Immersed in the (Right) Details
13
Rabbit Trails and Brick Walls
When All the Brilliant Plans Don’t Work
Success is never final.
Winston Churchill
“Spontaneity” is often mistaken for “fresh.” Instead of fresh ministry served thoughtfully with a balanced program of Bible study, small groups and relationships—basically, a ministry driven by biblical purpose—we believe that fresh is just “letting the Sprit lead.” Fresh becomes “whatever happens, happens.” But that’s not fresh programming; it’s half-baked programming.
Someday, take a look at the supplementary DVD material for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You’ll discover all kinds of fascinating facts:
But the most fascinating fact is that, in spite of all this intense preparation, the script was actually rewritten almost every night. Most mornings, the actors woke up to discover a brand new version of the day’s script under their door.
I love the image one of the writers used in one of the interviews. He compared the whole process to laying down tracks just a few yards ahead of a moving train. Now there’s an accurate picture of sustainable youth ministry! In spite of all our plans and preparations, the best youth ministries are continually working and improving their plans, rewriting the script every day, laying tracks just a few yards ahead of the train.
Why Most Strategic Plans Don’t Work
We were wrapping up a recent visioning retreat, with the twenty or so youth ministry stakeholders completely exhausted and totally energized at the same time. As we stood in a circle to pray ourselves home, one of the women asked me, “Okay, when are you going to tell us?” I tilted my head like a puzzled puppy.
She said, “You guys see this stuff all the time. When are you going to tell us the right way?”
I understood what she was asking for. She believed that there was a secret formula, a “right” model for building a thriving youth ministry. Fortunately, the answer to her question was just outside the classroom window. Pointing to the massive church-building project underway, I said, “That’s how you’ll do it. Tonight we have finished drafting our blueprint; now we work the plan. And if we do it right, it will be a long, slow, messy, inconvenient process.”
When a youth ministry begins the implementation of its strategic plans, those involved need to be prepared for an avalanche of speed bumps, rabbit trails and brick walls that will interrupt their progress. We’ve seen churches with great enthusiasm about their plans rush into their first good idea, slam into a brick wall and abandon their plans altogether. One of the biggest obstacles churches face in implementing their strategic youth ministry plans is that they expect every step of those plans to “work.” But sustainable youth ministries sustain a process.
In the early years of Youth Ministry Architects, I focused almost exclusively on helping churches create their strategic youth ministry plans, like an architect providing a blueprint to a client. Every time I’d present these customized plans, I could tell by the nodding heads that the stakeholders clearly wanted to see these plans implemented.
But then I’d check in six months later. And I’d discover that the game plan that had generated so much enthusiasm was now filed away like a priceless historical artifact at the end of an Indiana Jones movie. Little or nothing was being done to translate the plan into reality. It was then that Youth Ministry Architects changed its focus—from being a document preparation team to becoming partners in the process of building sustainable youth ministries.
Over the years, we’ve identified the rabbit trails that cause youth ministries to wander off their strategic course and pursue second, third or fourth priorities before attending to the first ones. It seems appropriate to end this book with a dose of realism, a picture of some of the temptations that can so easily derail any building process. Churches that invest sideways energy running down these rabbit trails will find themselves in the same place one, two, three years later, having wasted their time in the creation of a blueprint that has become little more than an exercise in fiction writing.
Those Tempting Rabbit Trails
Quick! Let’s get to “the next level!” Hang around youth ministers long enough, and you’ll soon hear someone talking about “the next level.” Some were hired to “take their ministry to the next level.” Some will tell you they’re in the process of getting their ministry “to the next level.” But most have no idea what “the next level” is, other than that it’s got to be a whole lot more fun than the boring “first level” stuff.
Let’s do it like Young Life (or the Methodists or the Catholics or the Baptists down the street). Deciding on a specific model for a youth ministry tends to come later in the building process and will likely morph over the years. It’s common in an assessment or visioning retreat for one or more of the participants to obsess over the “tried and true” model that some other ministry is using. This is a rabbit trail that causes churches to decide that they simply must have a youth basketball program, a visitation program or any number of other programs that will only serve to stuff the calendar, exhaust volunteers and burn out staff.
