Fifty Thousand Coaches
10
Architecting the Constellation
From Camp Counselor to Sustainable Leader
What youth need more than gung-ho adults are Godbearing adults, people whose own yes to God has transformed them into messengers of the gospel.
Kenda Dean and Ron Foster
Reams of material are written and taught with an approach to reaching an end by effortless means—and more will be written. Advertising messages continually promote methods of achieving end results with little or no effort. And this material and these messages are so effective that in many cases people will work harder to avoid the extra effort than actually applying the extra effort that will produce the originally desired outcome.
S. L. Parker
I started a recent seminar with a simple brainstorming statement: The biggest problem with volunteers is . . .
The first person shouted, “What volunteers?!” And with a wave of laughter, the brainstorm was launched. Someone said, “They stay in the back of the room and don’t talk to kids.” Another gave just the opposite response: “They try to take over.” A third shouted, “It’s impossible to fire them!” As each answer was written on the board, heads nodded.
Every now and then, people ask us, “With all the different kinds of churches you work with, do you see patterns that show up in every church youth ministry?” The answer is an unequivocal yes. Once the youth staff is in place, there’s no challenge youth ministries face more consistently than fielding a well-equipped, well-coordinated team of volunteers.
Unfortunately, most churches perfectly design their youth ministries to guarantee volunteer problems. Here’s how: they hire camp counselors to lead their youth ministry instead of ministry leaders.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a “camp counselor” working with youth. In fact, having people who see their primary role as building relationships with kids is crucial to every youth ministry. But we have a name for folks who play that role, a name that just might surprise you: volunteers.
Why Volunteers Matter
Remember our pyramid from chapter five:
Figure 8.
The only way to turn this pyramid upside down is through the development of a team of volunteer leaders. But the unanticipated consequence of the elevation of the “profession” of youth ministry has been to push the work of volunteers to the sidelines. Too many volunteer leaders see themselves as second-class assistants to the real ministers doing the work. If volunteers (what some call “unpaid staff”) are to be empowered to serve, there must be someone charged with the responsibility of cultivating these leaders.
Youth ministry is the church’s ministry, not just that of specialists who can “relate” to young people. The mandate to be there for young people belongs to the Christian community, not to any individual or group of individuals.
KENDA DEAN
Sadly, the typical professional in youth ministry continues to see his or her primary job as “relating to students,” one student at a time, something like figure 9.
Figure 9.
The camp counselor role works just fine, as long as the number of youth involved in the program stays low. But if the ministry grows, the picture begins to look more like figure 10.
Figure 10.
The result of growing a youth ministry through a camp counselor is the implosion of the youth ministry (and often the youth minister).
But what would happen if professional youth workers took the radical step of seeing their relationship with students as secondary? What would happen if, instead, youth workers recognized that their primary work was ensuring that each student in the ministry had multiple godly adults pouring into his or her life? What would happen if we reconfigured youth ministry in such a way that the paid youth worker was primarily the architect of a constellation of relationships? It might look more like figure 11.
Figure 11.
Notice the shift at the center of the last two diagrams. In this last design, the teenager is no longer a dangling appendage, no longer dependent on the faithfulness, longevity or availability of a single member of the body of Christ. Rather, that young person is at the center of a web, a convergent community connected not only to him or her but also to each other.
Could it be that one of the reasons teenagers in our culture have such a hard time developing an integrated identity is that they are surrounded with dis-integrating relationships? Could it be that fragmented relationships with people who know nothing of each other actually pull teenagers away from an integrating center, leaving them with a patchwork identity developed as a coping mechanism for surviving the rootlessness of their world?
This letter from a teenage girl to her small-group leader (a volunteer) captures some of the power that a durable adult can have in a student’s life:
This was the first year that I ever felt included. . . . I knew that someone really did love me. . . . You made the insecure ones feel secure, making the excluded ones included. You loved me, spent time with me, and wanted to see me know God more. No one has ever done that for me before.
But behind this story is another story: this connection would never have happened unless the leader of the ministry (typically the paid staff person behind the unpaid staff person) had taken time away from “being with kids” to train and to transfer ministry responsibility and authority to this volunteer leader.
Everybody loves the idea of having more volunteers. We all understand why. But it is the how that’s the problem. After experimenting with a wide variety of methods for building volunteer teams in churches with all kinds of internal and external obstacles, we’ve identified three essential steps for building a thriving volunteer youth ministry team (and thus, a thriving youth ministry): recruitment, developing a team and delegating.
