Back to Our Story
1
Cracking the Code
The Anatomy of Stuckness in Youth Ministry
The declining church always assumes that the solution to youth ministry is programmatic. If only they could get a good leader! If only they could find a great curriculum! If only they could renovate a room in the building for youth meetings! They fail to recognize that the solutions to youth ministry, like the solution to decline in general, is systemic.
Thomas G. Bandy
He had done youth ministry earlier in his career, and quite successfully, he was quick to add. But over the past twenty years as a senior pastor, he had not once been able to establish a sustainable youth program in any church he’d served.
There were highlights, yes: a mission trip here, a particularly effective volunteer there and even a flash of success from a memorable, short-term youth director. But the only consistent thing had been his frustration.
After an exhaustive search and the hiring of yet another youth director (the one everyone had hoped would finally turn things around), it was soon all too obvious that a snowflake in the Sahara stood a better chance than this youth pastor’s “new and improved” program.
That’s when the call came.
The despair in the pastor’s voice was anything but subtle. He was weary of following one new idea after another, hiring one new youth director after another. He was tired of unhappy parents of teenagers (he, in fact, was one of them), who couldn’t understand why the church couldn’t crack the code for building an effective youth ministry. He was tired of his youth ministry being compared (often disparagingly) to the church across the street. And he could no longer believe that this less-than-stellar ministry could all be blamed on busy kids, apathetic parents and hard-to-find volunteers. He was, in a word, stuck.
When a youth ministry isn’t working, easy answers abound, the most popular of which is simply to “hire away” a church’s youth ministry problems. But youth directors hired to save the day often find it difficult (if not impossible) to live up to the expectations they face from the first day they walk into their offices. And as flattering as it may be initially to be branded as “the answer,” such an approach places on a youth worker a weight that few are called or equipped to carry.
As a result, most professional youth workers move on prematurely, some finding positions in other churches. But far too many, like one youth director we heard from recently, leave the land of youth ministry defeated and determined never to return. He wrote,
I submitted my resignation as youth pastor yesterday. I can no longer continue in youth ministry or for that matter any ministry. I’m not sure if it was the overwhelming sense of failure or God’s call. I sure hope it’s the latter. So I am looking for a new job, not in ministry. Anyway, thanks for your time, but I don’t see that it would make that much sense now.
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Building a sustainable youth ministry is not a matter of getting lucky; there is no secret code to be cracked by the elite few. No, effective youth ministry happens when a very consistent set of factors is put in place, and it flounders when those factors are absent.
For me, the story of learning to move beyond stuck began the way most good stories begin—with a little drama.
The Nashville Drama
In 1986, I came to First Presbyterian Church in Nashville after working for eight years both in a church setting and in Young Life. Having experienced moderate “success” in my two previous ministries and having won my seminary’s youth ministry award at graduation, I assumed that the Nashville ministry would be off and running like wildfire in no time. And I was not alone. I could smell the church leaders’ enthusiasm as I stepped onto the scene, the answer to their prayers.
But after five years, I had clearly become more of a prayer request than a prayer answered. Despite my seventy-hour-plus workweeks, there were few visible signs that any progress had been made. Only a fraction of the youth of our church were active in the youth program. I simply couldn’t break the code.
I prayed. I went to seminars. I read books. I prayed some more. I tried a variety of models, many of which described themselves as the biblical model for youth ministry. But nothing seemed to shake the inertia. We were stuck.
With nothing working, I made the unpopular decision to cancel youth group. It was clear that the way we were doing youth group simply wasn’t working. So we stopped meeting every week and focused instead on creating periodic events, specifically targeting smaller groups. The idea seemed logical to everyone; everyone, that is, except the senior pastor, the youth, the parents and the elders.
A year and a half after the change, participation was increasing almost imperceptibly. I began talking more and more about an idea called family-based youth ministry, my first shot at building a sustainable foundation for youth ministry. But dramatic change didn’t come until the storm hit.
