Student Leadership in Perspective
11
The Magnet Effect
Making Friendship Contagious
When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust.
Malcolm Gladwell
Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?
Jesus, in Luke 15:4
Daniel Goleman claims that the high school dropout rate of children who are rejected by their peers is between two and eight times greater than that of children who are accepted.
Donald Miller
Typically, churches have viewed adolescents as objects of mission, not as agents of mission.
Kenda Dean
Catie was the third generation in her family to grow up in our church. Her parents helped to launch a young-adult Sunday school class. Her grandfather was an elder. We always called her dad first when we had a question about technology. My daughter babysat for Catie and her brother as they were growing up. Catie was well liked and popular at school, a beautiful young woman with a bubbly, magnetic personality.
But after her eighth-grade year, neither she nor her parents were around church much. And so I called. The answer I heard gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. After a good bit of probing and prodding, Catie summed up for her mom the reason she never wanted to come back to our group: “I’ll never be cool enough to fit in there.”
How was that possible? So many of the adult leaders were crazy about Catie. She was dependable, comfortable in her own skin, mature beyond her years. We loved having Catie around.
But, because she went to a school attended by few of our youth group members, she was often left out of conversations. And because most middle-schoolers obsessively focus on making themselves feel comfortable, none of her peers were taking initiative to make “the outsider” (the one we all assumed was the insider) feel at home and comfortable.
Remember—you’ll be at church. People will be judging you.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
So Catie and her family, whom we had pegged as those most likely to be at the heart of our ministry, left our church. Though it was the last thing they wanted to do, her parents moved their membership to a church where they knew Catie would thrive. She is now deeply involved in a marvelous youth ministry down the street from us, a place where she immediately felt welcome and never once had to wonder if she was “cool enough” to belong.
The Cool Church
Because of my strong emphasis on family-based youth ministry over the past fifteen years or so, I’ve argued passionately that what kids need most is not just a group of Christian peers but also droves of durable, Christian adults. But I’m starting to broaden my appreciation for the unique role the youth themselves can play.
No one brought this principle home to me as clearly as Rick Lawrence did in Group Magazine’s fascinating study of ten thousand youth group kids. They asked students, “If you were choosing a church, how important would the following things be?” Check out the first two responses, both of which ranked way above all the others (numbers represent the percentage of kids who rated this item as “very important”):
When kids are thinking about the church they might want to be a part of, they’re not—at least not initially—thinking about the adult leaders. They’re asking, “Are these the kind of people I would like to be friends with?” Interestingly, the third-highest response, coming in at 59 percent, was “a senior pastor who understands and loves teenagers.” Coming in near the bottom of the list was “quality relationships with adults” (only 36 percent). And bringing up the rear with only 21 percent was “a fast-paced, high-tech, entertaining ministry approach.”
The article that reported this study, incidentally, was called “The Cool Church.” If we were to borrow Catie’s language, this would not be a church that looks cool to everyone who comes, but rather a church in which “I feel cool enough” to belong.
Please understand. Youth not ranking “relationships with adults” high on the list does not minimize the profound role adults play. Long-term, sustainable faith is most deeply influenced by the adults that surround our kids, not just their peers. But as we look at what causes kids to stay in groups, peers play a central role, a role that most adults simply can’t play.
As I look back on my experience as the new kid at church, the results of this study ring true. At eleven years old, I moved to Texas with my mom, and we quickly found Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Waco. The service was predictable enough, the adults were nice enough, but when it came time for “fellowship hour,” I wanted to throw up.
As my mother “fellowshiped” with all the other fellowshipers, I was left to stand in my prepubescent body by the ten-cent Coke machine. Kids of all ages with dimes in hand walked past me to the Coke machine, gathered their bargain prize and walked away. Though a few gave a polite hello, most were just as uncomfortable having a new kid around as I was standing there.
It wasn’t until Thereasa, an angelic tenth-grader, introduced herself to me that my terror started to thaw, and I began to think there might be a chance I would find a place. Every time she invited me to sit next to her, it was an affirmation that I had a place, that I really was starting to belong.
