Blind Spots In Middle School Ministry

Written by Eddie Witkowski, creator of MiddleSchoolMinistry.com

Have you ever stared at yourself in the mirror, glancing from eye to eye trying to catch them moving? It’s weird. You can’t! You can see your friend’s eyes moving–so it’s not a speed issue. The reason for this phenomenon is the same reason those last seconds sitting in staff meeting seem to take forever. You keep glancing at the second hand on the clock and it seems to “stick” for an extra second when you first glance at it.

It’s called Saccadic Masking.

This happens because the blur between looking at one point and another point is completely incomprehensible to our brains. It’s chaos. So our brain literally invents, or masks over, what happens during the period between our eyes glancing from one spot to the next. It takes bits of the destination our eyes point to and fills in the gap with this information.

Because this blur is incomprehensible, we are essentially blind during this period. The strangest part is, with our brains filling the gaps, we are completely unaware of our blindness. In fact, when you add up the time our eyes spend darting around, on average, we are “blind” for about 40 minutes per day.

Sometimes, in Middle School Ministry, our brains participate in oblivious blindness as well.

Our thoughts become so focused on one ministry activity after another, that we blur over the in between. Our Middle Schoolers are stuck in a world where too many adults don’t take them seriously. Their parents can’t decide if they are still kids or not. Their teachers can’t decide if they are still kids or not. We need to be the ones in their lives who take them seriously. It is during these “in between” times that we can best accomplish this.

Think for a second about some of the most traumatic memories of your life. More often than not, these memories happened during your Middle School years. Those past memories for you, are your Middle School student’s current nightmares. While they may be young and seen as kids by many, they feel like they are older. The challenges and hardships they face are real. As their pastors, we need to make one-on-one time for them a priority. We can get so busy organizing things that we miss the moments when we can tell that something is wrong. We miss the moments of conversation where God impacts students’ lives in incredible ways. The worst part is, we often don’t even notice we’re missing them.

Blind spots are built into human nature. They are hardwired into our eyes; hardwired into our brains. The problem lies in the fact that the nature of blind spots are that you can’t see them–unless someone brings them to your attention.

So here are some questions to ask yourself that will help find and address blind spots in your Middle School ministry:

• Where might the blind spots in my ministry be? Where might I be overlooking something?
• When was the last significant conversation I had with one of my students?
• In planning my activities, do I plan them to allow myself to have the freedom to interact with students? Or am I always too busy getting things done behind the scenes to make it work?
• What is the primary objective in my ministry area? How am I accomplishing that goal?\
• Do I hold regular meetings with my ministry team? If so, do I create a safe environment for them to be able to address areas that could use improvement?

These are hard questions, but questions that must be asked and must be answered. The beauty is, however, that when we solve these issues, we are no longer blind. Our lives and our ministry will be guided more clearly. They will function at higher levels, and be better conduits of God working in the midst of our student’s lives.

Eddie Witkowski has served in Middle School Ministry for the past 6 years by choice. Currently, he is the Middle School Pastor at Hermitage Church of the Nazarene and founder of MiddleSchoolMinistry.com. His passion is seeing Middle Schoolers grow deeper in their relationship with Christ. He firmly believes that having fun is essential to this and to celebrating the Christian life. Eddie enjoys  all things adventurous. Geocaching, bodysurfing, and website design are a few of his favorite pastimes.