Recruitment: The First Step Is the Hardest
The study behind the book Youth Ministry That Transforms revealed that less than a third of professional youth workers experience regular success in recruiting volunteers. Less than a third! Our experience with youth workers bears this statistic out.
Quite accidentally, we stumbled onto the biggest obstacle in recruiting volunteer leaders. After working with church after church that just couldn’t seem to get traction in recruiting volunteers, we started asking youth workers, “How many hours have you spent in the previous week actually recruiting volunteers?” Almost invariably, it was less than an hour (most often, it was exactly zero).
To get a youth worker off the dime, we recommend that he or she make five recruiting calls in the coming week. Since at this point we’re not expecting a definite yes or no, we call these “cultivating calls” rather than recruiting calls. The assignment is not to recruit, but simply to make the first call (even if that is simply leaving a message). This process can take anywhere from ten to thirty minutes.
Before we end our conversation with the youth worker, we agree on the names of people he or she will call for what volunteer positions and agree to an accountability check the next week.
But when we check in a week later, the youth worker who “desperately” wants more volunteers has often not made a single call. Something has come up—an unusually busy ministry month, a student in crisis, a dog who ate the list.
We’re talking about an assignment that could have been completed in less than thirty minutes, maybe in as little as ten. But the average youth worker has extraordinary difficulty finding those ten minutes.
Here’s why: Recruiting is hard.
Few of us like to ask people to do things for us. Most of us would rather just do it ourselves than go through the discomfort of making calls. As a result, many youth workers step into the fall (when the season opens) unable to field a complete team and complaining about being overwhelmed.
This pattern perpetuates the myth that “no one in our church ever volunteers.” Frantically cobbling together a group of volunteers who fill slots every other week or so reinforces the perception that they’re only helpers in someone else’s ministry. When we see a youth ministry with rotating helpers, we can be sure that there is dry rot in the foundation.
Sadly, most volunteer recruitment comes in the form of blanket solicitations to large groups. The assumption, of course, is that such an approach will save the recruiter time. But in the long run, blanket appeals always wind up taking more time, for very obvious reasons:
But hidden beneath all the reasons recruiting doesn’t work, there’s good news: when those responsible for a youth ministry actually invest the appropriate amount of time in the recruitment process, at the right time, we can almost guarantee success.
We’ve seen lots of variations, shortcuts and “brilliant” ideas for recruiting volunteers (for example, some suggest that you have the kids recruit for you, or threaten to cancel a program if you don’t have enough volunteers), but none of those work nearly as well as working a very clear process. Remember, we’re investing, not gambling on great ideas.
In this chapter, I want to offer the keystone steps of any effective recruiting process. Churches that stick to these fundamentals will almost always have the number of volunteers they want.
Working the Recruitment Process
If you’re expecting a secret, new-and-improved way of recruiting volunteers, you might be disappointed with what you’re about to read. Churches who buy into the latest-and-greatest, cutting-edge approaches to recruiting typically find themselves with limited results. Here’s the very straightforward process that, when worked, actually works:
1. Start early. We like to suggest that churches open their recruiting season for the coming year at least six months before the potential leaders are to begin serving. This principle means that most youth ministries need to begin their major recruiting push in February.
When we make these recommendations, people smile, as if to say, “That will never work around here. People don’t commit that far in advance.” But we’ve discovered that the very people we want to serve as leaders actually do think this way. These are the kind of people who take their commitments seriously enough that they know today whether they’ll be the chairperson for the PTA or on the board of the United Way or Rotary six months from now. The earlier you ask, the more weight you give to the role you’re asking the potential volunteer to play.
2. Identify your needs. Strangely enough, most youth ministers never sit down to discover how many volunteers they actually need to sustain their ministry for the coming year. Most imagine that they’re somehow beyond having to write down a list of needs; they simply assume they can keep it in their head (reason number one for why recruiting seldom makes it to the top of their to-do lists).
Figuring out the number of volunteers needed begins by taking out a pen and paper (or sitting down at a computer) and listing all the volunteers who will be required for the coming year, such as
We typically recommend a ratio of one adult for every five youth that the church hopes to see active in the ministry. In other words, a church with a dream of having fifty active students weekly should have ten volunteers engaged in hands-on leadership on a weekly basis. This number typically doesn’t include the dozens of other volunteers who will work behind the scenes, like committee members and event coordinators.
