Now What?
5
Building Right
The Structures of Sustainability
Your ministry is perfectly designed to achieve the results you are currently getting.
Andy Stanley
Be sure you know the condition of your flocks.
Proverbs 27:23
The guru par excellence of church conflict always told me that the most important thing in working in a hot fight is to recognize that everybody wants to simplify the issues so you have clear reasons for killing each other. . . . He said that the most important thing one can do is to “complexify things.” . . . When you see all ten sides of the issue you’d mistakenly thought had only two, only then can you begin working out of the polarization.
Diana Butler Bass
From as early as the sixteenth century, rulers and merchants from around the world dreamed of finding a shorter route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. If a canal on the Isthmus of Panama could be built, they imagined, the distance required to travel between the two oceans could be reduced to a fraction of the original trip.
But over the centuries, builders and engineers were thwarted again and again in their attempts to build a waterway across those forty-eight miles between the two oceans. A vast array of obstacles stood in their way, not the least of which was a sizable hill right in the middle of that stretch of land. The first builders attempted to simply plow through the mountain, in hopes of building a flat, sea-level-to-sea-level canal. After all, they assumed, it would be impossible to get a ship to travel uphill.
It wasn’t until 1914 that American engineer John F. Stevens was able to complete the canal, not by blasting away all the obstacles, but by creating a process for actually lifting ships from one level to another, allowing a ship to do the impossible—to travel uphill. The designers of the canal knew something about bringing things “to the next level.” The plan looked something like figure 1.
Figure 1.
The ingenious plan provided for the removal of only the highest portion of the mountain and for the building of individual locks designed to raise and lower vessels over the different elevations of the land being crossed. When finished, it looked more like figure 2.
The Panama Parable gives us a picture of the simplicity and complexity of moving a youth ministry to that elusive “next level.” In each lock of the canal, a ship is raised between twenty-five and thirty feet, not by muscular strength or pure force, but by a complex structure that simply applies the natural power of rising and lowering water levels.
Figure 2.
Typical youth workers employ a far different approach. With passion and commitment to do “whatever it takes,” they exert exhausting, often Herculean efforts to move the ministry to the next level. They attempt to heave their boats out of the water and carry them to the next level, instead of creating structures that can access a power greater than their own strength. The heavy lifting of moving their youth ministry from one level to the next too often results in herniated hearts that give up trying altogether.
But there are ways to naturally “raise the water level” in our ministries so that they will move from one level to the other, not by heavy lifting but through the creation of intentional structures. And I am convinced that a vision for such structures is absolutely necessary for churches that want to see lasting change in their youth ministries. Sustainable transformation is not catalyzed by superstars acting independently, however heroically, but by ministry “engineers” who choose to learn how to structure for change.
Structure for Change
How then do we create the series of locks that can move our youth ministries from where they are to where we want them to be? It all starts with that single word structure.
Any land animal more than six inches long needs a structure, a skeleton, to survive. And any youth ministry with more than a handful of youth will need one as well. Unfortunately, most youth ministries (and youth ministers) are woefully short on structure.
Most churches frantically try to make it to the next level without building first-level structures. As a result, most churches build house-of-cards youth ministries, programs that expand willy-nilly to the point of implosion.
But sustainable youth ministries do it differently.
Squaring the Corners: Developing Control Documents
All four walls were up. Our one-room building in the slums of Tijuana was taking shape. Our work had progressed more rapidly than expected. Spirits were high—until our work came to a screeching halt.
Our construction guide asked for a few volunteers to “square the building.” As our more agile workers positioned themselves on top of the corners, the rest of us waited for what felt like a very long time.
The grumbling of annoyed youth and leaders (“What’s taking so long?” “Come on!”) couldn’t hurry our site supervisor. He knew what most of the rest of us didn’t: taking time to square the house would save exponential amounts of time later.
Sadly, very few churches take the time to “square” their youth ministries. As a result, these ministries waste countless hours re-inventing the wheel each year, compensating for the results of foundational corners that never got squared. In our work with churches, we look for five key documents to confirm that a youth ministry has been “squared”:
1. Directories. Most churches have lists of their youth, volunteers and visitors, but those lists are usually stored in a variety of arcane computer systems. A sustainable youth ministry starts with a directory of its students (including school, grade, parents’ names, phone number and any other information that seems appropriate). The second essential directory is of all volunteers and staff working in the ministry, including each person’s contact information and role in the ministry. The final directory includes the names and contact information for all visitors to the youth ministry in the previous two to three years.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule for deciding which students belong in the youth directory and which belong in the visitors directory. What’s absolutely crucial, though, is that these directories be updated at least annually, using a consistent standard for who does and does not qualify as “ours.” As a way of maximizing the accuracy of the directories, we recommend printing them annually and distributing them at least to the members of the youth leadership team.
