administrative person is crucial. This person is supporting the leader of the ministry as well as the whole volunteer team.
Participants who are learning the new software or learning more about the ministry need to have someone they can reach out to as well. And there are many details for planning events with which an administrative assistant will be helpful.
If the Leader of the ministry is away on a trip, then It’s very helpful to have an assistant to manage the ministry, volunteers, or details.
It’s very possible that one of the administrators of the church could add a few hours to his/her schedule and manage the adventure ministry too. Or perhaps there is someone who could work from home 10 hours/week who is knowledgeable about how the church staff work and can therefore support the ministry that way. Lots of options here, but what’s important is to have someone to help with all the tasks that are so important for an active ministry like this.
8. CHURCH ASSIMILATION PLAN
The goal of the ministry is to use adventure sports to attract and attach people to Jesus and His church. Creating or identifying options to make it easy to invite activity attendees to visit the church will provide continuity with other traditional church evangelism and discipleship programs. Here are some possibilities:
Through training the volunteers. As a volunteer grows in spiritual maturity they want to follow Jesus in all ways. They can be encouraged to be worshipping in their local church, practicing generosity (tithing), and serving in other ways in their local church. Just as serving in the adventure ministry gives them a perspective of ownership and partnership in that ministry, they can have the same experience at their church.
Through promotion of church programs. When promoting adventure events, also promoting church events that would be great stepping stones toward involvement in the church. This will help the adventurer see the connection and how the ultimate goal is to become an active member of the church and follower of Jesus.
Through Small Groups. People crave connection and they work best when there are already organic common interests between people. Most churches already have a small group structure and programs. Using that structure and possibly adding “Adventure Groups” built around organic sport-specific connections can be super effective.
Through intro-to-Church classes. Many churches offer a “101” or “Growth Track” short series designed for assimilating new people. By promoting specific classes and having multiple people from the adventure ministry attend together helps them move as a group into the church.
Through the Men’s, Women’s, Singles, or Married LIfe Ministries. Adventure Sports events run through or in cooperation with a group like those mentioned can add further value to that group and add significant connection to the church. A Men’s Trap Shooting event, a Married Life Ministries Hike or kayak day; a Single’s Camping Trip; a Women’s Ministry “Bike & Bible” activity. These all work to connect adventure people to a regular ministry group of the church.
Through Sponsors. Through the Sponsor Program churches may be promoted through retail stores, services, restaurants, and other entities. For more information on the Sponsor Program, yep! See the upcoming article! Haha!
Through Special Events on the Church Campus. Hosting events of interest to the public on the church campus gives the opportunity to highlight the adventure ministry to the visitors along with other church events. Combining the events like those listed below with a dinner and raffle can add to the connectional and fun atmosphere. These events can be built around guest speakers (adventure people), films, or just for the food, like a Crab Feed or Wild Game Dinner. We did a lot of these with Bayside Adventure Sports and they were a blast! Yep, another article will be coming!
CONCLUSION
The eight critical components listed above are just the beginning of all that is possible for a church-based adventure sports ministry. Bayside Adventure Sports, the original Adventure Sports Ministry has a 27 year history of experimenting with and refining these and many other exciting and effective ministry concepts. Joining this Substack will provide access to articles, resources, conferences, leadership retreats, and coaching resources and opportunities. Learning from others and their creative ideas and experiences are part and parcelt o being part of the growing network of churches in the adventure sports ministry network.
A church-based adventure sports ministry does take some very specific preparation but really, it’s not rocket science and most any church can enjoy the benefits of attracting and attaching people to Jesus through the fun of outdoor sports. People in the community will appreciate all the options for connecting with other fun families, men, women, singles or young adults. Never before has there been an easier way to get so many people experiencing transformation through recreation in God’s Creation!