Warning: QWERTY Ahead
12
Dancing with Alligators
Navigating the Turbulent Waters of Church Politics
Religion is a big, beautiful, ugly thing. I read recently where Augustine said, “The church is a whore and it is my mother.” And for reasons I don’t understand, Jesus loves the church. And I suppose He loves the church with the same strength of character He displays in His love for me. Sometimes it is difficult to know which is the greater miracle.
Donald Miller
Every departmental silo in any company can ultimately be traced back to the leaders of those departments, who have failed to understand the dependencies that must exist among the executive team, or who have failed to make those interdependencies clear to the people deeper in their departments.
Patrick Lencioni
After twenty years leading youth ministry at the same church, I’ve earned what I call an “involuntary doctorate” in church politics. I wasn’t trying to be a good church politician. In fact, the whole concept of church politics was as distasteful to me as it is to most youth ministers.
I had always viewed church politics as a way for powerful and clever people to take advantage of the rest of us. I saw it as a way for high-powered people to push their agendas, which usually meant cutting a few sleazy backroom deals with cloak-and-dagger efficiency. I enjoyed a good Dilbert cartoon as much as the next guy.
But after hitting lots of brick walls, after a long series of painful failures in ministry, I now recognize that church politics is no laughing matter. The success of our youth ministry is inextricably tied to and, at times, dependent on, people and groups in our church over which the youth ministry has no control.
The finance committee determines what our annual youth budget is. The facilities team determines the availability of space for our youth programs. The senior staff and the elders either affirm or block our plans for strategic growth. I realized that if I didn’t learn a little about church politics, our ministry would always walk with a limp.
I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by a wide assortment of leaders—in business, in medicine and in the church—who redefined for me what church politics might mean. They taught me that, far from being slimy and deceitful, church politics is—surprisingly—about relationships and respect.
As I was discovering some of these principles in the curriculum cauldron of my own mistakes, I came across a study that investigated the role office politics play in people losing their jobs. By interviewing workers who, when dismissed from their positions, pointed to office politics as the cause, the researchers hoped to come to a clear definition of exactly what “office politics” meant. As they dug a little deeper and analyzed data from the interviews, they made an amazing discovery: what the disgruntled workers described as “politics” boiled down to little more than relationships, the regular give-and-take interaction with other people. The researchers summed up their discoveries this way:
Most careers involve other people. You can have great academic intelligence and still lack social intelligence—the ability to be a good listener, to be sensitive toward others, to give and take criticism well.
If people don’t like you, they may help you fail. . . . On the other hand, you can get away with serious mistakes if you are socially intelligent. . . . A mistake may actually further [your] career if the boss thinks [you] handled the situation in a mature and responsible way.
I would lean close to you at our fast-food restaurant meeting and say very firmly, “If you want to be an effective leader, you must learn to deal with relational conflict. There is no getting around this one. Resolving conflict is part of leadership.”
DOUG FIELDS
In a study of 185 youth pastors who’d been fired from their jobs, 42 percent had actually grown their youth groups numerically in the previous year. They were fired not because of their failure to produce results but, quite likely, because of their failure to accomplish these results without alienating key stakeholders.
I don’t want to minimize the pain some youth ministers have experienced at the hands of pathological leaders, of which the church certainly has its fair share. But I do wonder if many of the “horror stories” we hear about the ways elders and senior pastors have treated youth ministers are about a failure to communicate.
Pages from a Political Bungler’s Journal
Because my understanding of the ins and outs of church politics came primarily through trial and error (more error than trial), I’ll start by describing a few of my own failures and then identify the key components every sustainable youth ministry will, eventually, need to have in place.
Bungle 1: Isolationism. Early in my ministry, I believed that my job was to focus exclusively on our youth ministry. I didn’t want to be distracted by issues like worship attendance, stewardship or family camp. But then I read the Bible. And I read these very inconvenient words from early in Philippians: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (2:3-4). Though I don’t need to become entangled in other ministries of the church, I realize now that my apathy about those ministries was far from faithful.
I’ve met too many youth workers who secretly smile when they see the failure of the staid and stodgy music department. Too many of us offer only self-satisfied silence when parents or youth complain about how boring the worship service is. One (recently unemployed) youth pastor gave his entire tithe to the youth ministry he was leading, rather than to the church. When we approach our ministry as if it’s the only thing that matters, we perpetuate the illusion that the different parts of the church are in different boats that float or sink independently, rather than recognizing that we’re all in one big boat.
There’s a whole lot more to youth ministry than youth ministry. A hole in the boat sinks all of us, even those of us on the other side of the boat.
Bungle 2: Following my own passion first. Within two years of stepping into my role as a youth pastor in Nashville, I became fascinated with the idea of family-based youth ministry. Over the next six years, I made it my priority to think through, craft and launch this new way of thinking about and doing youth ministry. I was following my passion.