We were having an ordinary, garden-variety youth committee meeting—at least I thought so. When I walked into the room, it was packed with twenty extra parents (mostly uninvited), all of whom had their opinion about what was wrong with the youth ministry, and for the next three hours, this group vented their feelings, an experience I now refer to affectionately as Rotisserie DeVries.
The next morning as I sat in my office, flipping through the want ads, fantasizing about how much easier it might be to sell cars, I got the call from Jim Robers, a busy, young businessman in our church. I certainly knew Jim’s lively junior-high twin boys and his uber-volunteer wife much better than I knew him. He’d been at the meeting the night before. I braced myself for another round, knowing that our church had no rule against piling on.
His first words came out of left field. “That meeting last night . . . I realized about thirty minutes into it that you hadn’t invited us there. I realized I’d been set up. I don’t like being set up.”
I was quiet, wondering where in the world this was going.
He continued, “I just want you to know that if there is anything, anything I can do for you as you try to build this program, I want to do it.”
Not exactly knowing how he could help, I took him up on his offer, starting just by meeting him regularly for lunch. For the next six months, Jim, without even trying, taught me many of the core principles you will find in this book. Though he clearly didn’t have time, he spent more time on lunches, phone calls and weekly committee meetings than either of us care to count.
Jim taught me what he knew: how to build an organization that works, how to build the “jars of clay” that can carry the treasure of the gospel. And as I ran behind Jim’s blocks (as this elder in the church defended me again and again), I grew in confidence. But, more important, the youth ministry fundamentally changed, setting us on course to increase dramatically both our capacity and the quality of our work with students.
It is Jim’s building principles that we’ll be investigating in the coming chapters. But before we think about starting to build, we’ll need to clear the site, removing the ideas and assumptions that most often get in the way of building on a solid foundation. We first need to identify the patterns that keep youth ministries stuck.
You Know You’re Stuck If . . .
Youth Ministry Architects has now assessed enough different kinds of youth ministries to recognize patterns and attitudes that keep so many youth ministries stuck. Together these attitudes make up what we have come to call the “anatomy of stuckness.”
The typical stuck youth ministry is built on a number of unspoken assumptions, assumptions so woven into the fabric of youth ministry that they’re barely discernible to the average youth worker. I’ll put these assumptions in the form of five questions most commonly asked by stuck churches, questions that reveal fundamental misunderstandings that keep youth ministries from moving forward strategically.
Stuck question 1: Can you just give us some good ideas? I’ll never forget my first youth workers convention. We stayed at the swankiest hotel I’d ever been in. I missed nothing . . . seminars on games, seminars on music, seminars on how to lead seminars.
For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong.
H. L. MENCKEN
I took incredible notes. I came home with one thing more than anything else: ideas. Our church actually ordered the entire set of Ideas books, certain that if we could just figure out the next great idea, we could make our ministry take off.
But it didn’t take long to realize that few, if any, of those ideas translated into sustainable practices that moved our ministry forward. I finally realized that I didn’t need to go to a convention to get ideas: my church was full of them. In fact, some days it seemed everyone had the great idea that promised to move our ministry “to the next level.”
In the stuck youth ministries we’ve observed, great ideas are legion. In focus groups, competing ideas are offered with such passion and enthusiasm that it’s clear the speakers believe that the secret to a thriving ministry lies in trying this or that idea. Hang around struggling youth ministries long enough, and you’ll be sure to hear much of what we have:
But fragmented collections of great ideas almost never work, particularly when the implementation of great ideas depends on some mythical “you” who is supposed to take responsibility for turning those ideas into reality. Until structures are in place for great ideas to be implemented, even the best of them will wind up on a treadmill that may speed up or slow down but will go nowhere.
