15 I Don’t Know . . . Yet: Practicing the Long Obedience
15
I Don’t Know . . . Yet
Practicing the Long Obedience
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
You can have it all. Just not all at once.
I’ll be honest: writing this book has been a challenge. At first I thought it would be a great way to get my ideas out in the world. I thought it was a way to respond to all the young adult ministry blogs without having to visit every comment section. And, if I’m honest, I thought it might be a way to make me feel smart.
But it didn’t.
It made me feel dumb.
I started this project feeling like an expert in young adult ministry. After all, I had already implemented ideas and had extensive experience in the field. Then my coauthor, Mark, started asking me questions, an endless series of annoying “how will this help the ordinary church” questions.
And more often than I care to admit, I didn’t know the answer—at least not yet. Mark would say, “Right now, we have ideas. What we don’t have is a proven process that actually works.” And he was right.
Fortunately, I had a laboratory provided by my consulting work through Ministry Architects. Each church I worked with gave me the chance to beta test, prototype, and iterate. With each new iteration, I approached my work like a research scientist, searching for the right alchemy for each new context.
During the four years it took to write this book, I closed the young adult church I was leading, and self-doubt haunted me. I’ve wondered at times whether my ideas might work only in my own head. But four years is a lot of time to observe the realities of real-life churches.
One was First United Presbyterian Church in Belleville, Illinois. On my visit there, I spent a day with group after group listening to their dreams and struggles in young adult ministry. The pastor had brought me in to do an assessment and to provide a working plan for moving forward.
To make the experience more interesting, my schedule leading up to the trip was jam-packed, my kids were ornery at my departure, and I faced major travel issues getting there. But once I arrived at the church, I was inspired by a surprising pattern. Every listening group shared the almost exact same story—a story that reminded me why this project matters so much.
This remarkably healthy congregation was doing fine, despite having little-to-no young adult ministry. By the time of my visit, they’d gone so far as to recruit a team leader and a young adult ministry team to begin thinking about reaching students at the small college down the street.
In focus group after focus group I heard this surprising perspective: “We don’t even care if they come to church here. This is an underserved age group we need to care about.”
And over and over, church members affirmed, “We have absolutely no idea what to do next.”
The more I listened, the more it became abundantly clear: they were desperate for a plan. They had resources to invest. They had people to lead. The whole church was committed.
The light bulb clicked on, and I began to see how acutely lost churches can feel when it comes to ministry with young adults. I realized there are few if any accurate road maps to help churches take the right next steps.
If I could’ve read these chapters aloud to the saints at First United, they would’ve gobbled them up. They would’ve nodded in agreement about the six mistakes (I can imagine them saying, “Oh, so that’s why . . .”). They would’ve been eager to implement the principles of the paradoxes as well as the sample implementation plan in this chapter.
They were ready to do something, but they had no idea what to do or how to do it. And they aren’t alone. The vast majority of churches want to do something to reach young adults, but almost all of them are stuck. They simply don’t know what to do next.
As one woman in Belleville said, “Everyone’s always talking about how young adults are turned off by the church. What if we’re the reason they choose to stay away for good?” Some churches become paralyzed and wonder, “What if we’re that church?” No wonder some congregations never reach the starting line with young adults.
If you’ve wondered throughout this book exactly what to do next, this chapter is for you.
I Don’t Know . . . Yet
Friedrich Nietzsche said, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be long obedience in the same direction.” Eugene Peterson saw this truth with such clarity that he titled one of his first books A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.
If you’re part of a team charged with building your church’s ministry to young adults, be prepared for a long drive. This is one of those cross-country family vacations to the Grand Canyon in a minivan kind of journeys. It’s no quick trip to the pizza shop.
Any plan to address the complexity of young adult ministry begins with the recognition that epic, sustainable change—for churches, for individuals, for organizations—just doesn’t happen quickly.