2. An annual events calendar. There’s no reason for a youth ministry not to have its major-events calendar mapped out at least a year in advance, except laziness. Every September, parents should be able to plan around events, including trips, for the upcoming summer (nine months away). Too many youth ministers complain about the lack of committed volunteers and youth who don’t sign up for programs, when those programs are announced less than six weeks before they happen. It’s almost impossible to recruit volunteers to take load-bearing responsibility for programs less than six weeks away.
3. Job descriptions. When I ask the youth ministers we coach for a copy of their job description, the typical answers are variations on these:
Everyone from the lead youth staff to the van drivers have a better chance of playing their positions well if we can at least give them, in writing, a document that outlines the scope of their responsibilities. We like to help churches create results-oriented job descriptions, rather than responsibility-oriented ones, an approach that gives latitude to each worker to determine the “how” behind the desired results. (A few sample job descriptions can be found at www.ymarchitects.com.) Note, however, that a job description only gets used to the extent that it is part of a larger process that includes an annual review and revision of it.
4. The master recruiting list. Most youth ministries struggle to find volunteers. But very few have a clear process for recruiting the volunteers they need, beyond blanket appeals to overworked church members. A master recruiting list begins the process by first determining exactly how many volunteer leaders are needed for the coming year. We recommend creating this list in February (when recruiting season opens) and spending a few hours every week calling the most likely prospects, expecting a “no” from two-thirds of them.
Chapter ten describes the priority and process of building a thriving volunteer leadership team. But for now, it will be enough simply to start thinking like a coach. No football coach would ever think of stepping onto the field with only five players. A youth director who runs ahead to start building programs before he or she has a team to run those programs will be perpetually mired in sputtering initiatives that never quite get off the ground. (A sample master recruiting template can be found at www.ymarchitects.com.)
5. The curriculum template. We call the final control document a curriculum template, a six- or seven-year game plan of how the teachings in the youth ministry will be structured. There’s an almost infinite variety of approaches to developing a curriculum template. The key, though, is to have a plan that’s distinct from any specific current curriculum resources. Let me explain.
Most youth ministries have a reactive curriculum “plan,” driven primarily by the availability (and marketing) of specific curriculum resources. A curriculum template, on the other hand, provides the framework for a wide variety of resources that might be used. Here are a few examples:
Only after the template is determined should specific curriculum resources be chosen or developed. This approach allows for the certain reality that some curriculum resources won’t work and will need to be replaced, without having to change the template or the overall plan.
Imagine what would happen if schools taught with the same approach to curriculum that most churches use. One year, a teacher stumbles onto an engaging curriculum on verbs, with some really cool videos on gerunds. When the kids and teachers get bored with that curriculum, they cut it short, and the teacher runs to the curriculum store, finds a compelling study on algebraic equations (narrated by Rob Bell-Curve), and starts to teach that the next week. When that study is winding down, the teacher decides it’s time to teach on rocks or medieval knights or Christmas around the world.
There’s a good chance that any number of these resources would have commendable components. The failure in the teaching process would not be due to the individual resources but to the lack of a framework to tie those resources together.
Unlike the other control documents (which are straightforward assignments), the development of a clear curriculum template is a complex process that will likely require a much broader buy-in from stakeholders in the youth ministry. (For more information about developing a clear curriculum template, see www.ymarchitects.com.)
The corners are, of course, not the foundation. We build on the foundation of Christ, but before we start building, we’ve got to make sure we have squared our corners.
Purposeful Structure: Developing Visioning Documents
Once the control documents are in place, it’s time to develop documents that can clarify and provide the roadmap for the future of the youth ministry. We’ve found that these documents are best developed through a visioning retreat (what we sometimes call the “dance-floor building retreat”).
I recently returned from a visioning retreat with one of our client churches, and I was reminded again of why so few churches attend to such things. The debates are too tedious, the rabbit trails too alluring, the axes to grind too anxiety-producing to make such a process anything but exhausting.
When it was over, all that was left in the room was a scattered collection of cups half-full of long-cold coffee, two exhausted youth directors and me. It had taken twenty youth ministry stakeholders and the three of us twelve hours to hammer out a vision for this youth ministry.
Many churches actually have visioning documents for their youth ministries. But more often than not, these statements were written by one person (usually the paid youth worker) in the privacy of his or her office and then slapped on a brochure, only to be ignored for the next few years. Instead of cobbling together a patchwork of good ideas with no strategic thread, a systems approach to creating visioning documents widens the base of support for a youth ministry and galvanizes a team to move together in a single direction.
