4 Mistake 3: Expect the Youth Director to Do It

4

Mistake 3

Expect the Youth Director to Do It

Cheap saddles ain’t good, and good saddles ain’t cheap.

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

I’m a sucker for reality TV, so much so that my wife and I were actually featured on a reality show where viewers watched us buy a house. (Spoiler alert: we went for the third house.) Who knew something as mundane as house hunting could create television that millions of people choose to watch every week?

My favorite reality show is Extreme Cheapskates, which takes saving money to ridiculous extremes. Viewers watch families ration their food and toilet paper, mixing one part juice to five parts water.

One mom went so far as to count Cheerios for her toddler son: “We’re going to give you fourteen,” she said as she counted. As he gobbled up the meager pile, she gently reminded him, “And remember, you need to eat all your Cheerios or next time you only get twelve.”

Although going to such lengths to save a buck or two might feel responsible, sometimes the least expensive approach winds up costing much more in the long run.

That feels a lot like what most churches try to do with their young adult ministries. We need it, but we want it quick and cheap. If it worked, we’d all sing the Doxology, churches would be financially responsible, and there’d be no need for this book. But our national track record of abysmal young adult ministry suggests that the quick and cheap approach never gets us what we’re looking for.

One of the most common patterns we see in young adult ministry is for church leadership to walk down the hall, find the youth director’s office, and add a new title to the nameplate: Director of Youth and Young Adults.

It seems so logical, doesn’t it?

After all, most youth directors are still young adults themselves, often making them the one person in the church who actually knows young adults. It seems so economical; it won’t cost the church any more money and won’t increase the staff head count. And it feels like such a natural fit. A youth director who’s been around a few years knows the college students and young adults who’ve been part of the youth ministry.

It makes so much sense—and is also a huge mistake.

The Grand Mismatch

A local youth worker named Jesse called me to have coffee. His church had decided it was time to do something to reach young adults. Leaders asked Jesse to start a ministry to young adults. “It won’t take that much time,” the personnel committee chair said. “Just a Bible study once a week or something like that. We think you’re the guy for the job!” Being a young adult in his first full-time job, Jesse was eager to prove himself and impress the committee.

Jesse began asking me question after question. It didn’t take long to realize he’s an incredibly talented guy with lots of potential. In youth ministry now for five years, Jesse plays guitar in his own band. His marriage is about a year old and he has plenty of relationships with other young people like him. He has the kinds of qualifications almost any church would look for in a person to head up the mission of reaching young adults.

I had a hunch, though, from that first meeting, that this arrangement was set up for failure. And sure enough, Jesse spent only a single semester with “and Young Adults” attached to his “Director of Youth” title. Even worse, the church gave up trying to do young adult ministry altogether after this attempt failed to produce any sustainable results.

It wasn’t because Jesse was a bad guy. It wasn’t because he didn’t have the skills, and it wasn’t because he didn’t care. It was because his church’s approach was fundamentally flawed from the beginning.

There are three basic reasons:

Lack of Time

Try this homework assignment: find a few youth workers in your church or community and ask how much time they spend in any given week wondering what to do with their spare time. I doubt you’ll find any with such a problem on their hands.

Most youth workers I know are stretched and stressed. Assigning the youth worker to oversee a young adult ministry without adding any hours to their weekly schedule is choosing cheap—not just inexpensive but cheap. It’s a choice to overload the youth worker in a way that can’t help but negatively impact their own work—with youth, young adults, or both. It’s a choice to underresource and undervalue young adult ministry from the outset. It’s a choice that says, “It would be nice if this worked, but we don’t really care to invest in its success.”

Making young adults another side plate for a youth director to spin is a rapid route to ensure high frustration and little reward. And because young adults are the largest generation in American history, it also reveals we’re not taking the challenge seriously.

Though we may assume there are similarities, working with eighteen- to thirty-year-olds is actually staggeringly different from working with twelve- to eighteen-year-olds. Unless it was part of their original contract, most youth workers didn’t sign on to lead a young adult ministry. Tacking it onto the end of a job description is a huge bait-and-switch proposition for the youth worker and the church, requiring additional tools, resources, and skill sets.

Insufficient Focus

Young adult ministry is tough. A tiny fraction of churches are, by their own estimation, succeeding with young adults. Unlike the field of youth ministry that has, over the past twenty years or so, developed clear norms, best practices, and training systems, young adult ministry is pioneer work. The tracks haven’t been laid. No well-worn path takes young adult leaders to their destination.

Most are clearly lost.

Think about it this way. Would you ask a sixteen-year-old to start your youth ministry? Would you ask a second-grader to start your children’s ministry? They might have great hearts and a real desire to succeed—and lots of relationships among the target population—but their chances of success are infinitesimal.

