16 Failure Isn’t an Option—It’s a Certainty
16
Failure Isn’t an Option—
It’s a Certainty
Now is not the time to wave the white flag. Actually, just the opposite. Now is the time to aggressively embrace and empower a generation that will be next to carry the baton.
Vires acquirit eundo.
(We gather strength as we go.)
In the year 2000, a little file-sharing website called Napster turned the music industry on its ear. A year later, Apple introduced the first-generation iPod, offering the capacity to put “a thousand songs in your pocket.” And now, countless iterations later, digital media downloads for music, movies, TV shows, and books have become, far and away, a standard method of consuming media.
Now it’s normal. But it’s a new normal compared to 1999 and before.
Maybe you remember the days when the new digital landscape was just opening up, a world where everyone could copy music and share it without cost. This new arrangement offered a wide-open door for music distribution and, on the flip side, for widespread pirating and theft of copyrighted intellectual property.
Lawsuits were filed, and Napster lost a court battle with the Recording Industry Association of America. Napster eventually filed for bankruptcy, and the music industry breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, “At least that’s over!”
After the brief unpleasantness, the world of commercial music could go back to its previous method of distributing music and movies the way God intended—through CDs and DVDs.
Not so much.
Though Napster burned brightly and quickly and lost in the courts, it forever changed the industry. A door was opened that could never be closed, and the entire recording business had a choice to make.
Leaders could wring their hands, make doomsday predictions, and long for simpler times, or they could reinvent their work based on the new reality. Now, less than two decades after Napster’s death, the folks left standing in the music industry are, by and large, those who shifted into the new reality. They learned to live, and even thrive, in the new digital age.
Maybe the church can learn a lesson or two from Napster about navigating disruptive change.
Every church has a choice. We can cling to the ministry models and methods fit for a church that no longer exists, models and methods we’ve grown comfortable with for decades if not centuries. Or we can open ourselves to the possibility of the Spirit’s prompting in and through the disruption, prompting us to reinvent our churches in ways congruent with the new world before us.
If it feels as if the questions being raised by color-outside-the-lines young adults have the potential to unhinge the church, it’s because, by the grace of God, they do.
The Cost of Change
There is, of course, a downside to embracing this paradoxical approach to young adult ministry, apart from the long, persistent work required.
Because young adult ministry is, by definition, innovative, and because innovation itself can be messy and disruptive, this process can’t help but create a little (maybe even a lot) of institutional resistance among people who hold the keys to church leadership.
I was fascinated to learn recently of a theory developed by a ministry friend. His name is Doug, so he calls it “Doug’s Law,” just in case it catches on. It states:
Meetings required to make a decision = church’s age ÷ 10
Stated simply, Doug’s Law holds that the number of meetings required to make a single decision in your church is directly proportionate to the number of decades your church has been around.
For example, if your church is less than ten years old, most decisions get made without having a single meeting. If it’s fifty years old, that same decision can require as many as five separate meetings with various teams, committees, or individuals. And if your church is one hundred years old or more, according to Doug, may God have mercy on your weary soul!
If you’re in an established church, you know how notoriously difficult it can be to successfully launch new things. You know the institutional inertia that relentlessly sucks good ideas back into the gravitational pull of its core, where movement seldom occurs.
As a result, if your church chooses to create a new focus on young adult ministry, it will—if done right—almost inevitably cause a stir and require many extra meetings. It may make people uncomfortable. It may result in underground resistance and sabotage. It may give rise to irrational institutional roadblocks.
You can be sure that no matter how much initial support the idea of young adult ministry has, it will cost something. I’m not saying your church must give up its beloved worship style. I’m not saying you’ll have to rip out the pews and put in a coffee bar or get a younger pastor in the pulpit every now and then. (I’m not not saying those things either.)
I’m saying that unless you’re a new church with a laser focus on young adults already, the shift toward creating a thriving young adult ministry requires managing sometimes-complex change.
And change naturally creates resistance.
At some level, you’ll be asking hard-working, deeply invested leaders to step back a bit and allow young adults, new to the party, to share the leadership load. You’ll be asking veteran volunteers to share power with young adults, knowing there’s a good chance the younger generation will be more likely to fumble the ball.