A quick word of explanation about major-event coordinators: If you have ever lived in a midsize to large city, you’ve probably heard of an organization called Junior League, made up of women who work together to pull off grand events that raise money for their favorite charities. I watched from a distance as Junior League in Nashville put on events, and I compared it to the way I was working. Here’s what I discovered:
It’s always fun to discover a new way to spell stupid using the letters of my own name.
A fascinating thing happened when I started allowing highly organized people to organize our events: they got organized. The capacity of our ministry expanded dramatically, because I was freed to do the things only I could do, like recruiting and equipping volunteers.
3. Develop your pool. The next step is to develop a pool of potential recruits. Most youth ministries recruit “off the cuff.” They discover a need (usually an urgent one), and they do what comes naturally—they go after the best person they can find for that position. Sounds logical, doesn’t it?
The danger of this approach is that you may be asking an A player to do a job that a C player could do just as well—or better. For example, when you’ve got to have someone make the arrangements for the cookout, your mind immediately turns to Jan. Jan is an uber-volunteer; she can do just about anything. She’s clearly the best pick for this job (and just about any other job you might need her to do). You call Jan, and she’s happy to say yes.
Two weeks later, you need someone to handle all the logistics for the silent auction, the extraordinarily complicated fundraiser that should bring in 90 percent of the money needed for the upcoming mission trip. You immediately think of Jan, but her youth ministry volunteer plate is now filled with the less-strategic job of managing the cookout.
Strategic recruitment means waiting to make the first recruiting call until you’ve developed a master list of potential volunteers. We suggest going through your entire church directory and writing down every name of every person who might be a potential volunteer, and putting those names in one of three categories:
The general rule is to develop a list three times longer than the number of volunteers you actually need.
Once that list is developed, label each name on the list. You can use any system you like, but I like the baseball approach:
This is not the time for us to make a decision for our potential volunteers. In other words, this is not the time to say, “She would never do it.” At this point, we’re simply developing the list of people we believe have the gifts for this kind of ministry, even if we don’t believe they have the time right now.
4. Select a draft pick for every position. Once you have the two lists in front of you (the list of needs for your ministry and the list of potential leaders), place a name next to every position. Add phone numbers, and use this document as the master recruiting list. I always like to start with the “reach recruits,” those superstars (like the senior pastor) who I think have little chance of saying yes. If they say no, I’ve lost nothing. But I’m surprised how often someone I’m sure won’t be available says yes.
5. Start smiling and dialing. The traditional way of recruiting requires waiting until you think someone will be at home before making calls. This approach is problematic for a number of reasons:
When you call, ask for what you really want. Avoid making the position too easy. Our senior consultant Jeff Dunn-Rankin has helped me imagine how Jesus might recruit if he used the same methods that many of us use in youth ministry. Jeff imagines that the revised biblical text might go something like this:
And verily Jesus saw Peter, busy with his day job, and said reluctantly unto him, “Listen, man, I need you to do me a favor. Nobody’s responded to my note in the bulletin, and I can’t get anybody to help us out on this thing I’m putting together. I don’t know what happened to commitment, but hey, whatever. I just need you to spend some time with me once a month. You and Nathanael and Judas could do it on a rotating basis. Look, I know you’re busy, but if you do this I’ll definitely owe you one. If not, we’re canceling the Last Supper.”
6. When two-thirds of your potential leaders turn you down, return to step four and repeat the process. The secret is not in the creativity of the process; it is in persistently working the process. Committing the time and fighting the inertia of call resistance are key aspects of a recruiting program that short-term, camp-counselor youth workers avoid. Starting the recruiting process six months in advance provides enough margin for repeating the process over and over until you have a full team to field, before the insanity of summer schedules arrives.
Developing the Volunteer Team: Stewarding a Community of Dreamers
Once a team is in place for the year, it’s time to ensure that systems are in place to help those leaders discover their unique calls to ministry while at the same time moving toward a single, clearly articulated vision. I love Erwin McManus’s winsome picture of our role in working with volunteers. He calls us “stewards of a community of dreamers.”
