13 Paradox 5: Respond to Lack of Commitment by Asking for More

13

Paradox 5

Respond to Lack of Commitment by Asking for More

The average age when formal leadership training starts is 42.

We give leaders a 20- to 40-year head start.

Joining my church’s mission has brought a sense of purpose in my life. I have a church where I’m an important piece of the puzzle in making a difference.

With all I’ve already said about giving more responsibility to young adults, now might be a good time for a reality check.

Loyalty. Longevity. Responsibility. Follow-through.

These probably aren’t the first words you’d use to describe young adults. If you’ve done even cursory research on this generation, you’re more likely to use entitled, lazy, and unable to follow through on the simplest tasks.

When it comes to planning ahead, Lauren, a college student, admits it’s not a strong suit of her peers. She says,

[Millennials] act as though social engagements, parties, and activities where people gather are more like opportunities. A smorgasbord of possibilities, if you will. They take in all the possible offers and then wait until the last minute to decide which one to attend based off of how beneficial it will be to them individually. It does not matter if they already agreed to go. If something better comes along, they’ll go to that.

Cassie, age twenty-seven, reflects a similar mentality: “I join about 12 Facebook events a month for shows or birthdays and go to something like two of them.”

And it’s not just social engagements where young adults seem to lack staying power. Perceptions in the workplace are equally as incriminating:

In one poll, 68 percent of those surveyed say young adult employees are less motivated to take on responsibility and produce quality work than their counterparts in other age groups, and 46 percent believe young adults are less engaged at work than other employees.

If we approach our young adult ministry with those same assumptions about young adults, we’ll likely move in exactly the wrong direction. We’ll assume the only way to work with young adults is to expect little of them, knowing that so few actually stick around once their initial interest fades.

And that approach would be a huge mistake, one I’m sure Karen is glad her church didn’t make with her.

Today, Karen is a supervolunteer in her church’s youth ministry. But it didn’t start out that way. She was typically late or absent for team meetings, regularly texting at the last minute about why she’d have to miss. She cited excuses such as a full class schedule, too much homework, or just “life.” Karen was stretched to the limit and didn’t really have space for youth ministry.

She didn’t have space until she was approached a different way. Instead of lowering the bar and asking Karen to take on even less than her current one-hour-a-week volunteer role, the youth pastor invited her to make a deeper commitment: run the winter retreat.

Although this was an exponentially greater commitment, more like ten hours per week for a month or two, something clicked.

Maybe it was because this opportunity gave Karen something to direct and own rather than just help out. Maybe it was because this was a seasonal commitment rather than an open-ended weekly one. Maybe this challenge tapped into her organizational genius.

Regardless, Karen’s story provides a great picture of the young adult mindset. It’s not that they don’t have time or ability to follow through on commitments. Like Karen, most young adults make time for what matters to them. Despite the stereotypes of laziness and inconsistency, young adults desire to make an impact, and if an opportunity taps into that desire, their likelihood of staying committed and interested shoots way up. They desire deeper commitments, even though they have trouble making them.

The Relative Value of Time

A friend with more than a decade of ministry experience (who now serves as a consultant for other churches) recently described her disappointing experience trying to volunteer at her home church. She told the youth director that her travel schedule (due to coaching other youth ministries) made her unavailable most Sundays but that she’d love to help with the midweek youth group or maybe a small group during the week.

The youth director seemed pleased and said he’d find something to fit this eager volunteer’s schedule. A week later, he called back and asked if she’d take responsibility for updating the youth ministry bulletin board once a month.

My friend was understandably disappointed—and not because the job was too hard. She certainly could have done the bulletin board in much less time than she was planning to volunteer to actually work with students. But the offer felt like a massive misappropriation of her gifts.

Even she was curious about her gut-level reaction: “It’s funny. Ask me to change your bulletin board once a month—maybe a thirty-minute job—and I don’t have time. But ask me to do something that takes several hours a week but fits my gifts—like overhauling the struggling junior high program or launching a new group for middle school girls—and I’ll find the time!”

Churches everywhere struggle with the lack of commitment they see in young adults. They seem to show up for a season, promise a lot, and then disappear. A young adult once committed to take a key role in our ministry and enter into our internship program only to drop out less than a month later.

The key is understanding that time is a relative concept in the young adult universe. On the surface, they may seem overscheduled, with way too much on their plates. It’s easy to assume this population won’t have time for the church. But ask them to join a mission that resonates with their own gifts and—bam!—they suddenly have time. Research backs it up.

With seemingly unavailable young adults, the best approach may seem to be lowering the bar and asking less of them. What if the best solution is actually asking more, inviting them to greater levels of ownership and leadership in the church? Certainly this won’t work for everybody, but for some it will serve as the gateway into fruitful, profound engagement.

