One More Reason Why Superstars Fail
3
Hoping, Wishing and Praying
Beyond the Frantic Search for the Youth Ministry Superstar
The pressure to succeed is especially acute for youth ministers, who—despite their lack of knowledge, skills and experience—are expected to attract young adolescents to a life of commitment to Christ and the church. It is a daunting task made increasingly difficult by the expectations of adults and a notable lack of congregational support.
Merton Strommen
The request was one we’d heard often enough, but never this blatantly: “Can you help us find a superstar youth director?”
My response came so abruptly that it shocked even me. “That is one thing we just don’t do.”
After an awkward silence, I explained that after years of watching churches search for and hire “superstar” youth directors, I’d come to the conviction that helping churches find superstars doesn’t really help. Instead of helping build long-term, sustainable youth ministries, the superstar orientation does just the opposite: it keeps youth ministries stuck.
I’ve grown weary of churches spending heroic, sacrificial energy (and money) trying to build quick-fix, big-win youth ministries, only to find themselves three years down the road with nothing to show for their efforts but overblown memories of a burned-out superstar.
It’s easy enough to understand. Parents get worried about their kids; they get desperate, clawing at any shred of hope they can find. Churches exhibit a similar desperation when they find themselves on the verge of extinction because their kids are staying away in droves. And when we get desperate, we also get stupid.
At Youth Ministry Architects, we’ve seen the pattern enough times to no longer question its predictability. The story usually goes something like this . . .
Fired, Hired and Tired
You could almost see the heel marks all the way to the doors of the church. Jim Johnson’s daughter, Annie, hated the youth program. She hated the dorky games; she hated the way the kids were so exclusive; and she really hated that her parents made her participate. So when Ryan was asked to leave his role as youth pastor, there were no tears shed at the Johnson house.
When the pastor called Jim to ask him to lead the search committee for a new youth director, Jim was thrilled. Quite honestly, in his estimation, Ryan had been a disappointment at best. It broke Jim’s heart to pick up his daughter at church and hear her say, with her typical flare for the dramatic, “Please don’t make me go back there, Dad. I would rather have a brain tumor than have to walk into that room again!”
So by the time Ryan had left town, Jim had filled his committee and the search had begun in full force. The committee (made up mostly of parents whose sons and daughters had been less-than-enthusiastic about Ryan’s ministry) made their list of what they were looking for.
They put together a job description, and for six months, they made phone calls, conducted interviews and went to more meetings than any of them had expected. At the end of the six months, they had narrowed their search to three candidates.
Before long, they hired Andrew, an incredibly creative, relational, student-focused young man in his twenties with an apparently endless supply of energy. The search committee enjoyed his sense of humor immensely, and they were certain the kids would too.
But by the end of the first year, Andrew came to the unsettling realization that relating to students was only a fraction of what he was expected to do. The church also looked to him to recruit and train adult volunteers, select and gain approval for curriculum resources, organize major youth ministry events, keep up with all the money that came in for retreats and camps, relate to parents and businesspeople, and make peace between members of his team. In a word, he was expected to do the one thing he promised the search committee he was not good at: organize.
As details fell through the cracks left and right, criticism from parents and church leaders increased exponentially. Andrew began to realize that though he thought he was hired to do the work of the youth ministry, he was also expected to build the structure for the youth ministry. He felt like a mechanic charged with working on his car’s engine while driving it down the highway at seventy miles an hour.
As the decibel level of complaints increases, we can only guess that Andrew will soon be looking for another position, very likely outside youth ministry and the church altogether. And that church will begin the search cycle all over again.
The Telltale Signs of a Superstar Search
Even a cursory review of the number of churches searching for youth workers reveals the immense imbalance between the need and the availability of trained, effective youth workers. A glance at the typical job posting shows why.
Most youth pastor job postings suffer from chronic vagueness on the one hand and wildly unrealistic expectations on the other. Too often, youth pastors are set up to be judged as failures by at least one of their constituencies. Just for the sake of illustration (and morbid entertainment), I’ve pulled a few excerpts from ads of churches searching for youth workers. My comments are in parentheses.
Too many churches are looking for a dynamic, top-notch, committed, magnetic, relational, creative, organized, theologically informed, twenty-two-year-old who can present powerful, life-changing messages and will gratefully work for $23,000 a year. The excruciatingly exaggerated requirements found in so many of these job descriptions gives evidence of little more than a history of chronic dissatisfaction with those who have gone before.