Stuck question 2: Can you keep us from failing? Too many churches become paralyzed by their fear of having a failing youth ministry. But, as absurd as it may sound, it is often our successes that keep us stuck rather than our failures. Here’s how:
Almost every church has something it has done in youth ministry that has “worked,” perhaps an annual beach retreat, a favorite service project or a memorable musical tradition. Many focus obsessively on getting back to the success they once experienced.
But this journey in reverse (or, at best, in neutral) seldom leads out of the cesspool of dissatisfaction. If a ministry isn’t working, it makes little sense to pour increasingly more energy into any single program, no matter how great a track record it might have had. A ministry that chooses to see its future only in the light of what has been will always stay stuck.
When we began our assessment at Anderson Community Church, people in almost every focus group spoke in glowing terms about the home-repair ministry that a youth director had launched more than ten years earlier. Upon probing, we learned that very few of the youth were engaged in this ministry at any level, though there were a number of committed adults. Yet many in our focus groups seemed absolutely certain that if the youth group could just get back to that single successful program, all would be well (and peace would return to Pride Rock).
Nothing characterizes successful organizations more than their willingness to abandon what made them successful.
MIKE WOODRUFF
Curious as it may be, few things keep churches more stuck than their successes. Here’s the irony: Sustainable youth ministries fail all the time; they thrive in a culture of experimentation, innovation and creativity. It is floundering youth ministries that often remain paralyzed, unable to risk, stuck in a nostalgic obsession with past success.
Stuck question 3: Do you understand how different we are? Almost every church we have worked with suffered from a perception disorder we call “terminal uniqueness.” In these churches, focus group members return again and again to the “unique” reasons for their less-than-thriving ministry, such as
None of these challenges is even remotely unique to any one youth ministry. In fact, some combination of these factors has been present in every church we’ve worked with and in almost every effective youth ministry. A church that wants to avoid falling victim to the trap of terminal uniqueness will keep off the dead-end street of explaining away its less-than-effective youth ministry with these excuses.
We count what we believe to be important and whatever we count becomes important.
LYLE SCHALLER
We count people because people count.
WAYNE RICE
Stuck question 4: Will you help my church understand that youth ministry isn’t about numbers? Few principles are more sacred in youth ministry than this tired refrain (typically uttered with an air of absolute authority): “It’s not about numbers.”
Conventional wisdom has it that talking about numbers is unspiritual and clearly antithetical to faithful ministry. But both the research and our experience reveal that numbers do, in fact, matter.
Youth Ministry That Transforms, the first thorough study of the profession of youth ministry, discovered surprisingly that “the size of a congregation’s youth group is the greatest predictor of its overall climate.” In addition, the study revealed a direct correlation between the number of youth and volunteers in a youth ministry and the “sense of team” experienced by the youth ministry as a whole. After decades of experience, Jim Burns and Mike DeVries (he is my brother in Christ, but no relation) summed it up clearly: “Youth go where the numbers are.”
Anti-numbers churches remain stuck because they fail to recognize that students are drawn to places where there is at least a critical mass of youth, a place where they don’t feel uncomfortably alone. To the average teenager, a room with “nobody there” is far less inviting than a room packed with friends and energy.
I know, I know. You may be ready to jump out of your skin right now. Let me qualify:
But some numbers in youth ministry do matter, and matter profoundly. Consider this parable (borrowed from Rick Warren):
Imagine that Susan and I decide to take our teenage children to Disney World. As we send them off in the morning, we say, “We’ll meet back here at the flagpole at 9:00 p.m.” The children nod in agreement and run to the rides.
Nine o’clock comes, and Susan and I are at the flagpole. Debbie has arrived. Leigh has arrived. But Adam is nowhere to be found.
I look at my watch one more time and say to Susan, “Okay, honey, let’s go.”
Susan says predictably, “We can’t go! Adam’s not here.”
I answer, “Listen, honey, Adam knew good and well what time we were meeting, and he’s not here. We have two high-quality children here. Let’s just work with the ones we’ve got. Let’s go.”
