6 Mistake 5: Wait Until They’re Ready

6

Mistake 5

Wait Until They’re Ready

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

“Are you ready?” Klaus asked finally.

“No,” Sunny answered.

“Me neither,” Violet said, “but if we wait until we’re ready we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives. Let’s go.”

My family recently moved to the southern edge of our community’s development. My home is part of a brand-new subdivision, and our lot is right on the dividing line between suburbia and acres of rural farmland.

Just out my back door, I see barns full of tractors, silos filled with grain, and fields bursting with crops as they meet the horizon. Last week I pulled our car to the side of the road so my kids and I could see a hay baler in action. We watched, mesmerized, as the tractor drove back and forth across the field, launching fresh hay bales into its trailer, one by one, for almost an hour.

Maybe this newfound fascination caused my ear to tune in when NPR recently reported about the future of farming.

Bob Hawthorn is standing in the back of a red pickup in an open field, on a windy April afternoon in Iowa’s Loess Hills. This is where he farms 2,000 acres of corn and soybeans, and he’s eager to get his crop into the ground. Hawthorn is 84 years old. His hands are worn from all those years of hard work. And he gets annoyed when his neighbors ask just how long he plans to continue that. . . .

In the meantime, for those coveting the land, it could be a long wait. In Iowa, nearly a third of farmland belongs to people over 75. That means farmers like Bob Hawthorn hold a big piece of the future of farming.

Agricultural economist Mike Duffy says a new generation is ready to work the land but may have a hard time getting hold of it: “We aren’t short of young people that want to farm. We’re short of old people who want to move over.”

That line struck a chord with me because the same thing could be said about most churches.

As pastor’s kids, my young boys are also fascinated with church right now. They love everything about Jesus, Sunday school, and singing worship songs. And in ten years or so, when they enter the world of adulthood, will the church hold them back and keep them waiting in the wings? Or will the church find a way to share leadership? Based on our current trajectory, I’m nervous.

Most churches today simply keep the young adults they do have in a holding pattern—often unintentionally. They push the pause button and say, “We’ll get back to you when you’re ready.” Although this mistake may be unintentional, it’s as widespread and damaging as the others.

I’m not suggesting that older generations simply get out of the way in a mass exodus of leadership. We don’t need an abrupt hand-off from older, experienced leaders to totally green ones. That would be a disaster.

Here’s what I’m affirming:

In today’s church, “apprenticeship” easily can be church-speak for “wait just a little longer.”

The Long Wait

Young adults today have grown up in an increasingly accessible world. Here are some results of a recent survey of parents by a computer-security software company:

For their entire lives, young adults have literally had the world at their fingertips. As kids they’re interconnected with the world around them, and today they’ve grown into CEOs of tech startups, small-business owners, and founders of nonprofits by the time they’re in their midtwenties.

Many popular sports figures and cultural icons are downright ancient by the time they hit thirty-five. Yet this is the generation most churches sideline for leadership because they’re not “ready.”

Australian ministry specialist Fuzz Kitto remarks:

I have a friend who, when he was 23, had an income of over $100,000 a year. He managed over 1,000 employees. Decisions he made before breakfast affected the economic policies of the entire Australian region. “But when I go to church,” he reflected, “they treat me like a kid.”

In another congregation in which I served as a consultant, a 25 year old who was a consultant accountant managing a multimillion dollar budget was rejected as a member of the finance committee. The reason: “He’s too young and inexperienced to understand how the finances of the church really work, and as a single person he hasn’t had to deal with the major life issues of balancing a budget for his family.“ In other words, “He’s not an adult.”

I recently read about a church that was in the process of electing the next group of elders to the board. As they discussed potential nominees for the position, they spent lots of time talking about a particular thirty-five-year-old nominee. They decided that although he had spiritual and leadership qualifications, he was “just too young” to hold such a leadership position as an elder in their church. Instead, they elected him an “elder-in-training.”

Isn’t it fascinating that someone old enough to be elected president of the United States often isn’t considered old enough to hold a significant leadership position in many of our churches?

Young adults are fast becoming our culture’s leading innovators, business leaders, entertainment icons, and world changers. And what is the church telling them? You’re not quite ready yet. Maybe after you’ve paid your dues and been a faithful attender and contributor for a few more decades, we’ll invite you to serve on a committee.