It sure worked this way for Erin, a twenty-something in our church, but not without first creating a little discomfort for me.

As the church’s worship coordinator, Erin spent three to five hours a week organizing our worship teams. When we met for lunch, she was amped—brimming with big ideas. I assumed this lunch was about ideas she had for the worship team but couldn’t have been more off. She had ideas for how the entire church might engage in mission more faithfully together.

While Erin talked, I realized I’d been seeing her only in the category of worship coordinator. And honestly, she fit well into that slot. But she made it clear she had much more to offer than I gave her credit for.

And offer she did. As our dreaming and brainstorming came to a close, Erin said, “This is the reason I’m here. This is the reason I want to be part of this church. Can I go for it?”

As the pastor, I had a decision to make. I could keep things tidy and confine Erin to the slot where she was serving (“Just play your position, and let me worry about the big picture”). Or I could give her permission to step out, knowing that her ideas weren’t part of any linear strategic plan the church or I had developed. What if, I wondered, creating a laboratory for innovation—a place for young adults to make their creative contributions—became part of our linear strategy?

I decided if I was serious about engaging young adults, not just getting them to show up, I’d need to make room to see them in new ways, viewing their desire to make an impact as intimately tied to our call as the church. I had to recognize that Erin’s ideas weren’t simply from a single, enthusiastic young adult. They were an expression of the unanswered cry of a generation: “Help me make an impact!”

I couldn’t help but hear the implied message: “And if I can’t make an impact here, I’m not going to wait. I’ll make an impact somewhere else.”

The End of Assimilation: A Modest Proposal

In the last decade or so, how we’ve thought about and involved young leaders in decision-making has drastically changed (and it needed to).

It used to be a normal, effective practice for key leaders to sit around the decision-making table and then report their decisions to younger apprentices. Young leaders took their cues from the older decision-makers and implemented those people’s decisions.

Some younger leaders expressed a desire for a voice in the process, but more simply left the church. Many young leaders assumed (often correctly) they could make a more profound contribution through a nonprofit startup or through their secular employment than by waiting for the older generation to allow them a meaningful seat at the decision-making table.

Today, younger leaders have gone a step further, desiring not just a voice but an actual opportunity to shape decisions. Today, the only way to truly work with younger leaders is to make sure their voice and their values affect the outcome.

I’m a systems guy; that much has been clear throughout the book, I hope. I’ve spent lots of time trying to understand how to build systems that ensure a healthy, grounded culture in churches. Healthy churches don’t make up processes as they go. They read books, attend seminars, and avoid reinventing the wheel as much as possible.

In many churches, the assimilation system has been popular for decades. It’s designed to help move people to deeper involvement at church, from being guests and visitors to contributing members.

I’ve come to believe that assimilation is a terrible word for what we’re trying to do with young adults. It conjures up images of a Star Trek-themed clone-making assembly line. Assimilation assumes that the most important questions churches should ask about new members are, “How do we transition them into the dominant culture of our church? How do we get them to buy into what we’ve created and support it with their time and money?”

It’s time to give up trying to assimilate the next generation. That ship has sailed. We might find ourselves lowering the commitment bar just to get them to jump over it and join what we’re doing, but young adults aren’t interested in being absorbed into the dominant culture of our churches. They want a role in shaping and creating an entirely new culture.

Here’s my modest proposal: find ways to deliberately share the responsibility for shaping your church’s future with the generation you’d like to see lead it in the next fifteen to twenty years. Consider creating a Next Generation Leadership Academy.

Here’s the basic idea: most churches have little if any process in place for cultivating a new generation of leaders. The best that most can imagine is trying to include a token young person (read: under forty) to serve on the leadership board. In our observation, these experiences are often exercises in frustration, with young voices routinely stifled by the status quo and an old guard annoyed by new ideas from upstart young leaders.

What if a Next Generation Leadership Academy became a normal part of the workings of every church? It could happen naturally—when the only churches left in twenty years are those that have successfully found ways to engage the coming generation’s leadership power.

Though the details can vary, a Next Generation Leadership Academy contains the following components.

The goal is to make it normal to have space for young leaders not to be assimilated into the church’s dominant culture but to become co-creators of it.

Like every initiative with young adults, though, we anticipate that building a Next Generation Leadership Academy requires a commitment to a multiyear process of beta testing, prototyping, evaluating, and improving. For a more detailed proposal for a Next Generation Leadership Academy go to ivpress.com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry.

A Working Prototype

Chris Sasser, a friend and fellow Ministry Architects consultant, found a way to develop the leadership capacity of young adults when he launched the Leadership Journey. He was looking for a new way—beyond the typical approach of drawing young adults into church programming—of doing young adult ministry at his church in Wilmington, North Carolina.