Thereasa did what the adults in the group couldn’t have done. She made me feel like part of the group. It’s not that adults were insignificant (they became more important as time went on), but adults could not be the sticky paper that kept me connected to the church. Friends had to be.
Once I began to grasp the power of these principles a few years ago, our youth ministry team decided we wanted to make our group the safest, most welcoming place in the city for teenagers, a place where no one could ever walk away saying “I could never be cool enough” to fit in there.
Planting the Seeds of a Friendship Epidemic
Though Catie, Rick and Thereasa helped me to understand the importance of building a friendship culture in youth ministry, it was my friend Jeanne Mayo who began to teach me how to make it happen. Around the time that her book Thriving Youth Groups was coming out, Jeanne and I had the privilege of leading a summit for youth leaders at the Group headquarters in Colorado.
Jeanne, who is married to a senior pastor, has more energy than a twelve-year-old, and she didn’t get the memo that a middle-aged mom is not what a church needs to build a thriving youth ministry. She has grown ministries from a handful of students to over a thousand. When you ask her how, she will tell you that, after Jesus, nothing has affected the growth of her ministries like the climate of friendship that has been built there. Almost everything I know about how to build a friendship culture, I learned from Jeanne (or from other people who learned from Jeanne—including my own son—but more about that later).
I will certainly not do Jeanne’s process justice here (for that, buy her book), but I do want to offer a simple outline of how a youth ministry might strategically create its own friendship epidemic.
Examine your process. The first step is to start by defining exactly what you want a first-time visitor or an “outsider” to experience at each of your ministry settings. For our ministry, we look at the Sunday-morning window from the time the student’s car drives into the church parking lot until the time he or she gets back to it, including all of these steps:
Now go back through this list and underline the two or three places where prospective students might decide never to come back. Then circle the one part of the process that tends to get the vast majority of our time and attention.
If you’re like most youth workers, you circled the program. In fact, most of us spend 90 percent of our effort preparing the week’s program (writing the curriculum, planning the games and so on). The truth is that the formal program is only one in a series of steps every student goes through. When we begin to think in terms of steps, not simply in terms of a program, we recognize our need to reallocate the time invested in the various steps.
Very few kids step out of a youth ministry because the programs are lousy. Kids will actually forgive all kinds of programmatic mediocrity if they are certain they belong. Consider what most teenagers do on weekend nights. They don’t usually have brilliant, hypercreative plans (you’ve seen them meandering through Blockbuster for hours, looking for a movie to rent). They simply “hang out” with their friends. If our youth ministries don’t provide students with the opportunity to be with the kinds of friends they want, it won’t matter how spiritual, cutting-edge or outrageous our programs are; kids will not stick.
Make the shift from a program focus to a friendship focus. Think back to the Group survey. Remember what came last on the list? “A fast-paced, high-tech, entertaining ministry approach.”
How often do kids walk into our “outreach programs,” the ones designed to engage the outsider, to find the student and adult leaders scrambling around finishing the final setup, practicing for the skit or putting the final touches on the video or PowerPoint of the day?
With a program focus, the number-one priority is getting our programs right. With a friendship focus, we corral our program preparation time so that, if something has to slide, it won’t be our availability to the lost or lonely student walking through the door.
In Practicing Passion, Kenda Dean identifies the three longings every teenager carries with him or her into every one of our youth meetings.
Though it could be argued that the adolescent longing for transcendence (“move me”) requires a high-quality, moving program, it’s important to remember that our students are much more likely to be moved relationally rather than programmatically. Some experts suggest that unless a newcomer has at least seven friends in the church, after six months, that student will be gone.
Large-group meetings merely lay down the groundwork, lower the drawbridge and tear down the walls so that life change can occur in more intimate settings. With a Postmodern mindset, people in this emerging culture process truth relationally.
TIM CELEK AND DIETER ZANDER
It’s not that programs are irrelevant. They’re simply secondary.
