What Makes a Training Experience Captivating

Your Content is Great, but the Experience is Terrible

Week after week Lead Pastors try to find something to captivate their congregations for another sermon. They look for jokes, quips, lists, funny pictures, or heartwarming stories to weave into the points of the sermon to keep people’s attention, help them learn something they can apply to their lives, and keep them coming back next week to do it all again.

However, when these same pastors are bring on a new pastor to their team and ‘train’ them, the pastor will hand their new pastoral staff member a policy manual and ask them to read it through and sign an agreement to adhere to the manual. If the pastor is more cutting edge, he will provide a series of videos they can watch training them how to be a pastor at their church. They put almost no effort into making the training experience for their pastors engaging and add no elements to captivate their attention and keep them moving through the training experience. As pastors, It is time for us to approach our pastoral training experience more like we approach our sermons. It is time we make it more captivating for the pastors on our team we are asking to go through it.

To make a pastoral training experience captivating you will need to keep the learning modules short, make interesting videos, simplify the experience, and build in application points.

Introduction

When I started college at a state university, I was amazed at the size of the classes I was in. Many of my freshman classes were around 250 students and we sat in large auditoriums where concerts were held. In some of the classes, the professor was so far away we couldn’t really see them and wouldn’t have recognized them if we had passed them on campus somewhere.

Needless to say, it was hard to pay attention in those classes. In fact, one of the things we would do is begin to yawn and then use a stopwatch to see how long it would take for our yawns to reach the teacher and cause them to yawn. As you might expect, I didn’t learn a lot that first year at the state school and had an abysmal GPA by the end to show it.

Now, I am not the type to push the blame on others, however, in my defense, I would argue those classes were not designed for my learning. They were designed to check a box on a list and meet some sort of regulation. There is no way anyone was supposed to really learn in many of those classes.

The rooms were too big, the teacher was so far away, the overhead projectors were dim (yes, they used overhead projectors when I was in college), and the teachers clearly didn’t want to be there any more than we did.

Since they were teaching Freshman 101 classes that covered much of the same material that some high schools covered, they didn’t need to worry about being captivating. They just needed to make sure the classes happened and grades were recorded.

So, let me ask, is that how you see your pastoral training experience? Is it just a formality that needs to happen so everyone can get to their jobs and start doing ministry? If so, that’s cool. Then this article probably isn’t for you.

If you are still reading, then I am going to assume you understand the importance of training your pastoral staff and investing in their growth and development. If you want to read further on this, you can check out this article I wrote about it.

Training your pastoral staff is vital for you and for your church. If you have any hopes of living your dream life in ministry that God has created for you, then you must have a highly effective pastoral staff. There is no way around it.

Doesn’t your church deserve a high caliber, effective, and strong pastoral leadership team capable of reaching the communities and providing quality discipleship?

I imagine we would all raise our hands and say ‘yes’. But, the key is not to just provide something. That’s what my college professors in my Freshman 101 classes did. They provided something, and most of us didn’t come because it wasn’t designed for our learning pleasure. It was designed as a formality that had to be checked off the list.

Well, that isn’t how to train pastors for Kingdom work. If we are going to train pastors, then we need to put in the effort to add elements that are captivating. In this article, I am going to give you four elements you can add to your training experience that will skyrocket the overall level of captivation.

1. Keep Learning Modules Short

The attention span of a human being has dropped significantly over the last few decades and we are now at an 8-second attention span. Less than a goldfish. Yet, all of us will think that in order to properly train pastoral staff members, we have to do long teaching sessions that go 45 minutes or more at a time.

Well, allow me to set you free from that mindset. You absolutely don’t need to train using 45+ minute sessions. In fact, if you do it will hurt you and your pastoral staff will dread having to sit through them.

According to Carmine Gallo, author of the book Talk Like TED, the most engaging and rewatched TED talks are the ones at about 18 minutes. After the 18 minute mark, people are looking to change the channel, switch to a new video, or find another activity to do. (For a quick overview of lessons learned from the book, check out this summary.)