Time can be a productive partner in creating the kind of change that lasts, that doesn’t run over people in the process, and that’s profound enough to navigate resistance and sabotage. When Ministry Architects works with churches to build young adult ministries, we recommend a five-year horizon. Quick fixes—especially in the church—usually are neither quick nor do they fix much of anything.
When working the processes outlined in this book, you’ll experience days of rapid growth when enthusiasm is high, when you feel the wind in your sails. Then there will be days when your ministry simmers on the back burner or actually takes a few steps backward.
There will be seasons of profound discovery and (more often) seasons of one failed experiment after another. And there will be days—likely many more days—when you just put one faithful foot in front of the other. And on each of those days, you do what needs to be done, working the long, slow process of creating the kind of change that takes root.
When churches are in a hurry to solve the problem of young adult ministry quickly, they’re most vulnerable to the kind of classic mistakes that, in the long run, require immensely more time. Hurried churches tend to launch a series of herky-jerky initiatives, assuming that a single home-run solution is the answer. Or they focus on single, short-lived, isolated events, claiming success way too prematurely.
Your church doesn’t have to live that narrative.
Here’s what we’ve discovered: faithful failing in the right direction almost always works. We call it “dumb persistence.” This key value has guided Ministry Architects from the very beginning. And it all starts with the words “I don’t know . . . yet.”
Young adults are by definition a highly diverse, individualistic, and paradoxical people group. As I hope we’ve proven throughout the past fourteen chapters, you can’t build a thriving ministry by imposing a few well-meaning programs on young adults. You must start with a stance of intentional ignorance, which is a pretty good place to begin when working with any new group.
Of course, every church’s approach must be, at some level, unique. But at the same time, we’re convinced that every church can build a thriving young adult ministry by working the same, deliberate, long-term strategy outlined in this chapter.
One Step at a Time
To borrow from Eugene Peterson’s title, I propose that people responsible for launching a young adult ministry practice an “obedience” to a basic process, to a system that, when practiced over time, is almost certain to guarantee results. I’m not saying this is the only process that works—only that you need a process. Use ours. Use someone else’s. Create your own system. But work a deliberate plan.
Don’t make the rookie mistake of cobbling together a few isolated “great ideas” from books, seminars, and ministry anecdotes and expect them to work. They won’t, at least not for the long haul.
Though previous chapters have touched on various components of this system, the following is a step-by-step process your church can use as a road map to get started (the appendix contains an expanded Young Adult Ministry Road Map).
Step 1. Assess the landscape. The first step focuses on evaluating resources, with eyes wide open to the kind of effort and investment this project requires. You’ll ask, realistically, “How valuable is this ministry in the landscape of everything else our church does?”
Determine whether building a young adult ministry is worth it. Because launching a ministry requires a long-term, sustained investment of time, volunteers, and resources, good stewardship requires counting the cost. Every church considering this question should ask, “Are we willing to invest time, energy, and focus over the next five years to build a ministry that effectively engages, disciples, and dispatches young adults into mission?”
Though a negative answer may seem heartless, it’s far better to never begin than to waste time and resources on work that will be abandoned after the first dozen failures, when church finances get tight, or as committee membership rotates.
Take stock of available resources. Once your church decides to enter the long-launch process, you’ll want to identify and compile your resources:
Develop a database (contact list) of any and all young adults connected to your church, even distant connections. Remember: this isn’t a list of just the young adults who would identify themselves as members or attendees of your church. It must include the barista you’ve gotten to know at your favorite coffee shop and the son of a church member who’s serving overseas.
A good rule of thumb is that you’re ready to begin inviting young adults to “programming” only after you have a database list of fifty or so young adults.
Create a database of local resources that connect to young adults in the community. This can include local colleges, other churches, restaurants, coffee shops, and apartment complexes that draw young adults.
Develop a list of any potential volunteers in the church who might have a heart and a vision for building a thriving young adult ministry, including young adults themselves.
