Meet the Normals
2
The Easy Button
The Crisis of Chronic Underinvestment
The history of primarily calling inexperienced and inadequately trained young people to do youth ministry reflects the myth that youth ministry is a beginner’s job that doesn’t require much education, experience or skill. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Youth ministry is one of the most demanding ministries—so demanding and frustrating that many pastors and congregational leaders don’t know what to do.
Roland Martinson
Chatting over coffee at a convention a few years back, I met an animated young attendee. As he talked about his ministry, he voiced his long-standing frustration. Unable to grow, stuck in patterns that no longer seemed to work, the church had gone stagnant. “But,” my new young friend explained, “after this week, everything will change.”
“Really?” I asked. “How’s that?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Why, this convention! I’ve brought my entire team here.” He truly believed that “this convention,” led by some of the most high-profile and engaging megachurch experts in the country, would immediately transform his stuck ministry into a thriving one.
Although I have little doubt that this young man’s heart was in the right place, he had fallen victim to one of the most common, most crippling myths about youth ministry: the Easy Button. Here are examples of a few Easy Buttons:
Easy Buttons don’t work in life; they don’t work in marriage, and they certainly don’t work in youth ministry. Churches that try to build Easy Button youth ministries find themselves just as stuck a decade from now as they are today. Effective, sustainable youth ministries are found in churches that give up the search for easy answers and, to borrow from Eugene Peterson, practice “a long obedience in the same direction.”
Steeple Chase
Every now and then, when leading a youth ministry seminar, I try a little exercise I call the Steeple Chase. Here’s how it goes:
I ask the group how many of them come from churches that have steeples. Typically about half raise their hands. Then I ask, “Suppose that tonight the steeple were to be blown off your church. What would happen?”
Within a few seconds, someone shouts, “We would get it fixed!”
“But,” I ask, “what if it was going to be really expensive to fix?”
“We’d still get it fixed,” someone answers.
I keep pushing. “But what if getting the steeple fixed was going to be a gargantuan hassle? What if the church just didn’t have the money?”
By this point, the annoyed group responds with increased volume and decreased speed, “We would get it fixed!”
When I ask how, the answer is almost always the same: “We would figure it out.”
Churches seem to know how to find the money to repair steeples, don’t they? Raising money to fix the HVAC system seems reasonable, doable, just a natural part of being the church. Need a roof repaired? It may be an annoying interruption, but most churches figure out how to fund it.
Isn’t it interesting how few churches feel anything close to this kind of urgency about their own youth, not to mention the thousands of disconnected youth in their community? Though youth ministry may be highly valued by most churches and though it has had little across-the-board success, churches often fail to see the need to invest appropriately in youth ministry.
It’s time to acknowledge that our culture has dramatically underinvested in the creation of nurturing structures for its young and that churches have been among the slowest to invest. Several years ago I spoke to a group of parents at a church across town. They’d asked me to give a presentation about how their church might turn their chronically underperforming youth ministry into a thriving one. I could see in their eyes the familiar longing for the Easy Button.
As I taught, I explained that the difference between an effective and an ineffective youth ministry is often directly tied to the level of investment a church makes. I drew a line down the middle of the board. On the top of one column, I wrote the amount of financial investment our church was making in its youth ministry at that time. At the top of the other column, I wrote the amount this church was investing in its youth ministry. The first figure was ten times larger than the second.
“Could it be,” I wondered aloud, “that the reason your church has chronically struggled in its youth ministry is tied less to the programs you’re doing and more to the investment the church is making?” The parents nodded in agreement.
I was sure they were getting it; sure, that is, until one raised her hand. “I understand what you are saying about investment” (it would soon be clear that she had no idea what I was saying), “but give us some ideas about some of the neat programs that you do to get kids to come. I hear my kids talking about your ski trip and other things you do . . .”
A quick survey of the landscape of youth ministry reveals one disappointingly consistent result of underinvestment: youth ministry is undeniably in trouble. Consider these markers:
Louie Giglio’s battle cry invites an investment at an entirely different level: “We’re debating about whether to have carpet in the emergency room, while there are people bleeding to death all around us.”
Underinvestment: All Too Normal
I’ve developed a theory about why youth ministry is so consistently underfunded: the short tenure, age and inexperience of most youth workers positions them to be ill-equipped to advocate for the level of investment necessary to build a sustainable youth ministry.
Consider this scenario: It’s budget planning time again. The church’s youth ministry, with a total budget of forty thousand dollars (including staff and programming), is engaging seventy-five youth each week. Jack, an affable twenty-four-year-old, leads the ministry in his first job out of college. Everyone likes Jack, but they see him as a kid himself.