This reality is, of course, less about young adults being ready and more about our lack of a clear process to move them into leadership. It’s probably also about the rest of us trying to hold onto the wheel just a little bit longer.

Author and pastor Larry Osborne puts it this way: “Leadership is a zero-sum game. One person’s emerging influence is always another person’s waning influence. That’s why making room for the young eagles is a hard sell, especially to those who already have a place at the table.”

Is it any surprise that this mistake leaves young adults more than a little disinterested in the church?

Meet Andrew

I had lunch with Andrew this week while he was home from college. I knew him as a high school student when I was a youth pastor. There’s something magnetic about Andrew. Everyone seems to love him. When he was young, he was teased for smiling all the time. And he might be the smartest person I’ve ever met.

Andrew recently finished six months of teaching little kids in Ghana. When he returns to school next semester, he wants to start a church in a lecture hall on campus, focusing particularly on students in sororities and fraternities who might never darken a church door.

When people ask Andrew about his plans to attend seminary and begin preparations to be a pastor, his reply is a simple, “No thanks.” Andrew doesn’t want to prepare to become a pastor. He sees himself as a pastor right now.

There is, of course, a danger in this kind of impatience. Doctors don’t simply start practicing medicine without appropriate training. But still, Andrew’s response reveals something about the essential shift in perspective churches must make with a generation that wants to offer something of significance to the world now.

Failing the Development Test

Apart from going to seminary and becoming a pastor, the on-ramps to real leadership in the church for young adults are few and far between. Despite the fact that almost every church laments it doesn’t have enough volunteers to fill all the needed roles, most key leadership positions are already filled with an old guard who’s resistant to step aside. (And they characteristically complain that all the work falls to a small group of “committed” leaders in the church.)

In his book Sticky Teams, Osborne suggests: “The seniors never graduate (at least not until they’ve become literal seniors and start dying off). They hog the leadership table, shutting out the next generation. It’s one of the main reasons that most churches stop growing and lose their evangelistic touch (and cultural relevance) around the twenty-year mark.”

Ironically, the same churches that complain the loudest about the lack of young volunteers often have absolutely zero developmental process for them. They bemoan young adults’ lack of commitment. They blame young adults for not knowing the way to get things done in the church, but the typical church isn’t helping them get there.

Despite what most churches say they want, only a tiny fraction of churches have taken the time to design and implement a process for recruiting, building, and developing young leaders. As a result, young adults hear a mind-numbing refrain: “These aren’t the leadership roles you’re looking for. Move along. Move along” (cue Star Wars music).

And they do move along—right out of the church.

Let’s admit the layered mistakes most churches are making.

No wonder so many Christian young adults believe they have a better chance of making an impact for the gospel by working at Toms Shoes than in the church.

First Steps

Our church recently made a first attempt at remedying this problem. We initiated a leadership-development course especially for young adults. We articulated the outcomes, developed a pathway for them to follow, and recruited a group to pilot the process.

As I sat at the table for the first session, I listened to each person describe their calling. For some, it was the beginning of a road to full-time ministry, but most were everyday young adults eager for a shot at church leadership. As one young woman put it, “God’s been calling me as a leader for a long time, and I want to find a way to live that out.”

I began to wonder, What would’ve happened if we had failed to create this process? Where would those callings have been addressed?

In another church? Maybe.

At the end of their lives as mere unrealized potential?

Would they one day doubt they had actually experienced God’s call at all?

Who’s listening to our young adults who hear the whispers of God’s call to leadership? Can churches create pathways for young adults that actually prepare them for faithful leadership?

Reality Check

When we hear comments like, “A family in our church was asked to host a dinner for twenty-somethings. Twelve RSVP’d yes. No one showed up,” the Gen-Xers and boomers in the room nod with passionate disapproval.

There’s another (quite reasonable) reason churches sideline young leaders. Young adults can be notoriously unreliable, even when they’re passionate about something.

Those of us who have young adult friends know it’s true. Some of my closest friends are fifty-fifty on showing up for a social event, even when they tell me they’ll be there.

One writer and political activist describes organizing a phone bank to encourage the community to act on a cause she knew was near and dear to the hearts of her young adult friends. She sent a day-of reminder to young adults who’d already said they’d be there, and here’s a sampling of what she heard back:

The pendulum-swing unpredictability about young adult leadership can be unnerving. In the 2008 US presidential election, the record-high turnout of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds played a huge role in the result. Yet just two years later, the young adult vote dropped by 60 percent.