If you have young adult programming that’s working, compile a one-page calendar and description of those programs, including the number and names of young adults involved.
Step 2. Gather and equip a team. Don’t try to go alone into unchartered territory. Invite and prepare a team of fellow travelers to go along.
Pray for young adults. Even before your first team meeting, get into the habit of praying by name for the young adults in your community (using the aforementioned database as a prayer guide). Once your team is recruited, invite them to establish the same practice themselves. Nothing focuses a team on the specific needs of your young adults quite like praying for them.
Build a team. Your team can be as small as three members or as large as ten. In a perfect world, at least one-third of the team will be young adults themselves, but don’t let an inability to hit this target stop you from moving forward. The key is to have a team, with each person’s role always including building a relationship with at least one young adult not yet on the team. (A sample job description and meeting agenda for this team are online at ivpress .com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry.)
Warning: As you start to build a team, you don’t want a highly anxious, impatient, easy-answer person who will cry “The sky is falling!” at the first steep hill. Here’s a clue: if a potential team member tends to use the word just a lot (e.g., “We just need to get a class started”), you likely have the wrong person.
The most important team member will be someone (perhaps two someones) willing to champion this effort for at least the next five years. It isn’t necessary to expect every team member to make a five-year commitment, but it’s wise to have the project’s champion work with a five-year horizon.
In addition to the point person(s), you’ll need to cover the following skills, understanding that one team member may have more than one of these:
database management and tracking
entrepreneurship
marketing and social media
local mission
volunteer development
leadership role in the church (from which to effectively advocate for and communicate about young adult ministry)
Get outside support. The team should determine whether it needs to accelerate and ensure progress by including a consulting group with a focus on young adult ministry (e.g., ministryarchitects.com or another group with a similar young adult focus). Though this may seem like an extravagance, consider this comparison: few churches would consider a major capital campaign without a campaign consultant. Few churches would consider a major building project without an outside firm to help. When it comes to accomplishing a mission your church has never successfully completed before, it can save a lot of time and money to have someone on your team who knows the process and has already completed it successfully.
Anchor your team in reality. Your first meetings as a team involve anchoring it in the real world of young adult ministry. Most people will come to this mission with some idea of how it “should” be done, usually based on little more than their experiences with youth or young adults themselves. Most conveniently forget the fundamental reality that almost all churches are, by their own estimation, failing in this area of ministry.
It will be natural to begin with easy-answer suggestions such as, “All we need to do is what Young Life, a popular campus ministry, is doing.” To counter this tendency, work this training process:
Confirm the job description for the Young Adult Ministry Team, updating it as necessary.
Do a group study of this book together (using the discussion questions at the end of this book). To avoid getting bogged down, have your team complete this study in three months or less, if possible (but no more than six months).
Identify a few churches with similar demographics as yours that are doing something right in their young adult ministry. Do a case study of each church to identify any transferrable principles. Note: if you’re a 150-member, hundred-year-old mainline church, it likely won’t help to benchmark against the 2,000-member, ten-year-old church across town that has catered to young adults from day one!
Step 3. Engage young adults’ first fruits. Now that you and your team have a clear view of what you have and where you want to go, the next step is to gather the low-hanging fruit by creating easy access points for the young adults you’ve been meeting or who are already within your team’s orbit.
Deliberately build connections. This step ensures that your work with young adults comes from your relationships with them rather than great ideas about them.
Remind the group that the most important part of their work is getting to know specific young adults in the church and community.
Create a master list of all the young adults who team members are connected to in some way, including who’s connected to whom.
This is the point when team members begin tracking and recording the relationships they’re each building with young adults, a process that happens at every Young Adult Ministry Team meeting (see “Young Adult Intentional Relationship Plan Tracking Sheet” at ivpress.com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry).