Cara Jenkins, now a youth worker in Sacramento, describes how youth group friendship took place in her own life:
When I was a sophomore in high school, I attended a youth group and was pretty cynical. I knew I came across pretty hard, and I didn’t expect them to care or accept me. Not only were they friendly and warm, but when I came back a second week, they remembered my name! Now, every week, I search out those girls who think they won’t fit in and love them like a few amazing people did for me when I was a teenager. I know it’s easier to gravitate toward kids who look like they have it all together, but breaking down social barriers has to start with our example as leaders.
Develop Your Own Extravaganza Squad
At this stage in the game, we don’t recommend launching an official “student leadership program.” We recommend focusing instead on identifying, developing and accessing students to engage in specific ministries for which they’re uniquely gifted. I love the term my friend and veteran youth pastor Joe Cox uses for this process. He calls it “student apprenticeship” rather than student leadership, emphasizing that these young people are being mentored into service, not simply handed the reins of power.
When I’m looking for potential student apprentices, I look down to try to find people bending over to do the work that no one else wants to do (like picking up trash after youth group), and I look to the corners for the people who have a knack for paying attention to those at the fringes of the group. A little affirmation and a few assignments can go a long way toward empowering student apprentices, one at a time, long before a formal student apprentice program is put together.
One of my greatest thrills over the past three years was having my son Adam on the staff of our youth ministry as the high-school outreach director. During his short tenure, he championed (loudly and repeatedly) the priority that everyone who walks through the door of our youth ministry feel loved. He accomplished this priority primarily through the creation of The Extravaganza Squad (or ESquad for short).
Our Extravaganza Squad is a group of forty or so students who have taken as their responsibility the creation of a contagious friendship culture in every program of our youth ministry. Depending heavily on advice from Jeanne’s book, Adam started by teaching the ESquad the difference between seeing new people as visitors and seeing new people as guests.
He asked the group to think about what it feels like to be on a visiting team at a sporting event and to describe the messages visitors get from the home team. The ESquad shouted out,
“Guests,” on the other hand, are treated like royalty. When we have guests for dinner, we take out the best china and cook our best meals. When we’re guests at a nice hotel, the “home team” is at our service, wanting to do everything they can to make our stay enjoyable. Isn’t this the idea the author of Hebrews was getting at when he wrote, “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb 13:2)?
The ESquad owns the atmosphere for every guest; they own the responsibility for making every outsider student in the room feel like a VIP. Every Sunday school class also has a mini ESquad that meets fifteen minutes before the students start to arrive. In these meetings, the group celebrates the ways outsiders have been made to feel welcome during the previous week, identifies any fringe students who might need a little special attention and prays together.
Take time to train the team. The first step in training a team of students to create a magnetic friendship culture is to schedule enough time to bring everyone onboard to accomplish the initiative you’re undertaking. We have seen too many “right” initiatives fail because there wasn’t enough time allotted to get all the players moving in the same direction.
Once time has been scheduled (but not before then), you can begin the actual training. We like to start that training where Jeanne does—with Paul Revere.
In his bestselling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers a fascinating investigation of how social epidemics happen, how a product or a behavior moves from being an isolated practice to being embraced by a much wider audience. In one of Gladwell’s most memorable images, he describes the dramatic difference between the results experienced by Paul Revere and those experienced by a relatively unknown figure named William Dawes.
Both men were sent with the same message—to warn local militias to prepare for the British invasion that was coming in the morning. Those on the side of the river assigned to William Dawes seem to have received the message and then rolled over and fallen right back to sleep, while those alerted by Paul Revere sprung to life, with the warning spreading like wildfire to the surrounding villages and farms. The message was exactly the same, but the results couldn’t have been more different.
When Jeanne brings her leadership group of students together, she begins with this story and makes the purpose crystal-clear with this introduction:
So why did I ask you to show up tonight? I guess I want you to know that I view each of you as Paul Reveres in a world full of William Dawes. You have the ability to influence the people around you. I’m asking you to use that influence to create a revolution of authentic friendship in [our group]. . . .
