Why I’m Embarrassed by This Book
Introduction
A Roll of the Dice
Exposing Today’s Most Popular Youth Ministry Model
To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of Hercules, the mind of Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.
Anthony Greenbank, The Book of Survival
My friend who owns the coffee shops told us, in a tone of kindness and truth, that nobody he knows who is successful gambles; rather they work hard, they accept the facts of reality, they enjoy life as it is. “But the facts really stink,” I told him. “Reality is like a fine wine,” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.”
Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
Over lunch at a restaurant in his college town, the twenty-year-old graduate of our youth ministry let me in on his dirty little secret.
He was scared, terrified actually. He had gotten in trouble, gotten involved with the wrong kind of people; he knew better. But the siren song had been too strong to resist. Undeniably hooked on gambling, he kept thinking he’d be able to win back everything he’d lost, if only he could just get into a big game. Well, he got in some big games, but win he didn’t.
And so, with shaking hands, he looked across the table at me, confessing that he would soon be leaving school and trying to “keep a low profile,” particularly from the organized crime ring that had loaned him somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars to stay in the game.
It reminded me, well, of youth ministry.
A Look at Today’s Most Popular Youth Ministry Model
Each year, our Youth Ministry Architects team is privileged to work intimately with dozens of churches, partnering with them in building sustainable youth ministries. The more churches we have worked with, the more we have discovered patterns. By far the most startling is this: most American churches have, often without recognizing it, embraced a clear model for youth ministry, a model more popular than purpose-driven, family-based or contemplative. Most churches have chosen to do youth ministry with a model best described as gambling.
It looks like this: The leaders of the church cross their fingers and believe, with all their hearts, that this time the cards will fall in their favor. This time, they’ll find the superstar youth director who will change everything . . . fast. This time, they’ll find just the right curriculum, just the right convention that will, finally, make youth ministry work as it has never really worked before, at least not in a sustainable way. This time when they roll the dice, if they wish hard enough, a thriving youth ministry will turn up.
But few people get rich gambling. For every one that does, there are thousands mired in chronic poverty. But wealth—and sustainable youth ministry—come not from gambling but predictably from a strategic, sacrificial and annoyingly inconvenient investment of time and resources.
So if you’re looking for a book that can give you easy steps for building a thriving youth ministry in the next three months, I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong one. Oh, there are steps (and rest assured I’ll be giving them to you), but they’re anything but quick, and on occasion, they will be so difficult that you’ll ask yourself why you got into this enterprise in the first place.
But there is good news: building a sustainable, thriving youth ministry is not only possible, it’s actually predictable. Sadly, most churches don’t have the patience to wait to build a sustainable youth ministry, so they opt for the roll of the dice.
From Gambling to Investing
Heroic attempts at building immediate, inflated youth ministries almost never work—at least not for the long haul. Anxious churches that expect (and often demand) youth ministry results in a fraction of the time it truly takes pay for it eventually. Though these churches may justify the expectations placed on their current youth ministries (and youth ministers) with words about how important the mission is, the expectation of immediate results herniates the ministry, rendering it less capable of achieving the desired results.
Gambling is a far cry from investing. Churches that have failed to build sustainable youth ministries typically spend all their resources on quick fixes. Those churches spend very little time or energy investing in the future of their youth ministries.
Before he started his job as youth pastor at Saddleback Community Church, Doug Fields, arguably the most widely respected youth worker in the country, told his senior pastor that it would take five years (five years!) before the church could expect to see fruit from the youth ministry he’d be leading. Fortunately for the rest of us, Rick Warren had the foresight to sign on a guy with a long-term plan rather than a flash in the pan.
Those who have actually done it—those who have built thriving youth ministries—are those who weren’t afraid to let their churches know up front that they would never meet the add-water-and-stir expectations.
I can hear the question you may be asking already: “With all this focus on investing in the future, what do we do about our youth ministry in the meantime?”
Here’s the best answer: “Stop gambling, start investing and, in the meantime, do the best you can.”
In the chapters that follow, you’ll read about churches that have tried it both ways. By the time you turn the final page, you’ll not only be convinced it can be done, but you’ll also be equipped with the tools you’ll need to build a youth ministry that lasts for the long haul. You’ll learn from churches that have taken clear, calm, deliberate steps that made their youth ministries incrementally better, until one day, years later, the incremental investments produced exponential results.
First, we’ll look at the “anatomy of stuckness” and identify the convergence of factors that keep churches chronically mired in lousy youth ministries.
Next, we’ll talk through a whole new way of thinking about youth ministry, a way that pays attention to systems, structure and climate more than to tasks and great ideas.
Third, we’ll focus on building a sustainable team to lead your ministry. You may be surprised by the discoveries we’ve made about the staff configuration found in the most effective youth ministries. We’ll look at the most common hiring mistakes churches make in youth ministry and will identify the most explosive landmines youth workers step on (and how to avoid them).
Finally, we’ll propose solutions to youth ministry’s chronic and persistent challenges.
Real-life examples from churches and youth leaders we’ve worked with pepper this book. But often, because of the sensitive nature of an example or because a particular example might paint a certain church or leader in an unflattering light, we’ve chosen to jumble the details of some stories. Although the details may be different, the essential principles embedded in them will remain.