The music program of the church, on the other hand, is led by Sandra, a fifty-three-year-old, dearly loved music minister who has been on the staff for more than twenty years. The music budget has grown to $120,000 a year.
When these two step into their respective meetings with the finance committee, one staff person has twenty-plus years of experience making church budget requests; the other has just one. If Jack is normal, he’ll spend much more time grumbling about how small his youth ministry budget is than he will working the predictable processes most likely to ensure an adequately funded youth ministry.
I hope you hear me here. I am not suggesting that there’s anything sinister about what the music staff person is doing. In fact, she’s doing exactly what Jack should be doing: clearly and compellingly communicating her ministry’s needs to the church. But Jack doesn’t know how. He’s choosing (yes, choosing) to do nothing to learn to become an expert in the complex process of successfully advocating for additional funding.
If Jack and Sandra’s church is typical, Jack will be leaving in just a few years, handing an even less-experienced rookie the responsibility of advocating for funding. The very rhythm of youth ministry staffing in most churches almost guarantees that chronic underinvestment will be the norm.
(If, after hearing Jack’s story, you’re panicking about how in the world you’ll be able to become successful at advocating for additional funding for your ministry, skip ahead to chapter twelve, “Dancing with Alligators.”)
Mis-investment: It Looks So Good
When I walked into St. John’s Church on the first day of the assessment, I was impressed. The youth facilities were state of the art. There was a gymnasium, a fully equipped rec room and an inviting collection of comfortable couches. But after a few focus groups, I could tell that this was a ministry in trouble.
It seems that the church had raised two million dollars to build facilities for youth, but had absolutely no plans for increasing the staff for the youth ministry. As a result, for the past six months, the lone staff person had doubled (or should we say “divided”?) as a facilities manager/recreation director, overseeing a complex and demanding basketball league, leaving even less time for his already overloaded plate as youth director. As you might imagine, at the time of this writing, the church is looking for a new youth minister, again.
Too many churches make this classic mis-investment blunder. Let’s imagine another way the two million might have been used. If they’d taken that money and invested it at a rate of 5 percent, they would have been able to hire two or three additional full-time youth staff for decades, without ever tapping into the principle. Great buildings seldom precede great youth ministries.
More times than we would like to count, we’ve come to “edificially obsessed” churches that have chosen to make the vast majority of their youth ministry investment in buildings. But gymnasiums, air-hockey tables, plasma TVs and leather couches don’t build thriving youth ministries; appropriate staffing, clear vision and structure do. Too many churches are like parents spending thousands on a playroom for their children while neglecting the kids’ need for food and clothes, assuming that the fortune they have already spent on their kids should be enough.
I’ve been known to make people mad. (Not often, fortunately.) The one issue that makes people the angriest is the cost and how long it takes to get a sustainable youth ministry up and running. Most churches want their youth ministry fixed fast and cheap. Though we can usually stop the bleeding quickly, restoring the “body” back to health takes a much longer time.
We understand the pressure people feel to build quickly:
Good arguments, all of them, but none is an excuse for avoiding building structures of sustainable youth ministry.
Churches build buildings because the cost is clear; architects can give a good estimate of what it will take. But churches have a much harder time determining what it costs to build a sustainable youth ministry.
The Crisis of Capacity
One characteristic shared by many churches we work with is “the crisis of capacity.” Churches that suffer under this crisis are like
Often, crisis-of-capacity churches contact us because they’re frustrated by the chronic “underperformance” of their youth workers. Balls are getting dropped. Parents are frustrated by the lack of information they receive. The senior pastor is tired of the youth ministry being the hot button in the church.
No good general ever started a battle that he hadn’t already won.
CHINESE GENERAL SUN TZU
But often we find that the apparent “failure” of the youth ministry is caused less by an underperforming youth worker than by an overcapacity ministry. Assuming that a more organized youth worker is needed (or a more relational one, or a more magnetic one, or . . . ), overcapacity churches forget to ask the fundamental question of whether their performance expectations are even reasonable. In short, they ignore the question of capacity.
Meet the Normals
Over the past five years, we’ve discovered five fairly consistent “normals” for understanding capacity in youth ministry. Though not all these normals are always present in every church, every church has had some clear combination of them.
1. One thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a kid. The most controversial of all the normals, this rule of thumb suggests that a church that expects to have one hundred youth involved on a weekly basis needs to have a budget in the neighborhood of $100,000, including the program budget, staff salaries and benefits. Though a change in staff or a change in youth ministry model may create a shift in which specific students a church engages, it’s not likely that the youth ministry will be able to increase the net number of youth participating without an increase in funding. Ordinarily, overcapacity youth ministries result in short-term youth directors and programs that quickly launch and then sputter out of existence. We’ve certainly worked with churches that were spending more or less than this benchmark amount, but we’ve found it to be a very reasonable and dependable marker of just how much a sustainable youth ministry normally costs.