If a visioning process is to set the course for a youth ministry’s future, it will involve a broad group of stakeholders in the ministry, including teachers, youth leaders, elders, youth and parents. But the process of drafting the four visioning documents in a way that propels a ministry forward is no small feat. We use a sometimes tedious and time-consuming process that engages ten to twenty stakeholders (staff, parents, volunteers and sometimes students) over a period of twelve to fifteen hours to craft these four key visioning documents:
By allowing multiple groups to work on drafting and revising the same documents, we avoid the trap of premature closure, the temptation to accept the first “good enough” idea that the most vocal group member proposes. Without an intentionally crafted process, the development of the visioning documents easily settles into what Patrick Lencioni calls “an atmosphere of self-victimizing groupthink.”
Let’s look at the nature and purpose of each of the four visioning documents.
1. The youth ministry mission statement. In the midseventies, Harvard University professor Edward Banfield made a profound discovery. He learned that seeing one’s life in terms of its long-term trajectory is one of the strongest predictors of a person’s future success. More important than education, family background, intelligence or race was the ability to view life from what Banfield called the “long-term perspective.”
Vision—no matter how in line with the vision of Jesus—is never enough. Execution of the vision is what counts. And execution, to a large degree, depends on structure.
ROBERT LEWIS
Those who work with chronically disadvantaged families (those living in poverty for multiple generations) have discovered a curious phenomenon: one item missing from homes of families trapped in generational poverty is a calendar. With little sense of how their actions today will impact how they live in the future, these families find it almost impossible to move from where they are to where they want to be. And consequently, they remain trapped in patterns they never would have chosen.
Too many youth ministries are stuck in the same kind of trap. Driven by the urgent demands of simply keeping a youth ministry afloat, most youth workers define long-range planning as getting this month’s calendar done just in time for the newsletter to go out.
But without a clearly articulated, compelling vision of what their church would like for its youth ministry to accomplish, these ministries meander with no higher purpose than simply “having a youth ministry” or “having a youth ministry better than most other churches in town.” But this is not a vision; it is a fearful reaction to the risk of extinction.
Something counterintuitive about growth: You have to do less if you want to grow more. And if you do more, chances are you will grow less.
ANDY STANLEY
A clearly articulated vision protects churches from becoming, in the words of Robert Lewis, “a sort of Christian ‘club’ that [exhausts] itself trying to keep its members happy.” A compelling vision protects youth ministries from competing agendas and paralyzing practices. And a well-crafted mission statement can become the filter through which leaders of a ministry determine which of the hundreds of ideas before them they will actually implement.
We’ve been fascinated to observe that, in more than a few churches, the first mission statement drafts come back totally devoid of any mention of God, with no mission higher than socializing teenagers into some vague notion of responsible adulthood. Other churches draft a statement that might be more appropriate for a forced labor camp than a youth ministry. But as we continue poking and prodding a bit, the drafting teams go back again (and again) to the drawing board.
When the tired debates about whether youth group should be more fun or more “spiritual” come up, a clear mission statement can help leaders navigate. Of course, many stakeholders would much rather skip the visioning process altogether, preferring to rush into the how-to part of the mission. (Find examples of youth ministry mission statements at www.ymarchitects.com.)
2. Measurable three-year goals. On September 23, 1999, NASA’s 125-million-dollar Mars probe ended its ten-month journey prematurely with a crash into the surface of the planet. As the investigation concluded, NASA admitted that the cause of the crash was simple. As I understand it, one engineering team did its calculations with the equivalent of metric units, while another made its calculations using another type of units. The difference was totally unnoticeable early in the journey, but after 416 million miles, the tiny discrepancy widened, until the spacecraft literally probed the planet. The method of measurement made all the difference.
Most youth ministers I know are happy not to measure anything. Many bristle at the thought of tracking attendance patterns or setting measurable goals. But without agreed-upon, measurable goals, a youth ministry will suffer from terminal vagueness. A numbers-free youth ministry simply doesn’t work for the long haul.
Imagine this conversation:
Youth worker: I’d like to sign our youth group up for a summer mission trip with your organization.
Mission staffer: Great! How many kids would you like to bring?
Youth worker: As many as we can.
Mission staffer: You can bring up to five hundred. How many would you like to bring?
Youth worker: We’ll just see how many God brings.
Mission staffer: We can’t very well sign your group up unless we know how many you plan to bring. Your deposit will have to be based on that total.
Youth worker: You are obsessed with numbers!