I’m asking you to be a part of an unofficial leadership team on Wednesday nights. I know that if the people in this room are on my team, together we can dramatically change the tenor of our whole youth ministry. None of us want this to be just a holy huddle.
Once the group is clear on its purpose, they’re assigned specific tasks. Some ESquad students are to greet everyone who comes through the door; some are to connect with people at the food table; others serve as “row hosts,” greeting everyone who sits in their section; others stay at the welcome table to give a gift to every newcomer; and still others work at a game area to help provide an active focal point particularly for hyperkinetic junior high boys.
Many churches that make friendship central to the DNA of their youth ministry continue to provide for the training of their student apprentices. One church asks their friendship-epidemic students each to create their Most Wanted List of five inactive students for whom they will pray regularly. Whenever the youth ministry sponsors an outreach event, everyone is expected to invite two of the five. They aren’t responsible for whether or not those students come, but they are responsible to invite them.
Other churches take time with their student-apprentice team each year to specifically attack what Jeanne names as the two most dangerous, community-killing viruses in youth ministry: gossip and sarcasm.
Still other churches encourage their ESquad students to approach the pursuit of outsiders as an intentional spiritual practice, as a part of the way disciples live out their faith. To do this, students visit other youth groups, as the outsiders, to learn from both those who welcome them well and those who fail to do so.
Sustaining a Friendship Culture
If our ministry has a clique problem, it’s because we’ve structured it to give cliques too much power. If we have an apathy problem, it may be that we’re creating bored consumers. If our eleventh- and twelfth-graders are dropping out of sight, could it be that we’ve structured our ministry in such a way that this result is inevitable?
I want to be clear that the idea of creating a friendship culture doesn’t work. We have to work the processes of friendship culture. These processes keep key stakeholders focused on a shared commitment to community until those practices become almost imperceptibly imbedded into the DNA of the group. Though there are certainly more, we choose to access three of these core practices in our ministry.
1. The Deuteronomy 6 retreat. We need more than weekly youth meetings if we hope to move from being a “youth group” to being a “youth family.” Becoming family comes from time together, with some suggesting that it takes a minimum of eight hours of “face time” before a group of people can begin to experience community.
Remember Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema. In these few verses, God gives his people a clear strategy for passing on their faith to the next generation (and hiring a youth director was never mentioned!). Moses identified four specific, high-leverage settings in which the passing on of God’s love to the next generation was most likely to happen.
See if you can find the four in the text:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deut 6:4-9)
Moses gave God’s people specific times when they were to talk with the younger generation about the love of God: “when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up,” all four of which happen on retreats and trips. It’s on these overnight experiences that all four of the Deuteronomy 6 moments happen, when we begin and end our days together, eat meals together and take a journey together.
2. The ballad of the bard. Almost every time Adam met with the E-Squad, he told a tale, typically a tale of one of its members going above and beyond. As the “bard” of the ESquad, Adam’s stories shaped the identity of the group, reminding them that they were the ones who were successfully taking away the awkward edge for a self-conscious new-comer (or for an old-timer who hasn’t yet found his or her niche).
Somewhere in the first few meetings, the ESquad came up with a motto that captured this responsibility perfectly: “We feel awkward so you don’t have to!”
Each time the ESquad gathers (usually in the hour before a major event or a monthly outreach), their most consistent ritual is “stacking it up” (like an athletic team might before a game) and shouting their motto in unison: “We feel awkward so you don’t have to!” Rituals like this are all a part of the bard role that youth workers play with student leaders.
When it comes to telling the stories that create a magnetic friendship culture, Jeanne is the poet laureate. Here’s an example of the kinds of truth she sings into the lives of her students:
We all come from different backgrounds. Some of us attend [high school A], others attend [high school B]. Some of us come from families with lots of money and others of us have to work hard to make ends meet. None of that matters in this place. The ground is level here for everyone.
Some of us are football heroes, and others of us are computer nerds. It doesn’t matter if you’re a prep, geek, jock, or nothing. We’re just glad to have you!
We are not as much a youth group as we are a youth family. Whether this is your first time here or your millionth, we’re really glad to have you.