The only problem was that the church hadn’t hired me to follow my passion. It had not hired me to develop a new model for ministry. The church had called me to engage the youth of our congregation in a magnetic ministry that would lead them toward deeper maturity in Christ, toward lives of service, deeply connected with this particular body of Christ.
If I had to do it over again, would I still do family-based youth ministry? Absolutely. Our ministry is now thoroughly family-based. I’m grateful for the privilege of leading with a model I obviously believe in so much.
But I realize now that I could have spent just as much time developing a more family-based approach if I hadn’t talked about it so much (and hadn’t used it as an excuse for not doing the work I was hired to do). If I could do it over again, I’d give my first attention to the specific work to which I’d been called, persistently pursuing my senior pastor to confirm that I was moving toward priorities at the top of his list.
The more stories I listen to, the more I see how often youth workers hamstring themselves by following their own passions. I recently read in a Youthworker article by Suzi Woodrow about a youth minister who spent all his time with kids on the beach or surfing with kids. Not surprisingly, the elders of the church let him go. If he had been hired explicitly to reach out to kids on the beach, fabulous! I have little doubt that his ministry there was fruitful. But too many youth workers focus their energy on something other than the jobs they were hired to do and then are shocked to discover the leaders of the church all over their backs.
Most church people have the nerve to believe that our job . . . is to first reach the church kids. . . . If we have no heart for our churched kids, we had better find a different ministry. . . . I’m not saying we need to automatically bail out of church-based youth ministry if we have a heart for the lost. I am saying integrity demands that we bail if we have no heart for the found.
LEN KAGELER
Bungle 3: The porcupine party. Recently I heard the church described as a group of porcupines. As the world becomes threatening on the outside, we do two things simultaneously: we put out our protective quills, and we move closer to each other. It’s not long before we hurt each other in our efforts at self-protection. When that pain gets too intense, we wander off in isolation to deal with those fearful threats, but this time, we are alone.
Many of the mistakes I’ve made with church politics have been driven not by my desire to build a thriving ministry but by my own anxious heart. Because I feel threatened in some way, I turn to any number of porcupine reactions. These reactions do little to build the youth ministry or the church as a whole, and eventually they diminish me, not only in the eyes of those whose opinion I value, but in my own eyes as well. When I’m “losing” at the game of church politics, it’s all too easy to turn to one of these porcupine reactions:
Nose knocking: “I don’t mean to be mean, but the guy before me . . .” The most notable characteristic of the Great Sphinx of Giza is not its location next to the pyramids; it’s not its 240-foot lion’s body with the head of a man. It’s that the face has no nose. Ancient leaders discredited positive memory of other rulers by defacing sculptures built in their honor. Although today we see those Vandal kings as weak, too many who claim to lead in the way of Christ still find it necessary to knock off the noses of their predecessors.
Manure bombs: “There’s nothing to talk about. I’ve said everything in my email.” I’ve borrowed the “manure bomb” idea from Thom and Joani Schultz, who warn us,
Confrontational notes and e-mails are akin to manure bombs. To the receiver, they come out of nowhere, allow no defense, do nasty damage, and provoke retaliatory bombings. Written missiles, lacking the nuances of voice inflection and facial expressions, are often misconstrued. And they allow no opportunity for concurrent give-and-take. They’re simply unfair, cowardly sucker punches. When you have something difficult to say, do it in person.
Pole-vaulting over rat droppings: “I don’t mean this as a threat, but if this new policy about the blue pens sticks, I’ll be looking for another position.” In a porcupine culture, battles over nonessentials can escalate to the point of threats that are way out of proportion to the issue. Peter Scazzero identifies five unhealthy ways of dealing with conflict in the church that are used more often than we’d like to admit:
Using any of these tactics can leverage a debate over an insignificant issue into a trust-breaking grudge that cripples communication for years.
Conflict avoidance: “That’s fine.” Many churches produce such a “culture of niceness” that the leaders avoid engaging in the critical disagreement that’s essential for its own health. Too many churches confuse peace-faking with peacemaking, and conflict moves from the leaders meeting into the parking lot, where previously silent people of like mind gather around their cars to say what they really think.
Harmony sometimes restricts “productive ideological conflict,” the passionate interchange of opinions around an issue.
PATRICK LENCIONI
Youth workers who miss the point of the porcupine warning eventually find themselves skewered by their own anxious reactions. Porcupine-like self-protection simply doesn’t work.
The Unspoken Rules of Church Politics
After a youth director runs into brick wall after brick wall in the world of church politics, too often he or she simply resorts to complaining, the most popular youth worker weapon of choice. But I would like to suggest an alternative: learning.