Youth workers can be victims of numbers or authors of them. What would happen, I wonder, if youth workers stopped fighting against numbers and started taking responsibility for determining what measurements will best help them track the results they want to achieve?
Without clear and measurable goals, the youth ministry is evaluated by as many standards as there are people complaining. Without clear and measurable goals, the only marching order for a youth director is “try to keep as many people happy as possible.” Clear, measurable targets can protect youth workers from the pressure to say yes to every new idea that bubbles up from important people in the church, allowing the ministry to defer adding new programs until the time of year when the re-visioning of goals takes place. I’ve been known to say, “I love that idea, but this year, we are lashed to the mast of these goals that have been established for our youth ministry. But we’d be happy to include your idea when we consider our goals for next year.”
As important as the first visioning process is, it’s equally important for the youth ministry to have processes in place for evaluating and re-visioning its goals each and every year. The youth ministries we work with establish three-year goals, each accompanied by a one-year benchmark. The three-year goals tend to be “stretch goals,” often set twice as high as the ministry hopes to reach, knowing that normal organizations tend to hit 50 percent of their goals. The one-year benchmarks are more attainable, since these are the standards against which the effectiveness of the ministry will be measured annually.
Goals do not necessarily mean that bigger is better. They affirm that clearer is better. Goals help define what a particular ministry will look like as it moves toward increasing health. If we want our youth ministries to be evaluated by something other than numbers and programs, we must take responsibility to define our targets clearly.
3. A statement of values. Values stand guard over the climate of a youth ministry. The climate or culture of a ministry must never be sacrificed on the altar of achieving measurable goals. Values protect a youth ministry from becoming so goal-oriented that it sacrifices the things that matter most.
For my wife and me the clearest picture of the powerful, protective role that values play comes from our own home. When our kids were still at home, Susan and I had a goal: we wanted them not to live like pigs in our house. Now if, in the process of trying to achieve the goal of having kids with clean rooms, we “motivated” them with anger, bitterness and resentment, we would have taught them about a whole lot more than just cleaning their rooms. They would have learned that it’s okay to treat people in destructive, disrespectful ways, as long as it helps them achieve the desired results.
Values define the spirit with which we will go about accomplishing our goals. For instance, love, kindness and respect are values. One church, which had run off four youth ministers in as many years, named one of their values as “excellence.” As we processed together how this value, if left unchecked, could result in a destructive, overactive-white-blood-cell pattern, they chose to add the value of grace. Without being intentional about its values, a youth ministry has little power to cultivate a climate of transformation. (Find a few samples of values statements at www.ymarchitects.com.)
4. A structure. There is a (perhaps mythical) story about Napoleon meeting with his counselors before going to war. The counselors, knowing Napoleon’s grand visions for expanding his empire, presented their aggressive plan of attack. He listened quietly as each described a different component of their ambitious plan. But with a few short questions from Napoleon, they sulked from the room, commissioned to start over again.
What were Napoleon’s questions? He simply asked about horses. “How many do we have? Where will they all be placed?” In a few short minutes, the humiliated counselors realized that their plans, though ambitious, would quickly outrun the available horses.
Without an Organization Chart, everything hinges on luck and good feelings, on the personalities of the people and the goodwill they share. Unfortunately, personalities, good feelings, goodwill and luck aren’t the only ingredients of a successful organization; alone, they are the recipe for chaos and disaster.
MICHAEL GERBER
Ambitious churches often design grand schemes for success that simply outrun their available horses. I’ve spoken with more than a few senior pastors who express their hope for a youth ministry that will engage four hundred to five hundred youth a week. But few seem to have any idea of how many resources it will take to sustain such a ministry. And so the church hires a youth staff woefully inadequate for accomplishing the church’s ambitious vision—a recipe for nonsustainability.
All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done. They destroy things.
THEODORE LEVITT
Getting a handle on how many horses a strategic plan will require demands a clear definition of the organization’s structure.
In almost every visioning retreat I’ve done, someone resists the idea of a traditional organizational chart, recommending instead something more organic, maybe a three-dimensional matrix chart or one with less layers, more like a series of concentric circles than a hierarchy. My experience has been that, though I appreciate the creativity and outside-the-box thinking that these folks bring to the table, attempts at creativity with an organizational chart typically result in fuzzy definitions of who is responsible for what, the very opposite of the purpose of such a chart. (For a few samples of youth ministry organizational charts, go to www.ymarchitects.com.)