This means you need to cut your presentations, whether they are live or in a digital format, to a shorter duration. What I suggest most pastors and trainers do is have sessions between 5-15 min long. If it is a live format, after the 5-15 minute window transition into a discussion, Q&A, or brainstorming activity before moving to another session. If you are using a digital format, just end the video, and then your pastors have the choice to go to the next video or wait until they are ready for it.

2. Make Interesting Videos

I am a big proponent of live, highly engaging, and memorable presentations. As a pastor, I will always push for live sermons, live services, and getting people into a room together to feel the energy of the moment.

However, I also believe it is a matter of choosing which format is better for each given situation. I believe live worship services and incredible sermons in a room of fellow believers is the ideal approach, however, I also believe that most training experiences should be done online through videos. I go into it in more depth in this article, but the primary reason is for the sake of time. When you spend your in-person time lecturing your training material, then you are having a one-way conversation that doesn’t deepen relationships or enhance learning.

If you are spending time with your pastoral staff, then you want it to take your relationships deeper and enhance the learning experience they are having. You want them to look forward to your time together. So, move the training to a video format and move discussions, Q&A, and brainstorming to live time when you are together.

But, they can’t just be any videos. In fact, if you have videos that are just like lectures (like the ones I had when I took a University class years ago), then you will bore your pastors to death even if you have incredible content.

Now, I am not saying your videos have to be highly produced and look like a Hollywood movie. That’s the mistake I made when I first started making videos and online training courses. I felt like it had to be such high quality that I became paralyzed and didn’t make any videos. My mentality was, “I won’t make videos lessons until I can make them high quality.” In other words, ‘if it isn’t done with excellence, then I am not going to do it’.

What I have come to realize since then, and I believe the Lord has convicted me a bit on, is that I was dealing with a degree of pride. I didn’t want to put out videos that weren’t excellent because that would reflect poorly on me. All the while, I could have been helping people and bringing them answers to their problems. My pride was holding others back.

Don’t make the same mistake I made. You want to make quality videos, but don’t feel like they have to be professionally produced. They just have to be captivating and draw your pastors into the training experience they are going through.

Simple elements you can use to make your videos interesting and more captivating:

1. Use Visual Aids: just like overhead projectors in high school back in the 90’s (where are my Xers out there) or the flannel graph in your 80’s Sunday school, visual aids greatly increase how interesting your videos are. You can use videos embedded into your video, you can use maps, graphics, charts, or even gifs or funny pictures to break up the experience. I use Ecamm to make adding visual aids into my training quick and easy.
2. Background Music: now this can be overdone, so find the right balance. The primary focus on background music is infusing the mood and atmosphere into the video. Intro music and outro music are pretty good standards to start with, focusing on upbeat music or something that inspires an excitement to learn. You can also have light background music throughout the whole video or at strategic points to change or create the mood of the video for a particular point or purpose. Be sure to follow proper copyright regulations as you use music.
3. Use Minimal Editing: a lot of times those of us who are new to creating videos will not edit at all or will over edit to the point where the video itself is distracting from the content we are sharing. If you want your video to be captivating, you need to edit as much as necessary and no more. Don’t worry about the little mistakes you make, but do edit out the big slip ups and points where you lose your train of thought. At the same time, don’t use every cool transition you can find and every effect that catches your eye. If it doesn’t add value to the experience of your pastors going through the training and distracts from the content, edit it out.

3. Simplify the Experience

If you are like me, you have a tendency to make things more difficult that you need to. I try really hard to live in the world of short and sweet or simple and focused, but a lot of times I end up making things complex and confusing. I don’t mean to, but it just happens because I want to offer such a great, in depth, and complete experience.

