When my Brother and I first started talking about youthmin.org last summer, we had a lot of dreams for it, some of which were realistic and some maybe not so much, at least not for now.

But if you had asked me in October, when we were heavily working on getting the site up and running and ready for launch, what my vision for the site was, you would have gotten what now seems like a very shortsighted answer.

I wanted to create a site in Youth Ministry that would amplify the voice of the “Everyday Youth Pastor” and create dialogue about things in Youth Ministry.

In talking to a friend recently, he asked me “What would you define ‘Success’ as for youthmin.org?” And I had to think long and hard about it, and truthfully, I’m still not done thinking.

Two months ago, I would have said success would be getting 1,000 views a day, 20 comments a day, 20 ReTweets a day. And as I thought about that more, I realized that specifically with a blog, these are some of the only metrics you can use for judging the effectiveness of what you are doing. To me, Success is all about Effectiveness, and when I look at the above, I would say  if our site was doing those things, we would be Effective in starting dialogue in relation to Youth Ministry.

But then I wrote my goals for February post after a “Poor” month in January for the site (Poor in relation to the above metrical goals, I still think we pumped out some great content last month). It’s almost like I willed things into happening, because we went from an average of 350 views a day in January, until the day I wrote that I wanted to hit 25,000 views in February, when our stats doubled and we’ve been closer to 1000 views every day this month, sometimes more sometimes a little less.

All that to say, we are showing signs of “effectiveness.”

But are we really?

I read a lot of posts about Youth Ministry, but I also read a lot about social media and blogging, and one thing I have come to see as being true is that the best blogs know what product they are selling. Now, I don’t mean they are selling a literal product (though many are) but they fully understand why their Readers read their blog specifically over the thousands of other blogs out there, and they know how to capitalize on that.

I would put forth that these bloggers have made the Vision Turn. I don’t think there is a single thing a person has started without vision. For all the talk about the word by Leaders in whatever industry, I would say Vision is not what lacks from most leaders. It’s easy to have. I mean, literally, thinking back, how hard was it for my brother and I to have a “Vision” for a new Youth Ministry site? We saw a few needs, and saw a way to fill them, and have been working at that.

But the problem comes when organizations, be it blogs, Youth Ministries, Churches, Companies, whatever, reach their vision turn, when the “What are we going to do?” turns into the “What are we going to do next?”

I think back to an article in Group magazine this past Spring/Summer about a Youth Worker who was fired from a church, and in his article he talked about one of the things he believed led up to his release was the lack of vision in the church after finishing a huge building campaign. I would put forth that this church failed to make the vision turn.

Coming up with a dream is only a fourth of the battle. The hard part is figuring out what to really do when you get there.

I don’t know whats next for youthmin.org. We’re not there yet, still a long way off. But I also know, if I don’t start planning for it now, then Youthmin.org will be a pretty cool site for a few months and then die off.

Just like in Youth Ministry. It’s easy to see a Youth Pastor who says “I want to build a building and it would look like this, and it would have this purpose, and were going to have 200 new kids this next year, and 50 baptisms.” Thats a great sounding vision. But when it happens, when those things are true, what are you going to do?

Prepare for the vision turn before you get to the curve.