11 Paradox 3: Reach Young People by Gathering More Old People
11
Paradox 3
Reach Young People by
Gathering More Old People
I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary, a collective creation of previously unimagined quality or beauty.
But don’t count on it.
You can do what I cannot do. I can do what you cannot do.
Together we can do great things.
A few years ago, I read a Sports Illustrated article that clarified once and for all the world’s most dangerous sport. The headline caught my attention and made me wonder, Is it football? Rugby? Maybe ultramarathoning?
Nope.
The most dangerous sport, the one with the highest propensity for injury, is (are you ready for this?) cheerleading.
That’s right. Cheerleading.
Andrea Atkins observes, “Cheerleading is the most dangerous sport of all, according to the most recent report from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina, accounting for half of all catastrophic injuries to female athletes.”
For some of you, I know that’s shocking. Your daughter was right when she told her brother it was harder to be on the cheerleading squad than to play football.
Cheerleading is no longer just about memorizing cheers, shouting in cadence, and waving pompoms. Routines include tossing a human as high as twenty feet into the air and (hopefully) catching her.
Say what you want about whether cheerleading is a real sport or not, but I’ve never seen anyone throw a point guard ten feet above the hoop in the Final Four!
When it comes to ministry with young adults, the most challenging part isn’t planning the program or Bible study. It’s not promoting events, making phone calls, or even getting young people to show up. It just may be cheerleading.
Let me explain.
Young adults desperately need a team of people around them who don’t do the work for them but who inspire, who cheer young adults into work they’re called to do. And like cheerleading, it’s much harder than we might think.
The Numbers 8 Principle
Young adults desperately want relationships with older generations. We know the immense formative power these relationships can have on the young, the old, and the entire church. But facilitating these connections can be one of the most difficult tasks of ministry.
It all begins, at least in my mind, with a shift in mindset for the older generation, a shift that can be a bit unsettling. This shift takes us back to a little-known principle God prescribes for passing along leadership. It’s buried in Numbers 8, tucked inside a lengthy list of instructions for the Levites, Israel’s priestly tribe. The passage could be easy to ignore:
The LORD said to Moses, “This applies to the Levites: Men twenty-five years old or more shall come to take part in the work at the tent of meeting, but at the age of fifty, they must retire from their regular service and work no longer. They may assist their brothers in performing their duties at the tent of meeting, but they themselves must not do the work. This, then, is how you are to assign the responsibilities of the Levites.” (Numbers 8:23-26, emphasis added)
Levites could be called into service as young as twenty-five. David later added a five-year “internship” to this plan and included Levites as young as twenty. This part seems completely logical, exactly what you’d expect.
The part of the design most of us don’t expect is that a Levite’s service at the tent of meeting stopped at fifty.
But there’s a catch.
Being fifty didn’t signal the end of ministry. Older Levites weren’t put out to pasture or forced into early retirement. Though they were actually no longer permitted to do this particular work, they could assist, serving as coaches, mentors, and cheerleaders (minus the pompoms) for younger generations.
The passage is explicit: “they themselves must not do the work.”
Think about the impact those words could have on the church if we applied them even loosely today. Could this cryptic text hint at God’s design for passing along leadership to the next generation? Could this design invite the over-fifty crowd to step out of leadership roles while they still have plenty of ability left so they can coach, assist, and develop the next generation from the sidelines?
Try throwing out this idea at an elders’ meeting, and you might discover this kind of cheerleading really is the most dangerous sport in the church! Think about what might happen to your church if everyone over fifty suddenly stepped back from leadership. For most congregations, “dangerous” doesn’t begin to describe the potential chaos.
On the other hand, what if, as a pastor, I knew from the very beginning of my ministry that at age fifty my leadership role would need to fundamentally shift, that I’d be stepping off the stage and moving into the wings? One thing’s for sure: I’d give a lot more attention to developing leaders around me—a lot earlier—than most church leaders do now.