But, that’s not what your pastors are looking for. When you are looking to make your pastoral training experience captivating, then you are going to want to keep things simple and straightforward. You want your pastors to know where they are going, where they are, and what is in front of them.

Making a simple experience allows your pastors to focus on learning and applying what they are learning, rather than on figuring out where they are going.

I have had this a lot through my years of education. I had some classes that were clear and laid out so I knew exactly what I was doing and what was coming. But, I have also been in some courses where I had no idea where I was, what my next assignment was going to be, and how I would even get a passing grade. Because the course was so complex and confusing, I spent most of my time trying to figure out the class itself rather than focusing on learning the content the course was designed to teach me.

Training up your pastoral staff is vital and requires you to design it sufficiently to provide exactly what is needed to be successful in ministry. But, don’t allow the gravity of what you are doing cause you to feel like you have to provide a complex training experience or an exhaustive handling of everything you could possibly teach.

Here are some tips to keep your pastoral training experience captivating by simplifying the experience:

1. Provide a Map: anyone going through any training experience just wants to know where things are going. So, provide a clear picture for your pastors of what they can expect. Is everything going to be in one module, or will there be several modules? Will the modules be broken up into sections with multiple sessions inside? Is there something they are supposed to do outside of attending the sessions?
2. Give Clear Instructions: whether you are training through live sessions or through a video format, take the time to give clear instructions. I would lean on the side of giving too many instructions. Give them in bullet points or steps so your pastors going through the training experience know what to do. This will also keep them from coming to you with a ton of questions as they are moving through the content.
3. Provide All Materials: Whether it is books or video links, provide everything needed for your pastors to go through the training experience. If there are online resources your pastors are going to need, build them into your digital experience, or if you are doing the sessions live, provide them with a webpage in your church’s website where they can access all the links they need. Focus on setting them up for success and removing any obstacles you can for them. This makes the experience simple and focused on content.

4. Build in Application Points

This may be one of the most important elements when you are trying to make your engaging pastoral training experience captivating. As I have mentioned throughout this article, you want to avoid a lecture approach to your training experience. Well, providing application points is one of the most valuable ways to keep your pastors captivated in the experience.

Application points are markers in the training experience where your pastors go apply what they have learned and and see their progress in proficiency. When your pastors are able to apply what they are learning and see it in action in real life situations, they will get excited about what they are seeing and they will be eager to learn more.

When I had the privilege of being a director at a ministry training school, one of our phrases we used a lot as a cornerstone of our program was ‘learn by doing’. We believed in the university level training we offered our students, but we also knew that classroom education wasn’t enough. There needed to be application points where students could go and practice what they were learning, see it in action, adjust on the fly, and then ask questions afterwards. This enhanced the learning experience of our students, and the speed at which they retained their ministry training was exponentially increased.

Here are a few ways you can provide application points in your pastoral training experience:

1. Give an assignment: no, I am not talking about writing a report or doing a research paper…though don’t necessarily rule that out. Instead, think about how your pastors can practice what they are learning. A lot of times it is just a matter of reps, and when you give them assignments to do, then they are intentionally putting their learning into practice rather than just jumping to the next video.
2. Brainstorm together: have your pastor sit down with you and hold a brainstorming session on something that is related to what they just learned. Push them to be innovative and think outside the box during the session to help them go beyond the material and look for new and fresh ways to approach ministry.
3. Collaborative Project: have your pastoral staff do a project together. Have them plan and execute an event, do a tag team sermon together, or even start a new ministry from scratch. Look for ways for your pastors to work together while they apply what they are learning and stretch each other in the process.

Conclusion

Your pastoral training experience is vital. In order for it to be successful it must be engaging. The best way to make it engaging is to build in elements that are going to captivate the attention of your pastors going through it and draw them in deeper to the experience.

With these four easy elements, you will certainly be able to captivate them. When you keep the learning modules short, make interesting videos, simplify the experience, and build in application points, you will have a training experience that is going to keep them coming back for more.

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