2. One full-time staff person for every fifty youth. According to this normal, a church that hopes to sustain the involvement of fifty youth on a weekly basis needs to hire the full-time equivalent of one staff person. When a church hires just enough staff to barely maintain the program they have and then expects quantum growth from the new hire, the understaffed youth ministry can be expected to remain mired in a climate of criticism, blaming and burnout. An overcapacity youth ministry sets up its staff and volunteers to be unable to fulfill the wide variety of expectations placed on them by the parents, the youth, the senior pastor and the church leaders.
3. One adult for every five youth. We like to think in terms of “spans of care,” recognizing that, realistically, most volunteers can’t effectively oversee the church’s Christian nurture of more than about five students on an ongoing basis. A church seeking to build a youth ministry with twenty-five youth active weekly will need approximately five volunteers working weekly in the ministry. Conventional wisdom would suggest that if enough volunteers are in place, staff will be less necessary. But our experience is just the opposite. Without sufficient staff to coordinate, inspire and equip volunteers, the volunteers easily become stuck in competing priorities and programs that eventually erode the long-term sustainability of the ministry.
Though the first three normals can provide a congregation with a prescription for aligning their investment in youth ministry and their expectations, it’s important to provide two more normals linking youth-group participation to the church’s overall membership.
4. Ten percent of the worshiping congregation. In a typical church, the size of the youth ministry tends to settle at around 10 percent of the worshiping congregation. Unless it invests otherwise, it’s likely that a church with an average worship attendance of five hundred will have about fifty students active in some way in the life of the church. At the same time, a church with a weekly worship attendance of five thousand might have a much larger youth group than the church’s investment (in budget, staff and volunteers) might predict, with youth participation pulled along by high levels of participation in the larger church.
Growth and decline in youth ministry attendance is closely linked to the ups and downs of Sunday morning attendance. . . . Among the 460 churches represented in the survey, if worship attendance was up, so was youth group attendance. The opposite was also true. A decline in worship attendance generally meant youth group numbers would similarly sink.
LEN KAGELER
5. A 20-percent ceiling. We’ve observed that churches can naturally grow their youth ministries to a size equivalent to about 20 percent of the worshiping congregation simply by increasing their investment (see normals one to three, above) and moving forward for several years with a consistent structure and vision. But when the size of the youth ministry begins to exceed the 20-percent mark, the norms become much less predictable. In other words, a church with five hundred people participating in worship could naturally grow its youth ministry to one hundred simply by increasing its investment. But as the youth ministry seeks to grow beyond the one-hundred mark, increased investment alone will not necessarily increase the number of youth involved weekly.
A disclaimer: When we present these norms, we’re often asked, “Where did you get these?” Our response is that, like a contractor who has built forty or fifty houses in the last few years, we’re able to estimate a general “cost per square foot” with sometimes frightening accuracy.
But we also encourage church leaders to “do the math” for themselves and to analyze their current youth ministry using these metrics. Even if they come up with numbers and ratios different from ours, answering these questions will provide them with a clear sense of what it takes in their particular context to maintain the current youth ministry and offer a baseline for predicting the cost of strategic growth.
There are, of course, a few exceptions to these norms:
St. Michael’s Church, for example, determined that, given the number of youth connected to their church, they wanted to move from having 45 youth involved weekly to having 150. After years of gambling, placing their bets on the hope of finding just the right youth minister, just the right program or just the right promotion plan, they decided they would take the investment approach instead.
The first year, they hired a full-time youth program director to join the full-time youth director. The next year, multiple interns were added. During the third year, a second full-time youth director replaced the multiple interns. At the same time, they dramatically increased the number of volunteers involved, moving from less than ten to more than thirty adults involved weekly. Within three years, their ministry was engaging well over one hundred youth a week. Though still not at the one-to-fifty ratio, they’re well on their way, having established a clear trajectory for growth, simply by intentionally increasing their investment and thus their capacity.
If you have a group of twelve kids who don’t understand your illustrations and one of them wants to kill you, you have a youth group just like Jesus.
MARK YACONELLI
The extraordinary news is that the doomsday predictions are wrong. The epidemic of lament surrounding youth ministry, though a welcome wake-up call, may actually be misguided. Churches that move beyond gambling and choose to invest strategically, with an eye to the long-term investment, are seeing delightful and dramatic returns.