Consider the way most professions work. In sports, the number of rookies on the field at any given point in the game is almost always smaller than the number of experienced players. In medicine, law and business, though there are plenty of rookies, there are few successful organizations that put rookies in charge the day they arrive. In fact, even after they have a medical degree, physicians are required to serve a minimum of three years out of medical school under an experienced practitioner before being licensed to serve on their own.
Youth ministry may be one of the only professions that has settled into the pattern of handing over total responsibility for running an organization to young people just out of college. Far too often, anxiety, not wisdom, drives us.
Testing Your Church for the Superstar Virus
How can a church know if it’s working with a superstar mentality? Over the years, we’ve discovered five telltale statements from churches afflicted with the superstar virus. See if any of these comments sound familiar.
1. “Our youth staff should know how to do it.” I remember well my first full-time youth ministry job. Just out of college, I was overwhelmed and over my head. My prayer life was doing fine. I was teaching well and building incredible relationships with students, but there were simply more plates to spin than I knew how to manage.
My youth ministry meetings were full of highly organized parents and adult volunteers. But I simply didn’t know how to structure the ministry to access their immense organizational gifts. So, instead of carrying some of the administrative load of managing details of the youth ministry, they simply lobbed advice grenades from a distance.
I would leave those meetings with an even longer to-do list, frustrated that my “team” had delegated almost every responsibility back to me. Something was wrong with this picture: the only role these highly organized adults chose to play was to complain about my lack of organizational skills.
I was well into my third decade in youth ministry when I finally began to feel confident accessing the immense gifts of those who really wanted to help me. As a twenty-two-year-old, I didn’t know enough to know what I didn’t know. I assumed it was my volunteers’ problem. I realize now that I was living out Ted Smith’s powerful description of the shortsighted way churches handle the “problem” of youth ministry: “We delegate youth ministry to folks who are structurally the most vulnerable, thus preventing the youth ministry from ever challenging the church with the gospel.”
Superstar-oriented churches assume that the “professional” youth worker should just know how to organize volunteers to share the workload, how to do the strategic thinking that will result in carloads of kids showing up. Those churches are almost always disappointed.
2. “Our youth worker will know the difference between wallpaper and concrete.” In any construction project, there’s a definite order that must be followed. For example, hanging sheetrock before running electricity through the house can more than double the amount of work required. If a builder tries to hang wallpaper before laying the cement foundation, there’ll be nothing but a sticky mess.
In building a sustainable youth ministry, first things must come first. But because most of those responsible for building a youth ministry are building for only the first or second time, they build like children handed a stack of wood, a hammer and some nails. With no blueprint, they simply start nailing things together as quickly as possible, which works fine for a slap-together fort in the backyard, but won’t result in a lasting structure.
Let’s get a little more specific about how Wallpaper Before Concrete (or WBC) youth ministries look.
3. “Our new youth worker will bring an end to all these crises.” It never ceases to amaze me how often youth workers and churches are surprised about problems in their youth ministry. To adapt the first line of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, youth ministry “is difficult.” It always is. It always will be.
This much we know . . . or at least we should know.
Sooner or later, something always hits the fan. A friend of mine says that there are only two periods in any youth ministry: crisis and pre-crisis. It is what we do in the pre-crisis stage that will determine the long-term health of our ministry. Senior pastors do resign, churches face budget cuts, youth directors get mono, youth leaders have affairs, and innocent people get caught in political crossfire. Crises will come.
When a youth minister is expected to prevent crises from erupting, that person is set up for failure.
4. “We’ll never hire from within our church.” One of Jim Collins’s surprising discoveries in his study of “good to great” companies was that, in over 90 percent of those companies (ten of eleven), the CEO was not a superstar savior hired from the outside but someone who had been a part of the company for a long time.
We’ve observed a similar phenomenon in youth ministries. Some of the most powerfully effective youth workers emerge from within the churches they’ve been serving. They step into their professional role with relationships and connections and with years of appreciation for the unique climate of the church.
The policy of not hiring church members almost always comes out of a negative experience that could have been prevented had clear accountability been in place before the hire-from-within took place. Trapped in a culture of niceness, most churches choose to create broad policies instead of dealing directly with those who are not fulfilling the expectations of their jobs.