In their landmark study of professional youth workers, Merton Strommen, Dave Rahn and Karen Jones discovered that 70 percent of youth pastors considered “developing volunteers” to be either “very important” or “extremely important.” But less than 25 percent of that same group said they’d been able to develop volunteers effectively, and half reported little or no success at all.
Most organizations are a puzzle put together in a darkened room. Each piece is clumsily squeezed into place and then the edges are ground down so that they feel well positioned. But pull up the shades, let a little light into the room, and we can see the truth. Eight out of ten pieces are in the wrong place.
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM AND DONALD CLIFTON
There are few places where the Second Law of Thermodynamics (“things tend toward a state of disorder”) is more apparent than in the development of volunteers. We can be certain that if we don’t have systems in place to intentionally empower, train and encourage our volunteers, they will not fulfill the responsibilities the ministry requires of them.
The simple (but not easy) principle of investment holds true here as well. Ministries that invest time troubleshooting, clarifying and connecting their volunteers build effective teams. Those who leave volunteer training to chance wind up with a dream team of amazingly gifted leaders who never seem to get enough traction to move their ministries forward.
What do leaders of highly effective ministry teams do differently?
They communicate. I have a friend who was asked by a ministry organization to “help” lead a mission trip to Iowa for a small group of teenagers. Just days before the trip, he learned that he would be the trip’s only adult. The trip, filled with one unpleasant surprise after another, left him with the conviction that he would never work with teenagers again.
Getting good players, that's the easy part. Getting them to play together, that's the hard part.
CASEY STENGEL
Every volunteer longs for clarity. But too often we give only fuzzy expectations—no job description, no behavioral covenant, no accountability structure—and then wonder why our volunteers don’t last.
One youth worker I know, when encouraged to spend more time supporting his volunteers, said that if the volunteers didn’t feel comfortable “just hanging out with kids,” he didn’t need them. You can imagine how eager his new recruits were to return to youth group after being ignored by the person they thought would give them direction.
Youth ministry can be filled with frustration and deep discouragement, especially for inexperienced volunteers. Without persistent trouble-shooting and intentional support, most youth ministry volunteers simply don’t continue. Not all volunteers need the same thing: some need encouragement, others need coaching and still others need help transitioning, as soon as possible, to another ministry. Regular communication takes time, the kind of time a camp-counselor youth worker will not spend.
They celebrate. In our church, one of the best times to recruit volunteers is at the end of the senior banquet. After an extended evening that includes teenagers speaking their hearts to those who have led them over the previous six years, volunteers leave with little doubt that their sacrificial commitment has “changed the world,” at least for a few kids. Few things are more motivating than someone hearing his or her name mentioned as a young person tells about the transformation God has worked in his or her life.
Youth ministries with effective volunteer teams find ways to give affirmation and encouragement all year long. For instance,
They do ministry out of community. I’m convinced that one reason youth ministries fail to build a magnetic community among their teenagers is because the adults who work with them have few, if any, connections with each other. It’s mighty hard to cultivate a sense of family among our kids if that same sense isn’t present among the adults.
I’m also convinced that one of the reasons Young Life volunteers do such an extraordinary job of building relationships with students outside the context of Young Life meetings is because those leaders generally meet together every week. The actual content of those meetings is less important than the practice of simply logging the quantity time necessary for a group of individuals to function like the body of Christ.
They build the expectation of long-term continuation. People laugh when I tell them that, at our church, we ask our youth ministry volunteers to stay involved for six years. My experience is that asking people to work with teenagers for less than that robs them of the sweetest part of doing youth ministry: watching the kids who once wore them out grow into godly men and women.
Mike Nappa discovered in his study What I Wish My Youth Leader Knew About Youth Ministry that, with some variation by grade, between 33 percent and 42 percent of youth group students said that their volunteer leaders had a great deal of influence on their involvement in youth group. But that number jumps significantly for the seniors, 51 percent of whom describe their volunteer leaders’ role as “having a great deal of influence.” I don’t think it’s too much of an interpretive leap to assume that these volunteer leaders were not newly introduced during the senior year. More likely, they were reaping the fruit of long, durable relationships built over a span of years, not weeks.
Delegating: The Power of an Apprenticing Culture
Calvin and Hobbes are speeding down the hill in the little red wagon. Calvin says to his tiger friend, “I thrive on change!”