A Word to Senior Pastors
As hard as it may be for you to believe, no one will influence the building of a sustainable youth ministry at your church like you will. In a survey of ten thousand Christian teenagers, kids rated only two qualities of church as more important than “a senior pastor who understands and loves teenagers.” In other words, students said that the senior pastor has more influence on their choice of church than even their youth director. There’s no one we’d rather have reading this book than you.
The fact that you’ve gotten this far suggests that you have more than a passing interest in the next generation. You are positioned to help your church see the importance of building your youth ministry slowly. You can instill patience as the church deliberately builds a youth ministry that lasts. And you can support your youth pastor when he or she is overwhelmed with criticism and broken on the sharp rocks of expectations that simply can’t be met . . . at least this year anyway.
The cycle of dysfunctional relationships between senior pastors and youth pastors must be broken. Youth pastors must learn how to commit themselves to uniquely prioritizing this relationship.
RON KING
Extraordinary books and conventions are available to help youth workers and churches think theologically about youth ministry, resources that are helping us reimagine how youth ministry might look in this new millennium. But in spite of this growing number of excellent resources, our work with churches and youth workers has revealed an obvious gap between concept and reality, between theory and results.
With a dizzying array of statistics about how different kids today are or how the ways we’ve been doing ministry don’t work anymore, senior pastors need a resource that gives them a picture of what is reasonable to expect from professional youth staff.
Many of our senior pastor friends have asked for help in leading their congregations through the difficult transition from a gambling approach to a sustainable approach in youth ministry. We offer this book as a youth ministry handbook for senior pastors and senior church leaders who may or may not have hands-on responsibility for the week-to-week management of ministry to teenagers.
A Word to Search Committees
We hope that after you read chapters three and seven, you’ll be convinced of these two bits of advice we often give to people in your position:
Don’t hurry.
Don’t settle.
Our recommendations are not terribly unlike the short and simple (but far from easy) advice from the book of Proverbs about marriage: “Don’t marry the wrong one” (my paraphrase).
We’ve seen churches living in the aftermath of youth pastors whose hearts and motivation for ministry left years before they did. Another church decided that having no one in the youth director position would be better than having the current director. And other churches simply got tired of searching and decided to hire the person they all admitted was the best of all the mismatched candidates they’d looked at.
We trust your church will make different decisions.
A Word to Youth Workers
In some ways, then, this is a very different youth ministry book; most others are written almost exclusively to youth workers, with the unspoken assumption that the hired staff person alone holds the key to building a thriving youth ministry. But this book invites ordinary church leaders to build exceptional youth ministries without depending on short-term, superstar staff.
So if you have stepped into your current ministry with the dream that you’ll take the church by storm and build the ministry you’ve dreamed of in six months, I beg you to reconsider.
Of course, it will be bad if you fail. But it could be worse—far worse—if you succeed. Though youth and parents might remember the glory days of your tenure on staff, there’s a good chance you’ll wind up like so many youth ministry superheroes, who leave gargantuan carnage in the wake of their one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-forgotten, it-will-never-be-as-good-as-it-was-back-then ministries.
The short-term, high-number, razzle-dazzle success of your current youth ministry might blind you to the fact that success in youth ministry is measured in decades, not in year-to-date comparisons with last year’s mediocre youth staffer who, quite honestly, just didn’t have your gifts.
So if you’re hoping for a silver-bullet solution that describes the way Jesus did youth ministry, you’ll have to look somewhere else. If you’re hoping to be comforted and coddled in your frustration with your senior pastor, your difficulty in recruiting volunteers, or your inability to find time actually to be with Jesus or kids, you don’t want this book.
But if you’re sold on the idea of building a youth ministry that will be stronger years after you are gone than it is today, these hours we’ll spend together will be well worth the investment.
Why I’m Embarrassed by This Book
The apostle Paul reminds us, “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor 4:7). I’m embarrassed that this book is less about the treasure and more about the clay pots that carry the treasure. This book has grown out of the gaping hole in the competency of youth workers, who may know the treasure well but seem to have little capacity to carry it.
I’m making the assumption that your heart beats a little faster at the thought of seeing young people live into the dreams God has for them, growing into fully devoted disciples of Jesus Christ. That dream is, of course, where the real treasure is.
So this book is not a replacement for the marvelous, provocative works about the “treasure” that matters most in ministry, books like Contemplative Youth Ministry, The Godbearing Life, Presence-Centered Youth Ministry and Jesus-Centered Youth Ministry. These books insistently invite us into more Christ-centered, Spirit-driven ways of thinking about working with teenagers, pushing us beyond the activity-centered, anxiety-driven approach that has become part and parcel of today’s youth ministry.
Despite the fact that more and more youth workers are thinking more theologically about doing ministry, those same youth workers find themselves stepping on the same landmines that have sidelined thousands of youth ministries before them. With so many extraordinary resources available, churches really don’t need more ideas, more passion, more zeal, more energy, more enthusiasm. What they need is the ability to take what they already have and turn it into something that works.
But first we’ll have to put away our infatuation with gambling.