Though hiring from within clearly carries risks, our experience has been that these risks are far smaller than those taken by churches gambling on a superstar outsider.
5. “With a new youth director, our volunteers won’t have to work so hard.” Finally, we have observed on superstar-focused search teams the debilitating expectation that the vast majority of the work volunteers have been doing heroically for months (sometimes years) will be lifted from their shoulders the day the new youth director steps into the office.
In an organization, leaders must be brought from the outside. In a movement, leaders emerge from within.
ERWIN MCMANUS
Do the math with me. Suppose ten people are each volunteering five hours a week, keeping the transitional youth ministry up and running. When the new youth director arrives (with a bandwidth of around fifty hours a week), he or she is immediately handed all the work the interim volunteers have been doing. The result is a net gain of exactly zero hours a week, and the youth director is left wondering why the new program can’t seem to get traction. Add to this equation the extra duties of a staff person—weekly staff meetings and functions, multiple committee meetings, assisting in worship—and you can see why it’s not unusual to add staff and actually move backward.
Do the Math
50 hours per week of a new staff person
– 10 hours of functions unrelated to youth ministry
– 50 hours of previous volunteer help
10 fewer hours available for youth ministry
The five attitudes of superstar youth ministries all add up to what has become a very toxic culture for youth workers, many of whom leave youth ministry after their first overwhelming experience. A study conducted for the National Catholic Conference of Bishops confirms this hypothesis. While research revealed that the vast majority (over 90 percent) of parish ministers find their work very satisfying, the same report tells a quite different story about those serving as youth ministers:
Of the various ministry positions, youth ministers seem to derive the least satisfaction and support. The full-time youth ministers find ministry the least affirming, their coworkers the least affirming, their supervisors the least satisfied, parishioners the least satisfied, and youth ministers the least likely to encourage others to enter parish ministry.
One More Reason Why Superstars Fail
Johnson Chapel Christian Church hired a superstar. They had wooed Jeff from his thriving ministry across the country, offering to let him “bring his own vision” to the youth program. If ever there was one, Jeff was a superstar. He had the whole package: experience, charisma, wisdom.
With twelve years of experience under his belt, Jeff was hired to serve as the youth pastor at a church with over five hundred youth on its rolls. It had been years since the church had had its last permanent youth director, and church leaders were sure that as soon as Jeff stepped on the scene, the vast majority of the youth they had “lost” during the interim would come back (apparently no one thought to consider that half of those youth had already graduated from high school and would never be “coming back” to the youth group).
After working for two years as the sole youth staff member, Jeff’s group stood at a steady participation level of 250 active youth a week. But it had plateaued there. And before long, ideas and suggestions were flying toward him like projectiles at a substitute teacher.
Jeff was given well-meaning hints like, “Work smarter, not harder,” and “Do the important things; not the urgent things,” and the less-than-helpful “You need to slow down more.” In the most blatant display of the superstar syndrome I’ve ever seen, the church sent Jeff to counseling to help him discover what his problem was, to find out exactly why he seemed so overwhelmed all the time. Forget the fact that the number of youth he was engaging weekly was easily in the top ten of any church in his denomination in the country. Forget that the church never took the time to find out how many churches had 250 active youth and one staff person. With blind certainty, the leaders of this church assumed that if there was a problem in this ministry, it couldn’t be the superstar expectations of the system. It had to be the staff person.
Like a light bulb attracts bugs, we expect the youth pastor to attract kids. When the youth pastor burns out, the kids go away, and the search for a new bulb begins (along with the hope that this one will last just a little bit longer).
WAYNE RICE AND MILES MCPHERSON
Jeff is now in a new position with more reasonable expectations. The church has started another search. At least one of the parties is happy.
The superstar syndrome always creates larger problems, not the least of which is removing the family, the elders, the deacons and other concerned adults from the lives of teenagers and replacing them with a new “youth ghetto” in which the rest of the church simply lets the youth minister take care of the kids.
Superstar-syndrome churches spend sacrificial amounts of energy on the roller-coaster ride of gambling on the next youth pastor. But ironically, superstar youth ministries come from churches that spend their energy creating a climate and building an infrastructure in which moderately gifted, garden-variety youth directors produce superstar results.