To learn the unique traditions and political processes of your church, look at them like an anthropologist trying to learn the unspoken processes for decision making in a particular culture. Try looking at processes in the same way you might learn the unique mealtime culture of a particular family. These processes are not good or bad, they just are. If you hope to enjoy your stay with this family, you’ll learn them as well.
Though every church has its unique culture and informal approval processes, there are some universal rules of church politics.
Access internal marketing. We all know what marketing is: getting the word out about who you are and what you have to offer to your “customers.” But internal marketing is different. The target of internal marketing is not our customers, but our colleagues and any others who might have a stake in the success of the youth ministry, including church officers, potential leaders and alumni youth and parents.
Because you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you’re seen as an ambassador for your youth ministry. If you’re the senior pastor, periodically mentioning the youth of the church in sermons is internal marketing. If you’re a volunteer leader, talking to a church friend over coffee about a recent happening in the youth ministry is internal marketing. If you’re the youth director, introducing leadership students to some of the leaders of the church is internal marketing. Articles in the church newsletter and the bulletin are (you guessed it) internal marketing. In the language of Proverbs 22:1, you’re helping to establish “a good name” for the youth ministry.
The simplest internal marketing process starts with discovering the primary pet peeve of your supervisor—and addressing it appropriately. One senior pastor evaluates the quality of the youth ministry by the order in the youth pastor’s office. Another addresses his pet peeve in the monthly youth newsletter. Another wants check requests or reports turned in on time. Youth workers who ignore their senior pastor’s pet peeves pour salt into a wounded relationship and eventually find themselves in an uphill climb every time they need approval (or funding) for a new idea.
Decisions in the church, like decisions in any organization, are based at least partly on the gut sense people have about the department (or the leader of the department) in question. If my elders have heard very little about the goings-on of the youth ministry over the past year, they’re much slower to respond positively to the specific request I’m bringing to the table.
Learn the fine art of keeping your supervisor on your team. In Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry, Doug Fields gives new youth workers some of the best advice I’ve ever heard about working with senior pastors:
Trust is our most valuable currency for dealing with senior leadership. And trust, as we know, takes a long time to build and only seconds to destroy. A single ignored assignment, a single delayed response, a single expression of gossip about the senior pastor to someone else on the church staff, and the value of our currency diminishes exponentially.
Just a few months ago, my senior pastor, Todd Jones, gave me the most powerful words of encouragement I’ve ever heard from a boss. In the annual review with the chair of the personnel committee, he said something like this: “I know I can trust you. I know the kinds of things you say to people about me. I know your commitment to seeing our whole church succeed, not just your little piece of it.”
I’m not suggesting perfection. What I’m suggesting is that, when we blow it with our senior pastor (or with others to whom we have a reporting relationship), we immediately and without excuses accept responsibility and ask forgiveness, knowing that the way we handle our failures can itself be an opportunity to build trust.
It’s helpful for every youth worker to learn his or her boss’s preferred style of communication. One supervisor may want daily updates with numbers by email, another might be looking for stories every week on voicemail, and a third might ask for a written monthly report. But all senior staff appreciate being asked for their advice every now and then, whether it’s about a new person being hired, a new initiative being tried, or a particularly complex problem with a volunteer or a student.
Though we don’t want to flood our boss’s inbox or voicemail with information, overcommunicating is better than keeping him or her in the dark. When we make it one of our ministry goals never to set our senior pastors up to be surprised, we save untold hours of repair work later.
Cast the net wide before initiating change. Thanks to the vision of our senior pastor and eighteen months of infrastructure building, our youth ministry was months away from launching what was to become the Center for Youth Ministry Training (CYMT), a bold, extensive initiative involving church leaders in finances, facilities and mission.
To make matters more complex, this effort was being launched in collaboration with Brentwood United Methodist Church, the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminar, the Youth Academy at Duke Divinity School and the Cal Turner Center for Church Leadership at Martin Methodist College.
Though the general plan had received enthusiastic support from our elders, I was beginning to hear reports that a number of them had grave concerns about the long-term implications of this plan. So I paid a visit to one of our key elders, a long-time friend and a wise and thorough businessman, to ask for his advice. He happily shared his concerns about the project, which we resolved together with surprising speed.
Before I left, he gave me invaluable advice: “There are a good number of other people you need to have meetings like this with before this thing comes up for a vote.” Together we made a list of elders I should visit, and I spent much of the rest of that week in those meetings, capped off with a follow-up meeting with Todd. The elders approved the proposal unanimously, and in the fall of 2006, the CYMT was launched.