You’ll be asking long-term members who’ve always seen the church as a place of respite, a place filled with people like themselves, to widen their circle to include a twenty-something (or two) who looks, thinks, and acts more than a little different from them.
You’ll be asking leaders to hand over a few keys to the church, knowing that those who receive them may not value the church in the exact same ways as those who built it.
Pastors have lost their jobs over less.
Read those last few paragraphs again and you’ll get an idea why it’s so easy, so natural for churches to stay stuck in a regressive status quo, wondering why there aren’t more people “like us” showing up.
This dynamic, perhaps more than any other, is the root cause of the most disturbing trend identified in chapter one: most churches aren’t even trying to reach young adults.
The good news, despite this reality check, is that young adult ministry isn’t only possible, but it has the potential to bring a flood of new missional vitality into your church. First, you must be prepared enough to continue slogging through the seasons when this ministry is an uphill climb.
The Slow Road to Rapid Change
We’ve seen churches snap like dry twigs under the weight of the unbridled enthusiasm of people passionate about their pet projects. Impatience can cause zealous folks to unwittingly sabotage their own change efforts.
If you’ve been around the church a few years, you’ve likely witnessed a church body being split in two, not because a change initiative was ill-conceived but because the rollout was.
Bend wood at too sharp an angle, too quickly, and it will splinter and snap.
But under the right conditions and with enough patience, wood can be bent, twisted, and turned in almost any direction.
This kind of change takes slow, deliberate pressure in a sustained direction. It takes time to create systems that produce the kind of change that both energizes and lasts.
Secrets of Sustaining Change
One Saturday afternoon, my father and I tackled a garage project—repairing a broken ladder from my bunk bed. The steps were in place, but only one side rail was usable. It was going to be a quick job. All we needed to do was cut the wood to replicate the existing side rail, and we’d be done in less than an hour (or so we thought).
After cutting the first new rail, we realized we should’ve cut a mirror image of the existing rail, not an exact replica. So we tried again.
For the second attempt, we got the mirror image right but cut the slots for the steps at the wrong angle. And the third time wasn’t a charm because we cut the slots at a different but still wrong angle.
By the fourth try, our quick project had devolved into a frustrating afternoon of arguing, finger pointing, and cold silence.
The typical church tries to solve the young adult problem as a quick and simple project. It invests little in the way of design and immediately gets to work, making one mistake after another, cutting and recutting, frustrated that the wood isn’t cooperating.
Maybe it’s time for the church to step back from the hurry-up crisis language surrounding young adult ministry. Maybe it’s time to begin working with a set of blueprints that can be implemented one step at a time.
As you and your team enter the process of moving young adult ministry from a marginal aspiration to a core mission of your church, here are a few words of caution to help you slow down to just the right pace:
1. The process works (if we work the process). You might have picked up this book for a variety of reasons. One of the most common we’ve heard is that readers have already tried everything they can think of, but nothing seems to have worked. By now you know this book isn’t designed to give you a new idea; it’s designed to help you get off the roller coaster of ideas and into a steady, sustainable process for success.
My coauthor, Mark, is known to say, “We don’t need great ideas in ministry. We just need to operationalize the lousy ideas we already have.” We’ve observed that when the processes outlined in this book don’t work, the problem usually isn’t with the process. It’s because we stop working the process and rely instead on shortcuts and simplistic solutions such as events, personality, or a single, silver-bullet program.
The process of building a constellation of relationships beneath a young adult ministry can feel too slow for many impatient champions. Tapping into young adult passion for changing the world has many more layers and steps than simply throwing out a young adult Bible study and promoting it.
When (not if) you and your team get stuck, return again to the process (summarized in ) and work it.
2. Not all nos are created equal. When (not if) you hear a no from the powers that be in your congregation (or from the young adults themselves), remember that negative responses and resistance are simply a natural part of progress. Some nos are born out of fear or a lack of information. Some are born out of personal hurt. Some come from past failures. And some provide the very information we need to create a better plan.
Before you throw up your hands assuming nothing will ever change, stay committed to keep knocking. When you continue bringing up the right questions with the right spirit on a regular basis over a span of years, the walls of resistance almost always crumble. Churches that give up on their young adult ministry at the first sign of resistance will never have the kind of effect they desire.