Let’s build a building or buy more technology. Building facilities and accessing great technology, two of the most popular rabbit trails, are clearly “next-level” stuff. We’ve seen thriving youth ministries in mighty shabby facilities, and we’ve seen flat-lining youth ministries in state-of-the-art facilities. Great facilities and great technology can increase the momentum of a youth ministry, but they can’t create it.
Otherwise very intelligent, articulate people say, with all sincerity, “The reason our kids don’t want to be involved is because we don’t have a gym.” A church where kids don’t feel welcome without a gym will not be able to make them feel welcome with one.
Creativity gets a very bad name when creative people always make a point of solving a different problem from the one they have been given.
EDWARD DE BONO
In the same way, we’ve seen more than our share of youth workers who’ve become technology experts, who (often because of their age) wind up doubling as the IT experts for the entire church. These youth workers love to chase the rabbits of making movies, building websites, installing software and sound equipment—all fine second- and third-level activities. But if the youth director “has no time” to attend to the foundational priorities identified in the last twelve chapters, the ministry is almost certain to stall before it ever launches.
Let’s keep adding stuff to the calendar. It’s funny how churches with floundering ministries overstuff their youth ministry calendars. If Sunday school isn’t working, they add youth group. If those two aren’t working, they add small groups. If Sunday school, small group and youth group don’t seem to attract kids, they add a youth choir or a monthly special event or . . .
Like piling large, wet logs on a sputtering fire, piling more programs on a flailing youth ministry will likely extinguish whatever fire there is. Youth ministries, like fires, are very fragile at the beginning—starting with small pieces of easily ignitable wood gets the fire started. And once the fire is blazing, the larger stuff can be added. One of the hazards of all the great youth ministry “ideas” available today is that most youth workers have a knee-jerk tendency to implement a whole lot more of those ideas than they realistically have the capacity for.
Scaling the Brick Wall: Overcoming the Insurmountable
Most youth ministers would say they have some sort of plan. Sometimes the plan gets sidetracked due to rabbit trails. But at other times, even after investing appropriately, visioning clearly and staying away from common rabbit trails, a youth ministry finds itself running into the same brick wall(s) over and over again.
Making it through the brick walls starts with accepting the fact that, as our ministries become sustainable, there will always be walls that stand in the way of moving forward strategically. When we recognize that brick walls are simply a part of ministry, we can stop beating ourselves up for being stuck and begin working a very specific process to scale those walls. To introduce this process, I’ll tell the story of Lesleigh, an imaginary youth pastor who found a way to “scale the wall” of small groups.
For years, the youth ministry at First Church had talked about small groups. Lesleigh, the church’s only youth staff person, would come up with grand ideas about small groups, launch them with great fanfare, but within weeks find that the new-and-improved small-group program was no more effective than that of the year before.
Lesleigh knew it wasn’t working, so she pulled together three wise counselors, all committed to the youth ministry (but not serving in a specific role). She asked them to meet with her regularly until they had together “scaled” the small-group problem. She explained that she was looking for a commitment to two kinds of meetings: weekly one-hour tactical meetings to work the plans they developed and periodic three- to four-hour strategic meetings to develop or revise those plans (see chapter nine).
The group started with a four-hour strategic orientation at the home of a team member. They shared a meal and shared their dreams for a thriving small-group ministry. They put in writing a descriptive vision of what a sustainable small-group ministry might look like. They identified a game plan and a timeline for making their dreams a reality. Before the meeting was over, each person was given the same assignment: find at least one thriving small-group program and talk to the leader to discover transferable principles.
In the first weekly meeting, only two of the four team members had made their calls, one of them being Lesleigh. She pleasantly asked if her expectations were realistic, giving each person on the team a “get out of jail free card,” the chance to bow out if he or she simply didn’t have time.
One of the team members took the card. She explained that, though she loved the youth ministry and Lesleigh, she simply didn’t have the time she’d thought she did. The meeting ended with everyone receiving the assignment to contact two of the current small-group leaders to gain insight into why previous attempts at building the small-group program had failed.
After finding a replacement for the lost team member, Lesleigh called all others before the meeting to check on their process. All four came prepared, and full of ideas. But not all the ideas were the same.
In fact, there was a sharp divide between two members: one wanted kids to be in groups with their friends, while the other wanted to break up cliques and mix the friendship groups. To make matters more complex, a third person wanted all the groups to be single-gender, while another wanted most, if not all, of the groups to be coed.