This provocative Bible passage shifts the lens of young adult ministry away from getting young adults to participate in the programs we design for them (sometimes for no greater purpose than getting them to come to more programs we design for them). The lens shifts to developing the next generation of leaders for God’s people to take part in God’s work.
Just how we make such a shift is the unapologetic focus of the rest of this book.
The End of the Conveyor Belt
Think about college graduation day for a moment. After a few pictures with family, graduates take their seats with all the other robed scholars in their flat hats, completing a journey begun in kindergarten.
After that last piece of cake, that last hug on a sweaty May afternoon, that last promise to keep in touch, the reality of adulthood comes crashing in. After twenty years of schooling, it’s finally over. And life starts to get unsettlingly real.
For many young adults, this new life comes with its own brand of profound loneliness, making the years after college graduation, for some, the loneliest time in their lives. The built-in social circles of school are removed, and the conveyor belt of automatic community comes to an abrupt halt.
Stepping into this stage of life leaves many young adults unhinged and feeling more alone than they ever expected. Many look anywhere—online or otherwise—for places that might offer meaningful connections with actual people, places that provide purposeful outlets for their personality and gifts.
Young adults coming into our circles, into our ministries, and into our churches aren’t just looking for a friendly place; they’re looking for friends, for family. They aren’t looking for a place that knows how to run effective social media campaigns; they’re looking for a place to find and cultivate a new sphere of belonging and impact.
A young adult in his late twenties highlights this longing:
My dad worked his butt off all the time. He grew up at the end of the Depression, and he knew what it was like to go without. He wanted to make sure my brothers and I never had to experience that, but we grew up instead without much of a relationship with him.
I think many baby boomers grew up with a mentality that asked them to work very hard at giving things, but the children of baby boomers missed the connection with them altogether.
Here’s a mixed bag of news:
Good news. Most young adults highly value older generations and long to be connected with a resonant community that spans more than their own life stage.
Bad news. Only 16 percent of young adults regularly interact with any older mentors.
Churches may wince at this reality, but we did it to ourselves. We’ve successfully socialized young adults into assuming that being in church primarily means being with people in their own life stage. Maybe that’s why on-ramps to adulthood are so difficult to find.
How did this happen?
We create a church nursery for babies.
When babies get too old for the nursery, we create a children’s church experience for them during worship.
When children become teenagers, we create a high-energy middle school experience during worship.
When kids finish eighth grade, we provide their own targeted high school worship service (to keep them from being bored in worship).
Those who don’t say goodbye to church when they say goodbye to youth group are shuffled off to a college and career group.
In many churches, it’s become perfectly normal to spend one’s entire childhood and adolescence without ever worshiping with people outside your age group, which reinforces the consumer culture that surrounds you every day. Because of an extensive focus on age-appropriate, attractional programs from birth through high school, many young adults who were highly active in their youth group were never truly part of their church.
They step into adulthood with a developmental and spiritual backdrop in which people of other generations have been almost completely absent from their faith development (apart from teachers and leaders running programs targeted to their specific needs).
No wonder the typical church’s first response to this problem is to start another age-specific program, this time with the name “young adult” attached to it. In one church we visited, an older focus-group member suggested, “Easy. Just put them in a room with each other, add a guitar, and you’re good to go!”
Instead of focusing on programs for young adults, let’s start by focusing on building solid on-ramps to a multigenerational community for young adults. We don’t do it because it’s simply much more complex than creating and advertising a group that almost all young adults will ignore.
On-Ramps to Community
Not only do most churches not yet know how to build on-ramps to a multigenerational community, but most young adults don’t know how to do it either. Indeed, they might not know how to get it or even how to articulate that they want it. But many young adults have a deep longing to connect with other generations. This is especially true for those who’ve spent their lives isolated from the rest of the church.
Take Jennifer, an active twenty-seven-year-old volunteer in her church. She grew up in a traditional, age-segregated program. But after finding a way into the life and leadership of her church, she described it this way:
Being so engaged in the church has brought a sense of purpose in my life. I have a church where I am an important piece of the puzzle. Before, I only attended a service full of college students. We were all on the same path with the same goal. But now there are people from all walks of life, and their unique perspectives challenge me in so many ways.