Select a young-adult-friendly mission. Find one local mission effort in your church that you can immediately begin inviting young adults to. An ideal mission includes the following characteristics:
Ease of involvement (e.g., multiple scheduling options, no lengthy training requirements, proximity to the church).
Already a strong connection with your church, with multiple champions for this mission within the congregation.
A mission that resonates with a wide spectrum of young adults.
A turnkey project that lets people show up, get oriented, and begin working without having to collect and transport lots of tools and supplies.
If your church doesn’t have a local mission project that fits, you’ll need to find (or create) one.
Create a calendar of mission-engagement opportunities for young adults for the coming year, with at least one event per quarter.
Promote, engage, and track young adults. Once your mission is set, develop easy-entry opportunities for young adults to serve in it.
Invite young adults in your database to make a difference in the community, encouraging them to bring friends who might enjoy being part of this kind of mission experience. This can happen through email or social media, but—especially early on—you’ll want to ask each young adult directly.
For each project or event, have a team of non-young adults and young adults in more or less equal number.
When the group gathers for the project, take a few minutes to introduce the volunteers to one another and gather contact information for any new person serving.
As the work progresses, ensure there’s ample space for relational connections during the project or during meals afterward so non-young adults can take initiative to learn about each young adult.
Add into the young adult database the contact information for new participants, track the participation of attendees, and include appropriate notes (e.g., “new to town,” “mom is a pastor,” “working in the music business”).
Stay connected through social media or email with all young adults who participate in a mission project, continually updating them with progress reports and opportunities to participate again.
Continue improving and expanding this process until your team feels comfortably connected with at least ten young adults. For some churches, this can easily take a year or more.
Step 4. Listen and discern your next-step model. Now that you’ve built relationships with young adults and have begun engaging some of them in an outward-focused mission, it’s time to discern their particular passions for innovating, leading, and impacting the world around them.
Listen to their change-the-world dreams. By this point in the process, your team will have built relationships with quite a number of young adults who have, at one time or another, been involved in your mission. It’s likely that a few of them may have become part of the life of your church.
Now’s the time to be more intentional about listening to people’s change-the-world dreams in order to position them to begin leading the next step of ministry together.
Just to clarify: When I say, “Listen to their dreams,” I’m not suggesting you give them a survey and ask what young adult programs they’d like the church to offer! This step involves spending quality time in conversation with young adults—as individuals and in small groups—to discover what issues make their hearts beat faster and what challenges in the church and world they’re passionate about solving.
You’re listening for a unique call that God may be stirring in them. Some will be happy to be part of a change-the-world enterprise—either the church’s or someone else’s. But a few will have dreams that may never come to fruition without the support and colaboring of a church such as yours.
What you’re bringing to the conversation is a desire to help people discern and shape those dreams into something that can become a reality. Remember, at this point you haven’t launched anything. You’re still just listening.
Discern your next-step model. The exact expression of young adult ministry can, eventually, take many forms. But we recommend at this point that you choose one of these two foundational models, each designed to put young adults in the driver’s seat.
Option 1. Build your own change laboratory. This option allows young adults to help shape and incubate change in the church or community. Here you’re creating a space to listen to, develop, and implement specific ideas for change fueled by the passions of your young adults. Those ideas for change might come in the form of a social enterprise to address a community need or in the form of an innovation to change how the church does its work.
The whole point of the laboratory is for young adults to start from a stance of being partners in the church’s mission rather than recipients of its programs. The laboratory provides a collaborative space for experimentation (and failure) as young adults work with the support of other generations in implementing positive change initiatives. (See a sample plan at “Change-the-World Missional Laboratory Launch Plan” online at ivpress.com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry.)
Option 2. Launch a one-year intensive program in Christian leadership. The untethered season of young adulthood provides an open door for the church to offer targeted, trajectory-setting leadership development for the next generation. During these years of transition, many young adults will be enthusiastic about the chance to sink their teeth into a defined leadership-development process, network with people outside their generation, and build their résumé all at the same time.