Hobbes responds skeptically, “You? You threw a fit this morning because your mom put less jelly on your toast than yesterday.”
Calvin revises his statement, “I thrive on making other people change.”
Most people see delegation as getting other people to do the work they don’t want to do themselves. But abdication and abandonment are not the same as delegation.
In an abandonment culture, volunteers learn never to volunteer for anything, never to suggest an idea, because if they do, they “get stuck with it for life.” In an apprenticing culture, volunteers have all the support they need every step of the way, from the one-on-one orientation meeting to the final victory dance—and all the troubleshooting in between.
Most youth workers I know despise meetings. But for our ministries to be consistent, the unpredictable people who serve in our ministries need a predictable structure. When we assume that our volunteers will naturally do what we expect them to do, we delude ourselves. They will do only one thing predictably: be unpredictable.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter discovered in her fascinating study of winning streaks and losing streaks in business that
the losing companies are twice as likely as the winning companies to have reduced the number of management meetings in the preceding two years. At the very time when communication is most needed, losers are more likely to stop talking. . . . Losers, compared with winners, are nearly four times as likely to keep information in the hands of a small group that operates in secrecy behind closed doors, shutting everyone else out.
In “winning” organizations, information flows freely; in “losing” organizations, a select few hold the information. Meetings are nowhere more important than in the delegation of responsibility to key volunteers. Three kinds of meetings are pivotal to developing this apprenticeship culture: orientation, check-in and celebration.
1. The orientation. At this meeting, the ministry leader and the volunteer talk through the specific job description, the youth leader covenant, the overall mission of the youth ministry, and the unique scope and sequence of the work to be done. If we hope to give our volunteers load-bearing responsibility—the only kind that’s truly satisfying for a volunteer—this is essential.
During this orientation meeting, the leader might learn the specifics of building relationships with students, the general concept he or she agreed to initially. For example, a weekly volunteer might learn that he or she is responsible to
2. The periodic check-in. Why does Barry Bonds have a batting coach? Why does Tiger Woods have a swing coach? Because fundamentals break down, even if you’re the best in the league. Without a periodic check-in, we abandon our volunteers to their own memories, and we prevent them from part of the experience they thought they would get when they said yes: interacting with us.
No matter how much of a self-starter the volunteer is, he or she will need regular follow-up from you. We may imagine that the more competent the volunteer, the less we’ll need to check in with him or her. Surprisingly, the opposite is true. When we fail to give strong leaders clear direction, we give them permission to take the project in any direction they want, regardless of whether or not that direction fits with the mission and values of our ministry. Taking time for a five-minute check-in can save countless hours and maximize the chances of our best volunteers being willing to serve again.
3. The celebration. Too many volunteers complete their term of sacrificial service and no one says a word. Whether the celebration takes the form of a ten-minute post-event “afterglow” with all the key players celebrating together or a thank-you dinner, effective volunteer teams always take time to celebrate.
When these volunteer development processes are clearly in place, momentum begins to take over. For the past ten years or so, our church has sponsored an annual parenting seminar, followed by a youth workers seminar by a nationally known youth leader. At first, our results were disappointing at best. But this past year, we experienced the power of momentum in full effect.
When we met with Justin and Maureen Milam, our incredible volunteer chairpeople, three or four months before the event, we outlined the responsibilities, built in a few systems for periodic check-ins and got out of the way. Because they had served as lead volunteers before, they knew exactly what they were getting into, and they handled this responsibility with even greater effectiveness than in previous roles. And each year they got better, we all got better.
Fifty Thousand Coaches
In the middle of the delightful movie Akeelah and the Bee, Akeelah, a gifted young girl from an inner-city school, has hit a brick wall: the master spelling coach who was to be her ticket to winning the national spelling bee has resigned.
Akeelah’s mother tries to comfort her, telling the story of her own attempt at college and how her fear of failure led her to drop out. As they sit on the couch, Akeelah’s mom herself begins to coach Akeelah on her spelling words. Finally, mother challenges daughter triumphantly, “I’ll bet there are fifty thousand coaches out there.”
A youth worker’s job is to help students access their own collection of fifty thousand coaches, not to be a solo coaching superstar. Someone described a manager as the person who takes care of the visitors so that everyone else can get their work done. It’s not a bad description for a sustainable youth minister: taking care of all the distractions, so that God’s people can do the work God has called them to do.