3. Dumb persistence is your friend. As you begin the implementation process, it won’t be long before you come up against a question or a challenge you simply don’t have a solution for. The great news is you don’t need all the answers to begin the journey.
Martin Luther King Jr. was right: “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” Many of the people we respect the most in ministry made some of their most profound contributions when they had no money and were doing what they had never done before.
Roadblocks are an absolutely predictable part of this process. If you find yourself restarting parts of it again and again until you get some traction, you’re right on track. This is normal. You are normal.
When you’re stuck, keep going. There is incredible power in just taking the next single step, even when you don’t know how you’ll solve the next problem.
4. Persistence requires a champion. Proverbs 29:18 offers a one-sentence clinic in leadership: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (KJV). And where there is no champion for the vision, everyone forgets it.
For a young adult ministry to launch sustainably, someone must carry the banner. Someone has to champion the cause. A group of helpers, all leaning on each other, won’t get the job done. Someone needs to own the role of champion. Whether that’s a volunteer, a staff member, or even the senior pastor, the champion wakes up most mornings thinking about the next person to engage, the next problem to solve, the next message to share in young adult ministry.
5. Patience is a virtue. By now, I hope it’s clear that the process we’ve outlined is a slow one. For many churches, just getting a team to connect with young adults and build a database of contact information takes months. This process is designed to be worked one step at a time rather than with all the plates spinning at once.
If you work this process well, you’ll naturally be impatient, particularly at first. When you are, consider yourself right on track!
Too often, church life is driven by the urgency of the moment, so we react rather than build something with a long-term impact. Church life is busy. Life is busy. Our natural inclination is to leap from one thing to the next in an attempt to put out fires (or sometimes even starting them).
Ours is a slow-roast recipe for success, not fast food. If you’re feeling anxiety that not enough is happening as you work this process, take a great lesson from our friends in recovery and repeat after me, “One day at a time.”
Lasting Little Latin Lesson
I recently came across a Latin phrase that sums up our hope for how you’ll implement this book’s principles: Solvitur ambulando. Literally, it translates, “It is solved by walking”—or, more loosely, “We’ll find the answer while we’re moving.”
Every step of the work we’re called to do with the next generation can’t be mapped out. We’ll set a clear course and work out many of the details along the way.
In a recent Harvard University study, Bill Sahlman found, “Business plans rank no more than a 2—on a scale of 1 to 10—as a predictor of a new venture’s success.” And often the more detailed the plan, the more likely it is to flop. As far back as 2002, it was revealed that of companies in the list of America’s 500 fastest-growing companies, only 40 percent wrote formal business plans and two-thirds of those eventually ditched their plans. A study of the clients of Endeavor, a coaching company for startups, revealed that two-thirds of their clients didn’t write business plans, and 50 percent changed their business model at least once.
More often than not, successful companies, churches, and families practice that Latin proverb, “We’ll find the answer while we’re moving.” As you build your young adult ministry, look for people with resilience, people with the ability to keep moving in the same direction, despite the obstacles.
Project Friendship
After spending time with his disciples, Jesus makes an important distinction: “I no longer call you servants [but] friends” (John 15:15). Friends here might mean more than you think at first glance.
Today we use friend in a wide variety of ways, referring to a pal, a BFF, someone in your group, or even someone who just makes you laugh when you’re together. Jesus’ group of friends included people who would have been mortal enemies in “the real world.”
A zealot passionate about overthrowing the Romans and a Roman tax collector would have found themselves on opposite sides of almost every issue. But in Jesus, two diametrically opposing sides come together as friends.
One way to see the process outlined in this book is as a systematic way of building a constellation of friends between people in generations that are often divided. We’re excited to provide a way of seeing over the wall to where the other lives.
Fundamentally, this work we’re being called into is a partnership with the God who brings together the likes of zealots and tax collectors, senior citizens and young adults, insiders and outsiders—all united as friends around the Spirit and the gospel that sends us out together.
So take a step back, take a deep breath, fasten your seatbelt, and decide whether you’ll be part of this epic work of turning strangers into friends.