Most churches expect to create a thriving young adult ministry by throwing at it a few extra, misdirected, uninformed hours. The results are predictable: programs that start and sputter, launch and fizzle, and never quite get off the ground.

Structured Isolation

Ministry to young adults is wholly different from youth ministry. Yet so many churches end up building a young adult ministry that looks eerily similar to their youth ministry—Sunday morning class, fellowship activities, small groups, retreats, and a few service projects.

Despite the popular language that “youth aren’t the church of tomorrow; they’re the church of today,” a key component of any youth ministry is still preparing teenagers for lifelong Christian adulthood. Placing this same lens over young adult ministry is highly problematic.

With this lens, churches end up creating an alternative universe for young adults, one that keeps them in a subadult category with few, if any, on-ramps to integration and leadership in the church. The natural result is young adults who are isolated from the rest of the church body, cordoned off until they marry, have children, establish careers, and are ready to become “real” contributing members of the church. When we keep young adults in this kind of holding pattern, it’s completely understandable why so few actually stick around.

All three of these reasons—lack of time, insufficient focus, and structured isolation—point to a fundamental flaw in this approach: a lack of appropriate investment. It’s tough to succeed in any enterprise when we treat it as an afterthought.

Like trying to stay warm under a 4' x 4' blanket, underresourced ministries chronically struggle to maintain success for very long. Few if any churches ever build a thriving young adult ministry by treating it as a sidebar to, or an extension of, the youth ministry. Instead, this approach essentially ensures that the church continues defining success with young adults inaccurately.

Success becomes defined as the youth pastor corralling young adults in programs, doing whatever it takes to keep them coming. Instead of leveraging this generation’s passion and power to bring their voice to the table and bring vitality to the church, we box young adults into a holding pattern with little thought of actually treating them as young adults.

Success Reconsidered

The room held an impressive, intimidating air about it. In the center was a large mahogany table heavy enough to bear the weight of huge decisions. Sixteen large leather chairs surrounded the table. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave the room a sense of brightness, hope, and positive energy.

Ryan was interviewing for a position as the director of high school ministry at a large church. Not only were all sixteen seats filled, but also a few more had been brought in to accommodate additional interviewers.

Parents, staff members, volunteers, as well as all the senior-level pastors had gathered to invest in what they all felt was a game-changing decision for the church—hiring the right high school director. Clearly, this was more of a big-league interview than Ryan anticipated.

I definitely felt the anxiety, for both him and myself. If hired, Ryan would be working for me in the youth ministry I was charged to oversee.

Our high school ministry had struggled in recent months, which produced a significant dip in attendance. Enthusiasm and goodwill were in short supply. Students were bored. Parents were panicky and anxious. A lot was riding on this interview because the church desperately wanted a win.

In the end, Ryan was invited to ask questions. “Tell me about success,” he said. “What does success look like for this position?”

One pastor spoke up without missing a beat: “Around three hundred to four hundred in attendance for weekly programs and at least a thousand for outreach events.”

I remember little else about the interview. My inner monologue took over: Four hundred kids at a weekly program? We’re getting only sixty now! A thousand high school students? Are there even that many in our whole town?

The numbers floored me, not because they were big but because of how success was being defined. My pastor’s response (which was brand-new information to me, by the way) reminded me how fuzzy and confusing it can be to define success in any ministry.

Large numbers of attendees are the most obvious mark of success. If people are coming, we must be doing something right, right? Excitement and enthusiasm can be markers of success; if we feel great about the ministry, it must be great, right? Stories of life change can be measures of success because “if we change just one person’s life . . .”

And you could argue that youth ministry throughout America is succeeding by all these measures.

Youth pastors can tell stories of deep-impact life change in their students. More youth may be attending our programs and events than ever before. More resources and value are being assigned to this segment of the church’s ministry than ever before. And we have more formally educated, professional youth pastors (equipped with actual degrees in youth ministry) than ever before.

We could reasonably argue that youth ministry as a whole has never been more “successful” than it is right now, based on all the traditional markers of success. That’s all the more reason to give these successful youth directors charge over ministry to young adults, right?

Unfortunately, that’s almost always the exact wrong choice.

Unsticky Faith

The Fuller Youth Institute at Fuller Seminary recently completed six years of “Sticky Faith” research through its College Transition Project. For many people involved in youth ministry, this is the first real look at what happens to students after they leave the programs. The results are less than encouraging.

Of students who were actively engaged in youth programs when they graduated from high school, research shows that only about 40 to 50 percent actually stick with their faith through college. If the trend holds true, in an average youth group, one out of every two high school seniors who are currently active in our ministries will shed their involvement in the church as they shed their caps and gowns.

