Wanted: Third-Pig Youth Workers
9
Monkeys, Frogs and Balconies
Secrets of Third-Pig Youth Workers
He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. . . . But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.
Victor Hugo
[T]he men of Issachar . . . understood the times and knew what Israel should do.
1 Chronicles 12:32
Every time I’m tempted to leave my church for greener pastures, I do the math. Now that I’ve been in the same church for more than twenty years, certain things come easier: recruiting, fundraising, promotion. In my early years here, I had to work twice as hard to get a fraction of the current results, because I didn’t understand the invisible systems.
Today there is momentum—momentum from years of moving intentionally in the same direction. As I do the math, I realize it would take me twenty years to get to exactly the same place at another church. By then, I’d be seventy.
Maybe it’s my math skills that keep me staying put.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen enough youth workers crushed by the delusion that getting out of their current “dysfunctional” church will make everything all right again.
Making Longevity Likely
Longevity simply works—on all kinds of levels. It forces us to face up to the patterns within ourselves that keep our youth ministries less than effective. It forces us to continue relating to people who have let us down. In a world of disposable relationships, longevity creates a durable Christian community that keeps on loving in spite of disappointments, failures and manipulation. Longevity gives us the chance to learn from our mistakes and to do our part to build it better the next time around.
But longevity isn’t easy. My first five or six years at my current church almost killed me. But as I passed the seven-year threshold, something happened. I started to observe movement I didn’t initiate; I began to see our ministry carried along by a momentum that had been slowly, imperceptibly building for years.
Youth ministry is littered with people who bail out as soon as a bit of water comes over the bow. . . . Changing this church for the next one means trading problems that you know about for problems that that you don’t know about. And besides, wherever you end up, you’ll still be there, which guarantees that most of the same problems will be there too.
MIKE WOODRUFF
Maybe this is why, according to one expert, “No church in America has sustained a large youth ministry [200 plus] without long-term tenure in its ministry DNA.” In addition, both the level of satisfaction and the level of effectiveness in ministry dramatically increase with tenure. And ironically, it’s the long-term youth worker who is best positioned to build a youth ministry not dependent on him or her.
The largest statistical study of the profession of youth ministry concluded with this counsel to youth workers:
Persevere. The longer you minister with youth, the more goals you will see accomplished, the more competent and confident you will feel, the more satisfaction you will derive from your relationships with youth and their parents and the stronger will be your sense of purpose and confidence in God and his Word.
Longevity is a great idea, but for reasons very different than we might think. A well-intentioned mother offered this comment about the importance of longevity in youth leaders:
My daughter—an active member of the youth group—has bonded with and then had to say goodbye to three different youth ministers over the years. How do you teach a teenager about perseverance and the importance of long, committed relationships when your church life can’t back it up? How do you deal with the hurt and hesitation of building new relationships when they keep falling away?
Her questions reveal a common yet fatal assumption about youth workers—namely, that the key relationships in youth ministry are those built between the professional and the student. It’s actually the unhealthy ministry that pivots around the youth worker’s ability to build relationships with every student. In this sort of youth ministry, relationships with other Christian adults are considered second-rate.
There’s nothing inherently wrong or trust-breaking about kids having short-term relationships with godly adults. Most kids have little trouble bonding deeply with camp counselors with whom they spend only a few days or weeks. When our kids return from camp, we don’t wring our hands, saying, “How can my child ever trust again, after having built strong relationships with so many different counselors at camp?”
No, the value of a camp is not limited because of the presence or absence of different leaders—in fact, it is enhanced. The good camp—like a healthy youth ministry—involves a constellation of relationships, and a good camp counselor—like a good youth worker—simply adds to that constellation.
The problem is not turnover in staff. The problem is in the culture of churches that assume the only way to sustainability in youth ministry is to hire a youth worker who will stay for decades.
I’m not suggesting that high turnover is inherently good. What I’m suggesting is that the more intentional a church is at building a sustainable youth ministry, the more likely it is that its staff will choose to stay for the long haul. Longevity does not happen by chance. It is undeniably impacted by the overall climate of the youth ministry. Churches with youth ministries that are appropriately funded and that have clear, measurable expectations tend to have momentum, and staff members just tend to stay longer.