Re-visioning: When It’s Time for Change
Though visioning is a powerful process for churches struggling to get their youth ministries on solid footing, it would be a mistake to see it as a one-time event. The ideal timing may differ for different ministries, but we recommend an annual review of these documents, with a focus on revising the organizational chart and job descriptions, and re-upping the three-year goals and the one-year benchmarks. After the visioning documents are set the first time and the trajectory of the ministry is in place, the annual revisiting can be completed in much less time than the first time around.
But every five years or so, we also recommend that key stakeholders gather again for a more thorough vision-casting time (not unlike the first visioning experience). For example, one church might spend five years on stabilizing its youth ministry and building an appropriate infrastructure. But at the end of that time, with a ministry appropriately funded and staffed, with a strong team of volunteers and a new tradition of effective long-range planning in place, the ministry would be ready to set a new vision that can capture and reengage the hearts of those investing in the youth ministry.
Unfortunately, instead of revisioning after five years of stability, most ministries simply choose to coast. But, as in sailing, the time to tack is when you have enough momentum to make the turn. If you wait too long, the boat will stall and leave you dead in the water. The time to change the strategic direction of your ministry is, ironically, when things are going well.
Every organization goes through predictable cycles. As a new initiative begins or a new staff person is hired, increased momentum comes as a natural consequence. When momentum is strong and energy is high, the last thing most churches are thinking about is changing something. But the best time to consider a new initiative or a new trajectory in youth ministry is just before the momentum of the current focus has peaked. We picture it like this:
Figure 3.
In the evolution of a typical youth ministry, a new hire often initiates a “new era.” Curiosity combines with the infusion of new ideas and a new personality to give a natural lift to the ministry. After a few years, the patterns and programs of the not-so-new staff person are well established, and parts of the ministry are beginning to fly on autopilot. There’s a general sense of contentment about the youth ministry, and though not perfect, the paid youth worker is appreciated by most stakeholders in the ministry. It’s at this season, when contentment is at its highest, that the youth ministry may be in the most danger.
Many times we lose our momentum because we are afraid to lose the success we’ve achieved, and before we know it, we discover that we are running on empty.
ERWIN MCMANUS
If, instead of coasting in contentment, the youth ministry reengages in bold dreaming and engaging innovation, the seeds of fresh, new life can be planted in the ministry. Apart from this kind of innovative thinking, the youth pastor will grow increasingly frustrated and will eventually leave just about the time the decline of the program has begun to reach top speed.
In their classic book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman found that one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a company is for it to become large and successful, because its leaders so easily forget “what got them big in the first place: innovation.” The National Science Foundation discovered that “small firms produced about four times as many innovations per research-and-development dollar as medium-sized firms, and about twenty-four times as many as large firms.”
Building Differently
I remember my first foray into building model airplanes. I brought home the box with the cool picture on it, only to be disappointed by the gazillion gray plastic pieces inside, looking much more tedious than I had expected. I went to the directions—“Glue Wing Staff T-3 to Elbow Cog M”—and dutifully followed the instructions. But within a few minutes I was frustrated, bored.
I wanted to get on with the good stuff—building the wings or the fuselage, putting on the decals. So, laying aside the instructions, I went ahead and glued the big pieces together. Now I was making progress! Or so I thought.
As I returned to the instructions, I realized that I’d need to unglue the big pieces to put all the small pieces where they belonged. My solution? Leave the model kit in pieces, watch cartoons and eat another peanut butter Nutter Butter Sandwich Cookie. After a month of walking around the pile of pieces, I decided I must not be cut out for building models.
As a matter of habit, youth workers of sustainable ministries do those tedious, little things that “normal” (that is, frustrated, stagnant, victim-oriented) youth workers find inconvenient (like recruiting volunteers, calling fringe kids and learning something new every day). Long-term, effective youth workers do different things with their time. Oh, they still return phone calls; they still attend meetings; they still meet with students. But they do them in a different order.
Now What?
If you’re reading this chapter as a professional youth worker, I think I can guess what’s going through your mind right about now: “I have trouble enough just keeping the ministry running. How in the world am I going to develop all these visioning documents, much less track our progress on a regular basis? I’m sure it’s a great idea, but I just don’t have time.”
Am I close?
As youth workers ourselves, those of us on the Youth Ministry Architects team have recognized that the most important stuff, the long-term strategic stuff, seldom happens naturally. In fact, one of the main reasons our ministry exists is because we recognize that, while most youth workers do fine with the week-to-week programming, almost all of us struggle to keep our eye on the long-term priorities as well. But whether you choose to initiate the crafting of these documents for yourself or you invite someone to oversee the process for you, you’ll want to make a priority of clarifying your ministry’s vision with the clear architectural documents outlined in this chapter.