We can’t assume that these ideas will be obvious to everyone who walks through the doors of our ministry. While we’re ostensibly talking to the new people, every time the bard gets up to speak, he or she reminds regular youth, who once again remember, “Oh yeah, that’s who we are.”
3. The follow-up process. When a person visits for the first time, we want him or her to walk away feeling wanted, accepted and connected. Though the accomplishment of this goal is highly dependent on what happens at our program, we can take crucial steps after the visit to confirm our interest.
The first follow-up habit is a brief letter, ideally sent the day after the newcomer’s visit. In the letter, we reaffirm how glad we are that they attended the event, tell them just a bit about our ministry, invite them back and assure them that, if they’re involved in another church, they’re welcome to attend our youth group without feeling pressure to change churches. At the bottom of the letter, one of our youth staff writes a personal note. The letter is then stamped (not run through the postage meter) and hand-addressed (instead of using a mailing label) before it’s sent.
Our second follow-up habit is a phone call from one of the members of the ESquad. Calls are assigned by grade and sometimes by school, with the ESquad members trained to say again how glad we are about the visit and to ask for helpful feedback, using a statement something like this: “We’re really trying to get feedback from everyone who visits with us. We always like to find out if there’s anything we could have done that would’ve made your visit with us more what you had hoped it would be. Do you have any input for us?”
The final follow-up habit is our MIA list. Every month, we generate a list of all the students who haven’t attended in the past month. Typically, we divide this list among our youth staff, who leave check-in messages, talk to parents, and every now and then actually talk to students. Though some churches try to assign these tasks to volunteers, it’s our strong opinion that these calls belong primarily to the staff. Here’s why:
Student Leadership in Perspective
One message we often hear in an assessment or visioning process is “all we really need to do is let the kids run the program.” “After all,” the argument goes, “it’s their program.” The folks making these recommendations might be great youth leaders, but they’re lousy historians.
According to youth ministry historian Mark Senter, “student movements led by students below the college level are absent from the annals of youth ministry.” In other words, the idea of student leadership that many well-meaning leaders are suggesting has never happened, at least not in documented history.
“Letting the kids do it” eventually devolves into monthly committee meetings with students, focusing on scheduling and complaining. Other churches blithely assume that if they can get more teenagers to serve on adult committees, those students will naturally be attracted to leadership in the church as adults, and their committees will make youth-friendly decisions. I’ve never seen it happen. The truth is that an effective, well-designed, strategically implemented student apprenticeship program is one of the most complex and problematic pieces of a thriving youth ministry.
Please understand. I’m a fan of youth in leadership. Nothing has influenced the climate of our ministry and the attentiveness of our younger students quite like the juniors and seniors serving in apprentice roles. Though there are certain ministries that can only be accomplished by students, deciding whether to go bowling or play laser tag is not one of them.
Those who believe that student leadership in youth ministry is simply about adults getting out of the way so kids can take over are wrong-headed and short-sighted. Their brain genes have been doused with the same sort of laughing gas that led French philosopher Rousseau to conclude that the problem with education is . . .
ADULTS! If we tyrannical adults would just leave children alone they would learn, grow, and develop just fine on their own. Like wild flowers in a meadow, kids have everything they need to bloom their way toward a beautiful life. Only adults could mess up such a naturally perfect plan. . . .
Poppycock.
DAVE RAHN
Because so many youth ministries get tripped up in trying to build their student leadership team too early, let me identify quickly what a quality student apprenticeship program is not:
Some are under the illusion that using student leaders is easier than adults taking the lead. The opposite is usually true. If a church hopes to save time or is having trouble recruiting adults, that church needs to let go of the illusion that a thriving student leadership program will somehow take less time.
The most profound student leadership programs happen not when students are asked to plan the calendar or evaluate the quality of this or that program, as a student council might. Traditional approaches to student leadership might give students power, but they fail at a basic level. They fail to provide students with the life-on-life, uncomfortable ministry experiences that allow them to feel awkward enough to inspire their growth and effectively catalyze a culture of welcome in their youth ministries.