But in churches where the structure and goals are fuzzy or where each successive youth worker is expected to build the ministry from scratch, youth workers are much more likely to become entangled in conflict. And conflict turns out to be, far and away, the number-one reason youth workers give for leaving.
Far too many youth workers find themselves moving on much sooner than expected. Over the years we’ve stumbled onto a few curiously named habits that seem to be built into the DNA of youth workers who stay for the long haul. We always start with eating frogs.
Eat That Frog
Not long ago, Dave Rahn and his colleagues at the Link Institute sought to identify the greatest challenges facing professional youth workers. After surveying thousands, they identified the five most challenging issues:
Do you see the common theme? Take a look again:
The greatest threat to youth worker longevity is not our lack of skills or creativity, but our inability to manage the competing, confusing, often chaotic demands on our time. Sustainable youth ministers recognize one fact to be true: we’ll never get it all done. Show me a youth director whose job feels manageable, and there’s a good possibility he or she simply doesn’t understand the job!
We discovered the parable we love to use in coaching youth workers in a delightful little book by Brian Tracey called Eat That Frog. The parable goes something like this: Every morning, each of us faces a tiny frog on a plate in front of us, a frog that we must, sooner or later, eat. Like the slimy little creatures we dissected in biology class, these bite-sized frogs are not the first thing we’d like to pop in our mouth. But in the magical world of this parable, the only way we can survive is to eat one little frog a day.
The frog represents that one task that, if accomplished or ignored, will have the greatest impact on our future or the future of our ministry. Sometimes this task is as simple as making one phone call or setting up one appointment or even reading a chapter of a book that helps equip us to change. Sometimes it’s scheduling enough time to draft a strategic plan, setting a time to chip away at a massive, high-priority project or designing a curriculum template that keeps us from the reactive, teach-whatever-I-can-find chaos normal to youth ministry.
The key to becoming a frog-eating champion is to determine the most important task each day before we do anything. If we fail to eat today’s frog because we responded instead to the screaming demands before us, the next day we have a bigger problem: two frogs to eat, and one of them is now just a little bit bigger. When a youth worker feels overwhelmed, he or she is typically swimming in a swamp teeming with frogs that have been ignored in favor of secondary priorities.
I was working recently with a young leader drowning in the frogs he’d been ignoring for months (some for years). He desperately wanted to change the trajectory of his life and ministry. So I told him about the frogs. He loved the idea. I asked him to start by making a list of all the tasks he had to do and then to prioritize that list. I asked him to complete the list before doing anything on it.
Easy enough, right? But two weeks later he explained that he simply didn’t have time to get the list completed—or started. Yet he did have time to email me with random questions multiple times and even to send me a multipage summary of a book he’d just read.
Stuck youth workers stubbornly refuse to slow down enough to find the strategic frogs they must eat if they’re to pull out of negative spirals. Many of these youth workers use the time when they could be eating a frog to complain about how much they have to do.
It’s About Time
I’ve come to believe that the wrong kind of people teach time management. They tend to be the type who alphabetize their spices, who have in their DNA a natural proclivity for order. What people like me (and most youth workers I know) need is an understanding of time management presented by an attention-deficit-disordered, creatively chaotic youth minister.
If I were to write the ADD Youth Pastor’s Guide to Mastering Time, it would include the following ideas:
Finish before you start. Unless we commit time at the beginning of each day (or the night before) to determine what our first priorities will be, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get the most important stuff done. Instead of letting other people’s agendas decide our own, we must determine, before the day even begins, what we want to have done by the end of the day (and what we will ignore, guilt-free).
Practice the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule) is accurate when it comes to how we invest our time. Approximately 20 percent of our work produces a whopping 80 percent of our results. And the inverse is just as true: 80 percent of the work we do will produce a measly 20 percent of the results.
For a salesman, the time spent selling (not writing reports, organizing the office, attending meetings or responding to messages) is the biggest predictor of success. For the youth worker, time spent with students, developing a volunteer team and doing strategic planning contribute the most to making a youth ministry sustainable. Unfortunately, too many youth pastors seem to find time for everything but these three things.