When the team seemed deadlocked, Lesleigh suggested that they make this issue the focus of their next strategic meeting. Again they all left with an assignment: contact three youth and three parents to glean their insight about how to structure the groups.
At the next monthly strategic meeting (this one lasting three hours), Lesleigh helped the team look at their conflict points through a variety of lenses (based on Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats). They resolved their questions by agreeing to an experimental game plan: they would recruit eight small-group leaders to launch four different six-week exploratory small groups:
They agreed that this was an experiment, a laboratory for discovering the impact of different approaches to small groups. They identified their most likely suspects for small-group leaders, and each agreed to recruit two.
At the next weekly tactical meeting, the news was that only one of their eight potential recruits said yes. They spent the next hour strategizing how to better their chances of recruiting seven more leaders. Again they identified their likely suspects. But this time, they made their recruiting calls before they left the meeting.
And so the process went. With a rhythm of periodic strategic meetings and weekly tactical meetings, Lesleigh’s small-group launch team attempted, failed, revised plans, failed again and made incremental progress after incremental progress.
At the end of the year, they all agreed they’d made progress, but the small-group program was clearly not yet sustainable. When Lesleigh gave her team an “out,” none of them chose to step aside, each acknowledging that, without even trying, they’d actually lived a profound small-group experience together. They agreed to add two more members and to continue working their weekly assignments until the youth ministry’s small-group program had grown into the description they had crafted at the beginning of the process.
It took three years. But by that time, their incremental progress had almost imperceptibly resulted in exponential change. Not only was the small-group ministry thriving, but the church was using Lesleigh’s structure as a model for revamping their approach to the adult small-group ministry.
Persons with comparatively moderate powers will accomplish much if they apply themselves wholly and indefatigably to one thing at a time.
SAMUEL SMILES
With a combination of persistence and intentionality, Lesleigh’s team had created a steady drumbeat that eventually transformed its most floundering program into its most effective one. Consider the differences between Lesleigh’s process and the “normal” way a youth worker might address a small-group problem (see table 1).
In Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s study of winning and losing streaks, she found three consistent components in winning organizations: accountability, collaboration and initiative. When these three strategic bedrocks become standard operating procedure for a team (as they did for Lesleigh’s), scaling brick walls simply becomes a normal way that ministry responds to challenges.
Table 1.
Sustainable Approach
Traditional Approach
Long-term focus on a single issue
Episodic focus with key issue buried beneath multiple issues in disconnected meetings
Responsibility shared by a team
Responsibility carried by the youth worker
Regular meetings
Concerns raised reactively and urgently at random meetings
Regular time set aside for strategic thinking
Issue addressed between the urgent demands of the ministry
The expectation of a multiyear building process
The expectation of the quick fix
Working a plan
Reacting to anxiousness
Lesleigh’s small-group team not only became experts in understanding small groups; they also became experts in implementing a powerful collaborative process, the very process they would implement over and over in the years to come, as they dealt with the brick walls of curriculum, attendance and worship.
If Lesleigh’s process felt tedious to you, if you got impatient reading it, welcome to the club. The brick walls of youth ministry will not be scaled using the next great idea. Strategic plans are not enough. It’s working those plans in a strategic way (and getting back up again and again when the initial plans fail) that ultimately makes the difference.
Immersed in the (Right) Details
If there is one refrain I hear more than any other from frustrated youth workers, it’s “I just get mired in the details.” I have to admit that I’ve aired that complaint more than once myself. But then I talked to Scott.
Scott is a dear brother in my church, the chairman of our youth committee and one of the most successful, effective leaders I’ve ever known—in his home, in his business, in our church. I once asked him what sets his businesses apart, why they’ve been so successful.
I was, at first, taken aback by his response: “We get into the details. Most companies that do what we do give advice,” he said. “They tell people what to do. We get into the details of a company’s problems . . . and we solve them.”
One of the keys to an effective youth ministry is that someone with enough experience to tell the gold from the coal is “getting into the details.” Throughout the last thirteen chapters, we’ve worked with building images—architects, construction, foundations—on purpose. Sustainable youth ministries—built to withstand pressures from outside the church and politics from within—are established when a construction team has learned to pay attention to the right details.