When young adults do find an on-ramp for engaging with other generations, it can be a game changer for both generations. Believe it or not, these relationships, rather than the next greatest attractional gimmick, are what hold the greatest opportunity for sustained involvement in the life of your church.
As one author puts it:
If there’s one lesson to take away from this corpus of literature [about young adults leaving the church], it’s this: Intergenerational relationships are crucial. The number one predictive factor as to whether or not a young Christian will retain his or her faith is whether that person has a meaningful relationship with an older Christian.
Researchers Allan Martin and Clint Jenkin echo this message: “For so many of our respondents, their relationship with the church was determined by their relationship with older members. These were even more important than peer relationships in many cases.”
When comparing young adults who stayed active in their faith after adolescence with those who dropped out of church, Barna’s research confirms that those who stayed were almost twice as likely (59 percent versus 31 percent) to have a close personal friendship with an adult inside the church. Said another way, seven out of ten young adults who lost their connection with the church did not have a close relationship with an older adult.
The fact is, when it comes to young adult ministry, intergenerational relationships serve as the glue for connection to church. But as statistics bear out, these kinds of relationships almost never happen on their own. They require intentional work.
This means you’ll need to take a very practical step in building your church’s young adult ministry: forming a “coaching squad.”
Building Your Team
I have a friend who’s a turnaround expert for high school football teams. He’s now taken three teams with abysmal records to championships, each within three years or less. No matter what kind of talent pool he’s handed (and almost always, as he says, “It ain’t much”), his first priority, surprisingly enough, isn’t to focus on the players but to assemble a coaching team to work his game plan. Any church that hopes to build a thriving young adult program needs to do the same thing.
Intergenerational impact begins by building your team of coaches. Watch for people whose eyes light up about the prospect of working on such ideas. You’ll want at least three people on your team and no more than ten.
As you ask people to serve on this team, don’t worry yet about handing them a job description. Starting out, the project is too open-ended for airtight roles. As you begin talking with possible coaches and cheerleaders in your church, you’ll want to simply define the win, something like this:
We want our church to be a place where young adults engage profoundly in God’s mission. Some of them may stay for the rest of their lives, but most of them will be here for just a few years. We want our church to be the place where young adults have opportunity for service and relationship, and we want mentors who will help young adults make an impact for Christ in our community and our world. I’m not asking you to start a young adult Bible study or teach a Sunday school class. I’m asking you to partner with me and a few others for the next few years to create the kind of place that nurtures and develops the dreams of the next generation so profoundly that both the church and our young adults are changed in the process.
At this point, you’ll certainly come across people who like your idea and are willing to help. You’ll be tempted to put them on your coaching team.
Don’t do it.
Let me say it again: some people will merely want to help you with your idea. Don’t put them on your coaching squad.
You’re looking for people who have as much (or more) passion as you do about this dream. One person on your team who’s doing you a favor will diffuse the focus of the entire group. Helpers eventually will be great resources for you. But resist the temptation to put helpers on your coaching squad.
After recruiting your squad, it’s time to pull them all together to clarify exactly what they’re getting into. At your first meeting, start by having them each share why young adult ministry matters to them. Next, lay the groundwork, defining the process the team will be working. You can offer the sample ministry team job description (see “Ministry Job Descriptions” online) or draft your own based on the following basic template.
Invest in relationships. Spend time with young adults, inviting them over for dinner and having coffee with them, all outside of structured programming.
Facilitate friendships. Introduce young adults to people of other generations in the church.
Take the long view. Be prepared to work this process with the team for at least three years.
Show up. We don’t yet know what venues will take center stage for our young adult ministry. If the venue is a food truck, this team will be regular customers. If it’s a tutoring program, the coaches will be around. If it’s a worship service, the coaches will be as regular as the furniture.