The one-year intensive program varies from an “everyone is welcome” Bible study or class. It’s a high-commitment small group focused on preparing young adults for Christian leadership, especially those who won’t go into ministry vocations. And there’s a good chance that at least some of these young adults will have a desire to experience leadership within the life of the church. (See “Sample Launch Plan for a Next Generation Leadership Academy” for a general outline and structure for launching a Young Leaders Academy. See “Case Study for Next Generation Leadership Academy” for how our friend Chris Sasser led such a program. Both can be found online at ivpress.com/sustainable-young-adult-ministry.)
Step 5. Sustain and build engagement. As you engage young adults in one of these two foundational models, they very well may develop their own Bible studies or fellowship groups. When they do, celebrate!
Just don’t confuse these groups with the heart of your young adult ministry. They can be energizing byproducts, but the laboratory and the leadership institute models provide ongoing fuel for young adult engagement.
In addition, you can continue inviting new young adults into your young adult-friendly mission activities. One key to sustaining a thriving ministry is to continue to invite, track, and connect with young adults who aren’t already part of your ministry.
To ensure continued momentum, you can add these habits into the ongoing rhythm of your ministry with the understanding that you first want to complete the four building steps without spending lots of energy on these sustaining steps:
Establish regular launching rituals. Understanding the highly transitional nature of young adult life, engage your congregation in celebrating these transitions. Create regular rhythms and rituals that commission and send young adults into new mission wherever they’re heading.
Build a multigenerational culture. By now, your team should no longer be the only members of your church’s older generation who are caring for and investing in young adults’ lives. Continue inviting, thanking, and telling the stories of older adults connecting with the younger generation.
Respond to their leading. Young adults themselves will come up with programming they find meaningful in the church. They may start a supper club, a Bible study, a new worship service, a new mission, or a community-wide young adult initiative. They may push for more generationally diverse leadership. The church should welcome these ideas even though many of them might be (and sometimes should be) short-lived.
Create short-term discipleship experiences. Invite young adults into discipleship opportunities with follow-up reunions. This can be a three-week topical study, a cultural-immersion mission experience, a discipleship-oriented adventure trip, and the like. Build several of these into the next twelve-month calendar and provide appropriate promotion, invitation, and follow-up.
Create regular communication rhythms. Throughout the process, continue to build your database and regularly communicate with your young adult audience about opportunities for service together. Be sure to use communication methods that are most applicable to the generation you’re reaching. Group email blasts are okay for reminders to people who’ve committed to participating in a particular event, but they’re almost useless in getting new people to attend.
Beyond Running in Circles
Did you know it’s almost impossible for a human being to walk in a straight line for any period of time? It’s true. Psychologists actually documented this by performing a set of simple experiments.
They asked a few volunteers to walk in a straight line for as long as possible. Some walked through a flat, forested region of Germany, others through the Sahara Desert in Tunisia. Both places were vast and without visible landmarks in the distance. After a few hours of walking, they checked the GPS trackers.
The results show that the walkers always ended up walking in circles, no matter how hard they tried to walk a straight line. One researcher noted, “Just walking in a straight line seems like such a simple and natural thing to do, but if you think about it, it’s quite (a) complicated thing going on in the brain.”
Later, they repeated the experiment but blindfolded the participants. This variation resulted in more circle-walking in even smaller, tighter circles.
It’s just natural for humans—and churches—to walk in circles. Though it might seem simple, building a ministry, especially a new one such as young adult ministry, often makes us circle the familiar territory of repeated mistakes, unable to set a course toward breakthrough change.
This chapter’s landmarks will prevent you from going in circles. If you follow this process, you’ll move forward, one step at a time, in the same direction. Take the list of landmarks and focus on moving toward the very next one. The pace isn’t the issue; the direction is what matters. It’s not a sprint but a marathon. To borrow Peterson’s title again, it’s a “long obedience in the same direction.”