Most twenty-somethings score consistently higher on the dreams meter than on the follow-through meter.

We have the opportunity to cultivate reliability and leadership among young adults. Instead, most churches bounce erratically between expecting perfection and expecting nothing at all.

What would happen if we changed our expectations? What if we focused on developing young adult leaders rather than expecting them to show up fully prepared to lead as well as (or better than) those who’ve been leading for the past twenty-five years?

Here’s one of the most liberating discoveries we’ve made about cultivating young leaders: when young adults drop the ball on assignments, it’s part of the development process. It’s not proof that they don’t have what it takes. It’s not a sign that the church should stop giving them leadership opportunities. It’s just normal.

I know what you’re thinking: So now we’re supposed to give young adults leadership so they can drop the ball? Now that’s a great leadership development plan!

The solution is straightforward. If we know that young leaders are likely to drop the ball, we build in more deliberate onboarding and check-in processes along the way. The system set out in provides a great foundation to not only develop young adults in leadership but also to give older generations a way to walk alongside them during the process.

For now, all you need to know about the system is this: if you want to kill your mission and spike your stress level, expect all young adults to get assignments done on time (or better yet, expect them to come up with the right assignments intuitively!).

Expecting seamless maturity from young adults only serves to reinforce our rationale for keeping them in a holding pattern. Without having the opportunity to actually lead, they’re unlikely to stay around long enough to learn the leadership skills the church needs from them.

When it comes to establishing workable, realistic processes for mentoring the next generation into church leadership, the older generations seem to have a follow-through problem too.

Playing Varsity

As a sophomore in high school, my friend Jason got to play on the varsity team for the last game of the season. And by “play” I mean practice with the team and sit on the bench until the last thirty seconds of the game.

Regardless, Jason was elated, and so were we. We stood in the stands going crazy for the last thirty seconds of the blowout. We photocopied his class picture and made makeshift masks of Jason’s face that we wore as he stepped onto the court.

We weren’t thinking about the outcome of the game. It was a big-time opportunity for our tenth-grade friend, and we were thrilled he had made it.

There’s nothing wrong with playing JV, but few athletes set that as their goal. No one starts training for a marathon with the hope of getting halfway there. Young adults today are looking for places to “play varsity.”

We have to do better than “let’s wait until you’re ready.”

This year, I got to watch one of our young leaders come alive by being given the chance to play varsity. The step made a profound impact on him and produced a twenty thousand dollar savings for the church.

James was working as an intern, helping one of our pastors plant a new church that would hold worship services in a school gymnasium. The team was busy researching and developing an all-in-one portable system, including sound and screen equipment, chairs, coffeepots, and children’s classroom equipment. No small task.

James had been working hand in hand with the consulting group charged with helping the church put together the entire system, basically a $150,000 package. Being somewhat of a tech geek with many connections in the audiovisual world, James took a deeper dive into the auditorium design and offered an alternative, working with a local dealer with great connections.

The result?

A savings of almost $20,000, and a couple of unhappy consultants. After James introduced his ideas, the consultants were taken aback, scrambling to figure out how all the pieces might fit together. And frankly, they were more than a little miffed that a twenty-two-year-old had the gumption to push back on their expertise.

What I found most interesting, though, was how James’s pastor handled it. Despite pleas from the consulting team, his message was consistent: “James is our representative for this part of the project.” James regularly updated him, even recorded some conversations with the consultants, but the pastor repeatedly told James, “I trust you. I think you’re doing a great job handling this situation.”

This was a big deal for James. “This was a $150,000 decision,” he told me. “I’ve never had such high stakes for anything else in my entire life. But if we’re going to spend that kind of money, I really felt passionate about getting the design right.”

Sure, the pastor would have stepped in if the whole situation had begun to spiral, but he had the discipline to coach his apprentice without trying to control the particulars of the outcome. When I asked the pastor about his approach, his response was deliberate: “I already know how to navigate something like this; James doesn’t. But he’ll run into situations like this later on in his life, and here’s a golden opportunity to learn how to navigate something like this with a coach alongside him. I wouldn’t want to short-circuit that process just because he’s young.”

When we place young adults in a holding tank, when we place too much importance on making sure they’re ready, we rob them of an essential development opportunity. And we miss out on chances to cheer them on, see them succeed (and help them recalibrate when they don’t), and prepare them (and our churches) for the future.

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