These are the insider kids—not the “once in a blue moon” kids or the “I see them at school events” kids. Half of the most active youth group kids are disconnecting from the church and their faith by the time they graduate from college! In an age when the machine of youth ministry is running as high-octane as ever, graduates are making a mass exodus from faith.

Barna Group research is even more discouraging: “The most potent data regarding disengagement is that a majority of twenty-somethings—61 percent of today’s young adults—had been churched at one time during their teen years but they are now spiritually disengaged (i.e., not actively attending church, reading the Bible, or praying).”

Stated another way, the long-term effectiveness of “successful” youth ministry (e.g., ones that keep young people coming to programs targeted specifically to them) is being called into question more and more these days. We must ask: Does it make sense to apply this shortsighted definition of success to ministry with young adults and college students?

Two Thousand Dollar Shoes

I’d finally achieved a big goal I’d been working toward for a long time. I crossed the finish line of my very first 25K race. I ran (okay, mostly ran) 15.5 miles on a rainy morning in May and subsequently thought two things:

Eight months of daily training went into this race. At first, the going was pretty easy, a mile or two on every run. The leaves were changing color, I felt good, and everything was great. But then the two-mile runs turned into five, six, and beyond. Before I knew it, I was setting my alarm to run for an hour in the dark each morning. Some days I’d run eight miles in ten-degree weather. But now, I’d finally crossed the finish line.

However, in this case, the finish line was just the beginning.

The day after the race, something popped in the top of my foot while I was standing at church. I immediately started limping, trying to avoid the significant pain that came with every step.

I had no idea what I was dealing with.

After two weeks of rest, I started running again, only a mile at a time. And the pain returned every time I increased my mileage. So I’d rest for a couple more weeks, and the cycle would repeat itself.

I finally went to a physical therapist, who spent the next three months (and the next thousand dollars of my health insurance deductible) on exercises and painful deep-tissue massage. He recommended I replace my old orthotics with a fifty dollar pair of over-the-counter ones and finally discharged me when the pain was better, though not quite gone.

Still, the more I ran, the more the pain returned. So I went to the doctor, who took an x-ray, then an MRI, and sent me to an orthopedic specialist. She recommended a new set of orthotics and a couple of (painful) cortisone shots in the top of my foot.

I sat down with the custom orthotic specialist and retold the story of the past nine months. The more I talked, the more depressed I became. I had other races in mind—races I’d paid for and had to scrap because of my foot pain. I had other things I wanted to do with that thousand dollars I’d spent on physical therapy and the almost five hundred dollars on other copays. And I certainly wasn’t thrilled about the additional four hundred dollars I was about to spend on custom orthotics.

But at least I was finally getting some results. The shot had taken effect, and the support from the new orthotics seemed to be the fix. Finally, after all this time, money, and anxiety, I was about to start making progress again.

Before long, the specialist looked at my shoes and asked, “Are those the shoes you run in?”

I nodded, and he said, “I’m not sure what you paid for those. They may be fine. But as a general rule, I tell my running patients that paying more for your shoes is the smartest thing you can do. You should spend at least ninety to one hundred dollars for your shoes because they’ll give you the right kind of support, especially if you run long distances. With running shoes, you get what you pay for. Fifty-dollar shoes can lead to serious problems.”

I stopped in my tracks, immediately recalling a conversation with a coworker from the previous fall as I was beginning my training. We were comparing shoes, and he said, “I don’t know, man, that seems like a terrible decision.”

“No way!” I responded. “Why would I spend a hundred dollars on shoes at a running store when these cost me fifty-five bucks at Walmart? I love them!”

I didn’t give that conversation a second thought until that moment in the clinic silently calculating how much that fifty-five dollar pair of shoes had actually cost me. My decision to save forty-five bucks ended up costing close to two thousand, not to mention lost time, depression, anxiety, and pain. It was a huge price to pay for saving forty-five bucks.

I worry that many churches are making extremely expensive choices—to save money and energy—that turn out to be just as costly, if not more so, to the next generation.

I’m not saying a full-time staff person is required for a successful young adult ministry. But starting a young adult ministry with a bargain-priced arrangement of adding a few hours onto the youth worker (who won’t likely get paid any more for the additional effort and time) almost never works. This is a classic case of a money-saving strategy that doesn’t actually save money. Sometimes what looks like a good deal ends up hurting more than it helps.

Dropping additional responsibilities onto a youth director’s plate is a knee-jerk solution that seldom provides enough horsepower to meet the challenge of ministry with young adults. It’s the wrong model, and it almost never works.

So before you tack that “and Young Adults” onto the youth director’s job title, consider what kind of investment you’re making in your young adult ministry. Consider the ramifications for your youth ministry. Consider the cost of not fully engaging the mission to young adults that your church might desperately need. In the end, this “money-saving” approach can turn out to be more expensive than building it right in the first place.

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