Provide guidance. God told Moses that Levites older than fifty must not “do the work themselves” but must support the younger team. We’ll offer wisdom and lend a hand when we can, but the young adults themselves will carry the weight of leadership.
Reciprocate. Be willing to learn and receive from young adults, not just teach and give to them. Move beyond a transactional top-down relationship into a reciprocal, side-by-side relationship.
In this first gathering, you’ll give the coaching squad the opportunity to update the covenant (job description) together and agree to a basic understanding of what they’re committing to do. Once they’ve agreed to a covenant, provide a skeleton description of the process:
We’ll read this book together during the first three months.
We’ll continually develop a database of all the young adults we know who are in some way connected to our church.
We’ll meet with young adults one-on-one and in group settings until their vision of ministry in our community becomes clear, and then we’ll figure out the next steps.
We’ll select a project (or projects) and work together to launch it (or them), side by side with young adults, who will take the lead, with our support.
We’ll expect that our first few prototype ideas won’t work, so we’ll be prepared to keep processing with our young adult friends, rebooting and trying new initiatives. We’ll remember that no project is a failure if it provides an avenue to work alongside young adults and support them.
We’ll keep repeating the process of helping young adults live into their God-given missional dreams until we get the reputation for being that place in the community that really does help young adults move the needle.
There’s a good chance your team will attempt to do things that haven’t been done before, at least not at your church. Think of this work as a laboratory for the future church, its R & D department.
Of course, every laboratory has one thing in common—lots of failed experiments! But each failure can take your team one step closer to discovering just what you’re looking for (usually more than you’re looking for!).
Someone Has to Be the Head Coach
Our experience has been that any coaching squad won’t make much progress without a head coach, a team leader. Many churches assume that the answer to their young adult problem will come in the form of a singular leader—a superhuman—who can be a one-person relational magnet for college students or twenty-somethings.
Too often ministries that take this approach end up riding a roller coaster of ups and downs, success and failure, all predicated on the comings and goings of these individual leaders. Though a point leader is crucial to any enterprise, the best kind of young adult ministry leader has more spider skills than super skills.
They are web-weaving connectors rather than stand-alone problem solvers. For some churches, the team leader might be a dedicated staff person. For many, it will be a dedicated volunteer.
You don’t necessarily need a team leader who’s the high-energy, upfront face of the young adult ministry. But you do need someone to keep the trains running on time (and, to extend the metaphor, to be ready to fix the trains, build new tracks, and dispatch work crews as needed). See “Ministry Job Descriptions” at ivpress.com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry for a sample job description for a team leader.
This person doesn’t need to be the relational and spiritual center of the ministry but a leader-developer, the one who creates and maintains the platform for others (including young adults themselves) to exercise their gifts, who weaves the web of the ministry. Without this type of team leader in place, your ministry with young adults will likely sputter in fits and starts, typically unraveling before it gets off the ground.
Almost the Right Words
Finding a word to describe the young adult ministry role for this team of adults in your church has been tricky for me.
Though cheerleading is a great metaphor, it can give the impression that the job is to stay on the sidelines, out of the game. The word coach also can be interpreted as one who sits above young adults and gives them marching orders, advice, support, or systems analysis when things go wrong.
In a healthy, sustainable young adult ministry, the (sometimes only slightly) older adult leaders learn just as much from young adults as the young adults learn from them. By using the terms coach and cheerleader, a reciprocal partnership can easily be missed.
But ultimately, with fear and trembling about the potential confusion, I decided to stick with coaching language.
Here’s why: the end goal of any coach is to see the players succeed, to have them win games. The goal of any coaching staff isn’t to win the prize as the world’s best coach but to win games. Your coaching team will consist of people looking for young adults to succeed and empowering them to have that kind of success.
The best way for young adults to learn how to lead the church in the future is for them to lead in the church now. And the best way for them to succeed in church leadership now is to be supported, coached, partnered with, and surrounded by a generation of cheerleaders, participating in the most dangerous sport in the church.