But my bride is immovable. She says, “Have you forgotten that we have three children?”
To which I respond, “Why are you so obsessed with numbers?!”
“Because that third one,” she says, “just happens to be ours.”
A church that doesn’t determine how many students are a part of its youth ministry is irresponsible, just as a shepherd who fails to take the time to know how many sheep are in the flock would clearly be less than faithful in his or her charge. Likewise, a church that fails to determine how many students it would like to have involved on a weekly basis sets itself up for the anemia that comes from terminally vague expectations. If the target number is five students, the youth worker has clear marching orders.
Make no mistake about it. Every youth ministry will be evaluated by numbers. This evaluation may take place in a formal setting such as an elders meeting (“How many kids are we averaging in Sunday school?”). But more often, it takes place among a group of parents in the parking lot, at a party or on the phone, with conversations like this:
“My son says that no one comes any more.”
“You know, my daughter says the same thing.”
“All the kids are going to that church down the street.”
“I wonder what our youth director is missing?”
“Well, if you want to know what I think . . .”
The question is not whether your youth ministry will be evaluated by numbers but whether the ministry will be evaluated by good numbers or bad numbers. Here are a few examples to show the distinction:
I hope you hear me. My beef is not that youth groups are too small (though most are much smaller than they should be). My beef is that churches often don’t do the hard work of deciding what size youth ministry they’d like to have.
Whatever we measure really is our mission.
RANDY FRAZEE
Having one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake doesn’t work in driving, and it doesn’t work in youth ministry. We can’t say, “We don’t care about numbers,” and at the same time seek to grow our youth group.
Stuck question 5: Can you get me out of all these political games? Too many youth workers proudly announce, “I don’t play politics,” and then wonder why they find themselves stymied by political battles over ministry minutiae. These youth workers are confused. They are playing politics; they’re just playing poorly.
Perhaps a little reframing would help. When you think politics, think of the word’s etymological cousin, polite. Learning to “play politics” well starts with simply doing the polite thing.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article on why top executives fail, “the inability to work with others” topped the list. Many of the executives left their positions with the complaint, “It was all about politics.” But when probed further about what was meant by the word politics, the definitions boiled down to a single word: relationships.
Perhaps an example from my failure files would add a little clarity.
As he was repeatedly ambushed with youth ministry questions at social gatherings and church meetings, my senior pastor became increasingly distrustful of what I was doing. He approached me, carrying a powder keg of frustration, which was natural, considering all those surprise attacks directed at him that came because of something I did (or more often, didn’t do). He called me into his office and said, “I need to know what’s going on in the youth ministry!”
My response was neither polite nor politically wise. I said, “You never ask me about the youth ministry. Ask me anything you want to know, and I’ll tell you.” I failed to recognize that senior pastors are a lot like horses. They just don’t do well when surprised.
The polite thing would have been for me to prepare him for the criticisms of the youth ministry he could expect and to arm him with reasonable responses to those attacks. Instead, I only increased his distrust of my judgment (and therefore the tension of my own work environment) because I didn’t know how to “play politics.” Understandably, the next time I went to him with a request that was a little out of the ordinary, like for an additional intern or permission to miss an elders meeting, his negative response was well deserved.
Most young youth workers step into ministry ill-equipped to walk through the political minefields that are a part of every church. Instead of recognizing that they need training in how the game is played, too many become unnecessary casualties in a battle they didn’t even know they had signed up for.
By joining a church staff, a youth worker automatically steps onto the political playing field. And the one who holds firmly to “I don’t play politics” often leads a ministry that is dramatically underfunded.
There may just be a connection.
Back to Our Story
What happened to our stuck senior pastor at the beginning of this chapter?
With a little help, he let go of his assumptions and stopped asking the questions that were keeping his youth ministry stuck. He walked through the processes you’ll be reading about in the chapters to come.
He’s not stuck anymore.