Determining our most important priorities is not enough (though, according to some estimates, more than 97 percent of people fail to do even that much). When we have a key initiative (as complex as the CYMT or as seemingly simple as changing the format of Sunday school), we’ve got to move beyond just having a plan. We’ve got to get the right people on board with the plan, listen to their concerns and adjust our plans as necessary.
Write the last great chapter for your critics. Laurence Steinberg studied 204 families with adolescents in Wisconsin. Apart from the single shared characteristic of having teenagers, these families were very diverse: urban, white, black, suburban, rural, single-parent, remarried and so on. One truth that bubbled up: “Teenagers can make you crazy.”
The study revealed that “40% of the study parents showed a decline in psychological well-being during their children’s adolescence.” Steinberg suggested that what has come to be known as the “midlife crisis” may be more related to having teenagers in the house than to the physical effects of aging. In fact, the forty-something parent with a teenager is much less likely to be psychologically healthy and to feel good about his or her marriage than the same-age parent with a seven-year-old.
I am not offering this study as an excuse for youth workers to dismiss the criticism of “crazy” parents. What I’m suggesting is that the parents of the youth we work with need our support, sometimes desperately. Too many youth workers respond to parental criticism more out of defensiveness than compassion.
When a parent sees us in the hall at church and says, “You’re going on vacation again? You just had a week off at camp,” our tendency is to respond defensively, with a politically incorrect response like, “Why don’t you try taking a week at camp and see if it feels like a vacation to you?!”
For some criticism—like the one raised by this parent—there is no “right answer.” What we can do, though, is respond with the right spirit, without reacting negatively, recognizing that the one taking the potshots is likely speaking out of his or her own pain.
The truth is, criticism gives us the opportunity to write “the last great chapter.” Here’s how it can work:
Let’s imagine you go to a restaurant, and you receive less than mediocre service. Then imagine that you take the time to write a letter to the management and give them a piece of your mind. You let them know in no uncertain terms that you’ve decided never to return to this establishment.
But then you get a letter from the manager, followed by multiple phone calls from the corporate office, along with fifty dollars in coupons for future meals. Each call thanks you for your input, assuring you that the restaurant wants to do anything it can to keep you as a valued customer and friend. Most of us would not only go back, we’d also tell all our friends about the attention we received.
Complaints are often thinly veiled opportunities for us to show our willingness to listen to those we’ve been called to serve.
Nobody likes criticism. But when we’re criticized, too many of us resort to avoidance and defensiveness. Instead of staying in the uncomfortable place of listening and reconciliation, we postpone responding to our critics’ calls and emails, which of course only makes them more critical.
Ordinarily, the ministry instincts of a youth staff person are right. But sometimes we miss it (like when one of our staff people sponsored a middle-school boys’ video-game night using M-rated games, which many of our parents prohibited their sons from playing). Unless we’re careful, when we’re being criticized, we make it our first priority to “make our point.”
But our true first priority is to hear the concern of the critic, listen for the nugget of wisdom and search for creative solutions together. Sometimes when I’m criticized, I start feeling so defensive that I have to buy myself time by saying something like, “I hear your concern, and it’s so important that I want to talk it through with my senior pastor before moving immediately to a solution.”
Does this mean we always have to yield to our critics? If we truly believe that youth ministries are most effective when they support parents, we would be wise to set our default button such that we ordinarily defer to parents.
Of course, there will be times when we’ll need to stand like a rock. But if we’re “willing to die” over the time youth group meets or the attendance requirements for confirmation, we may be more like the three-year-old reacting to the crisis of an empty box of Cocoa Puffs than like a leader who knows how and when to stand with conviction.
Warning: QWERTY Ahead
In 1874, the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer was the best typewriter around. The creators discovered that some typists had a problem. They typed so fast that the strike keys locked up, so they created a keyboard designed to slow fingers down (for example, pinky fingers do a and p), what we now know as the QWERTY keyboard. Even though other keyboards have increased typing speed by as much as 50 perecent, those new keyboards have never been accepted.
Change is not all about logic. And wise change agents in the church recognize that some initiatives, no matter how logical and right, are just fighting a QWERTY culture. There are battles that can’t be won.
As far back as 1996, 1,300 ministers a month in the United States were fired or forced to resign. Nearly 30 percent of ministers have been terminated at least once. A decade from now, it is estimated that 40 percent of today’s pastors will be in another line of work.
Most of these pastors are brilliant, compassionate, faithful men and women, godly leaders trained in the study of Scripture, in thinking theologically and in providing care for those struggling with their faith or with a personal crisis. But few of us were ever told that to survive in the church, we must be experts at navigating the turbulent waters of church politics.
The time has come for those responsible for youth ministry to take responsibility for galvanizing the support of stakeholders in the youth ministry beyond the small circle of those actively involved in our program. To accomplish such a thing, we need to become adept at the last skill we thought we would need in ministry: church politics.