So instead of returning to what he knew wouldn’t gain much traction or have much impact, Chris focused on equipping young adults for changing the world with the gospel. Soon he realized the cards had been stacked in his favor. He says,

We had college students graduating who wanted to make an impact. But they felt like their options were limited. They couldn’t afford to do a “clean water for Africa” trip, and they weren’t looking to give up their jobs and go on Young Life staff. Some of them were doing a gap year after college to focus on mission but only a small fraction.

So Chris started by creating an equipping ministry specifically designed for juniors and seniors in college. He sets the admission cost high. Every member fills out an application and, if selected, commits to an in-depth leadership-development program. The Journey meets once a week during the academic year and includes weekly training in some aspect of Christian leadership, small-group accountability, a mission initiative, and even homework.

For the first few weeks, the focus is on discernment, as group members seek to discover ways they’re each uniquely wired for ministry. The rest of the first semester grounds them in the biblical narrative of leadership.

In the second semester, young people are introduced to a few key leadership books and to faithful, effective leaders from the community. Each student meets weekly throughout the length of the program with an older adult coach. In the process of doing life together, the coach works to integrate the concepts being learned with the craft of leadership, all while being attentive to the ways and places God is at work.

A natural byproduct of the Leadership Journey is authentic community. The fact that it’s a byproduct and not the goal is a subtle but important distinction. Chris didn’t set out to create a young adult fellowship that would attract people, but community happened through being in the trenches together. In fact, community happened in much more profound ways than it might ever have happened in a group designed specifically for fellowship.

Most participants begin not knowing many other group members. But the third space of shared mission ends up creating such a transforming power that a rich sense of community is unavoidable. The Journey process has had such a profound impact on students that most find themselves signing up for a second year that has more extensive requirements.

Chris has capitalized on the in-between season of young adulthood, providing a high-demand, high-commitment experiment in Christian leadership. After completing the first year, more than one participant has described the experience as their single most important faith step.

Chris isn’t focused on attracting young adults with a low-threshold, easy-commitment program. This demanding training program offers young adults an intensive, résumé-building internship in project management, ministry, and mission. And the high commitment on the front end raises the stakes and signals that this is anything but “youth group 2.0.”

No Easy Button

Let that story give you hope. You don’t need show-stopping, hip programming (like those one or two churches in your town have) for a profound ministry with young adults. Hopefully, you begin to see that a ministry such as the Leadership Journey might work in your congregation, even with a handful of young adults you currently know.

But before rushing to launch your own equipping ministry for young leaders in your church and community, you’ll want to count the cost. Scale your vision to what your church can afford, not so much in dollars but in time you’ll need to invest. Counting the cost can be painful, but not nearly as painful as skipping this step. For us, it was agonizing.

Our church was recently on the receiving end of a wonderful opportunity. We were offered access to a prime piece of real estate in the hub of a housing development right next to a university. The space included offices, a large gathering space, a café, and a media room—it was amazing!

The best part? More than a thousand students live within walking distance. The property developers were interested in a Christian organization investing in the students living there. All we had to do was move in and initiate some kind of ministry. As our church leaders and I toured the space, our minds raced with ideas:

In those first euphoric moments, our ideas for maximizing this opportunity flowed easily. We’d found “the easy button”—until we looked more closely.

As we dug into the complexity of this arrangement and our available resources, we couldn’t see a way to make this opportunity work for the long haul. We didn’t have a leader with the margin to invest. We didn’t have the finances to even launch a ministry, much less handle the ongoing maintenance and overhead of a new space. Certainly, we could have just done something in that space, but the opportunity, the need, and our available resources didn’t match up.

Although it broke our hearts to let this pass by, we knew the “we just need to” solutions we imagined on our first visit would have resulted in underplanning, understaffing, underresourcing and, as a result, underperforming and underachieving our vision for ministry.

With disappointing regularity, churches approach young adult ministry with an easy-button mentality, throwing a few spare dollars or an inexperienced leader in the general direction of young adults, hoping to get them to show up and engage even once. An opportunity presents itself and we dive in without a fully developed, adequately resourced, sustainable game plan, and unsurprisingly it doesn’t work out.

Young adults function within a paradox of time that’s different from what we might assume. Just because they don’t have time to attend doesn’t mean they don’t have time to lead, create, or build. For the church to capture the imagination and potential of the next generation, it takes a commitment to embrace this paradox and raise the bar for young adults within the church. Not just the bar of expectations but also the bar of responsibility, accountability, and leadership.

That kind of approach can’t start with “just doing something.” It takes careful planning and courageous implementation of a new way of reaching and equipping young adults. The shortcut, easy-button approach seems so much simpler. But it can’t hold a candle to the slow, deliberate cultivation process required for the kind of young adult ministry you’ve been praying for.

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