Hard Work or Difficult Work

In Free Prize Inside, Seth Godin make a very good distinction between Hard Work and Difficult Work.

“I define difficult work as the stuff that takes guts or insight.  It’s not dependent upon how big your budget is or where you got your degree.

. . .

Companies are pretty good at hard work.  Hard work involves the management of projects and the deployment of assets.  The people working on a project don’t spend a lot oftime worrying about whether it’s ultimately going to be a success in the marketplace — Instead they worry about their role in the process.

. . .

Difficult work is easy to avoid.  Difficult work is exactly what will get you promoted.”

I just read that and had to share it with someone.  I think this is where I have been over the past few months.  Youth ministry is hard, but changing the way you do youth ministry is difficult.  We have been experimenting and taking a huge risk because the old way wasn’t working.  So we split to cell groups and that has it’s own challenges.  So now the dreaming and planning and praying and listening is the difficult thing that we as a ministry have to do.

It’s easy to just do what I’ve always known and try to play it safe, but playing it safe is a waste of time, and it’s the riskiest thing that you can do.  Safe is boring, safe is invisible.

There has to be a better way to reach teenagers with the Gospel of Jesus.  there has to be a better way to transform a generation.  There has to be a way to curb the church drop-out rate.

So my prayer has been what is that way.  And the prayer that i ask anyone reading would pray is that God would give our team wisdom.  We can’t do this process of transformation on our own.

Taking the risk is difficult.  Changing the formula is difficult.  But if the result is a better, stronger, healthier ministry is it worth the cost?  I think so.