Post-It notes before PalmPilots. I know guys who have all the latest time-management gadgets, but they still can’t seem to do the most important things first. Don’t be fooled. If you are tempted to be gadget happy, make sure you have a simple system in place to attend to your most important tasks of each day. Having a resource that helps us do the less important things more quickly gives the illusion of productivity, but it will only accelerate the directionless churn of your ministry.
Embrace intentional procrastination. Because most of us overestimate how much we can do in a day, intentional procrastination provides a tool for deciding beforehand which things will simply not get done today. For example, I choose to intentionally procrastinate on my preparation for speaking. I determine how long I’ll need to prepare for a particular message (or wedding or funeral), and I don’t start preparing until that much time immediately before the event. These hours tend to be very focused and productive because of the natural rush of adrenaline that comes from knowing that I’ve got to be ready within the next few hours. Those who think they never procrastinate are deluded; we all put things off every day. Intentional procrastination just allows us to put things off on purpose.
Balcony Time
Far too many of us deal with our time like a five-year-old taking her hundred-pound dog for a walk. Driven by unpredictable, yelping demands, we feel incapable of doing anything to move our ministries in any direction. Our work becomes reduced to a series of erratic steps that takes us nowhere, each step a random replicate of the one before.
The few—the sustainable youth workers—who have been able to let go of the leash have one thing in common: they almost all practice balcony time. No time management tool is nearly as powerful, in our experience, as this one. In balcony time, we step out of the wild, rushing current of doing ministry and step into a place where we actually work on our ministries.
It wasn’t long into my start in youth ministry when I realized I was expected to be an expert at things I knew nothing about. Where, I wondered, was I supposed to have learned how to be an administrator, a manager, a strategist—all essential skills for longevity in ministry? And where could I learn them?
The answer: in the balcony.
Balcony time is the time when we decide what frogs must be eaten first. Whether they’re aware of it or not, everyone with leadership responsibility for a youth ministry has all the following responsibilities, which only get attended to properly when there’s enough time in the balcony:
Though these items are the very ones most likely to move a youth ministry forward, they are also the ones most likely to be ignored.
Let me be clear. Balcony time is not the same as Sabbath time or devotional time. A Sabbath is a day off from work; balcony time is time on, but usually not at the office, where interruptions are likely to come every fifteen minutes. The balcony is the place where we take measures to ensure that our Sabbath time and time with God are protected.
It is in the balcony that we gain the perspective to work on our ministries, not just in them. In the balcony, we find the leverage to move our ministries forward; it’s in the balcony that we move out of a victim mentality and into the mindset of a leader; it’s in the balcony that we learn to say no to secondary priorities in order to attend to the most essential ones; it’s in the balcony that we invest time in our ministries rather than just spend time.
Here’s how it works: Balcony time begins by carving out a block of at least four hours each week. Sustainable youth workers promise themselves that, during this time, they will not answer the phone, will not respond to emails, will not plan this week’s programs and will not seek to accomplish anything on the bulging urgent list. Though balcony time is not the place to work on this week’s top priorities, it is the place where we determine what those top priorities will be. It’s the place where we make the hard decisions about what things we’ll intentionally procrastinate about in the coming week.
I like to start my month by identifying the major chunks of time I’ll need to do the most important things, beginning with a weekly Sabbath day and three more four-hour blocks each week when I can be available to my family. The next step is to carve out an additional four-hour block each week for balcony time. All my meetings, phone calls and to-do lists get squeezed in around these priorities (Sabbath, family time and balcony time). Of course, the plan never works as neatly as it may look on paper—that’s another reason for balcony time. And it’s just one more reason we must also learn to become exceptional monkey managers.
Where Have All Your Monkeys Gone?
Every sustainable youth worker I’ve ever known has, sooner or later, learned the fine art of monkey management. I’m not referring to the skill of corralling that hormonal herd of junior-highers. I’m talking about all the “monkeys on our backs.” Simply defined, a monkey is the responsibility to make the next move.
Just walking down the hall at church, a youth pastor is a monkey magnet. In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to walk out of church on any given Sunday carrying twenty or so new monkeys. The monkeys climb on our backs through innocent comments like these (just for effect, you’re welcome to hum the flying-monkey music from The Wizard of Oz as you read):
Youth workers most prone to being overwhelmed by flying monkeys are those who walk down the halls of the church saying things like, “I’ll call you this week about that.” They end phone conversations with “Let me think about it and get back to you on that later this week.” They tend to end meetings having discussed an issue to death, but without knowing who will deal with all the monkeys.
Unless managed properly, screaming monkeys will overwhelm us and keep us from leading our ministries forward. After thirty years in the jungle of monkey management, I’ve observed a few principles about the behavior of these monkeys, patterns that every monkey management master needs to know:
Showing Up for Practice
Every youth ministry faces chronic challenges that resist the normal solutions of prayer, planning and persistence. Whether a church is attempting to turn around a stalled youth ministry or moving its thriving youth ministry off a plateau, those churches require the kind of single-minded, synergistic energy that only comes from a team that regularly “practices” together. And there is only one word for those practices, a word distasteful to most youth workers: meetings.
If we’re going to navigate around brick walls, we need more than a patchwork collection of ideas implemented in unpredictable episodes by passionate individuals. We need the power of a team pulling together in a unified, crystal-clear direction. Getting a team pulling in the same direction requires that the members regularly “show up for practice.”
You need a driver’s license to operate a car but no qualifications to call a meeting, which means any fool can do so. You’re bound to suffer folly in meetings—especially church meetings, which have been known to last through several presidential administrations.
MIKE WOODRUFF
Unfortunately, meetings led by creative, relational youth workers tend to swirl and churn, addressing dozens of issues with the same level of time and energy, often leaving the most important topics to the point in the meeting when “time is up.” These meetings offer an illusion of movement but never actually move ministries forward, because they fall victim to classic meeting mistakes:
One of the reasons so many youth ministries—and so many churches, for that matter—are chronically stuck is that they fail to access the power of good meetings.
In his marvelous book-length parable, Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni suggests that thriving organizations need three distinctly different kinds of meetings:
The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients.
PATRICK LENCIONI
1. Daily stand-up meetings at the beginning of each day (five minutes)—standing up to ensure brevity, daily to ensure accountability. Nothing affected the productivity of our summer interns like having daily stand-up meetings to make sure each intern had clarity about his or her number-one priority for the day.
2. Weekly tactical meetings (an hour to an hour and a half). These meetings keep the team focused on the immediate concerns, the tasks and responsibilities that require the sharing of information and coordination of effort. In youth ministry, it’s normal to talk about scheduling, volunteer recruitment and support, attendance, and kids and families in need of immediate attention.
3. Monthly or quarterly strategic meetings (two to eight hours).
Also, I like to pull my team away for an annual retreat to do long-term visioning and scheduling, in addition to growing in our love for each other and for Christ together. At these meetings away, we take time to address chronic challenges, including the following:
These challenges will not be met without the power of a team moving in the same direction—praying, dreaming, trying, failing, evaluating, trying again, praying some more.
Wanted: Third-Pig Youth Workers
When I read The Three Little Pigs, I can’t help but see the first two pigs as metaphors for traditional youth ministry. They built their houses fast, considering the deliberate work of the third pig just a little obsessive for their tastes. And, quite frankly, the first two pigs achieved visible results much faster than their brick-laying brother.
But when the wolf showed up with his huffing and puffing, the little pigs were left with nothing stronger than their brash confidence and bold conviction: “I won’t let you in! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!” But words are cheap when no structure is in place to back those words up.
Normal, everyday, garden-variety youth workers throw the structure of their ministries together quickly and then scurry around, mired in their own complaints about their senior pastors and elders, bemoaning the hopeless state of youth ministry around the world.
Sustainable youth workers spend their time eating frogs, climbing balconies and actually enjoying the wild and woolly monkey dance that is always a part of youth ministry. Third-pig youth ministers build sustainable youth ministries one brick at a time—ministries that won’t be blown in.