A Primer on Environmental Architecture
6
Changing Culture
The Work of the Environmental Architect
e · thos—noun—1. the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period. 2. the character or disposition of a community, group, person, etc.
Dictionary.com
Failure and success are not episodes, they are trajectories.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Nothing good happens by accident.
Peter Drucker
Almost every longing related to youth ministry is connected to a single desire: We want to change something.
Sometimes that desire is simple and straightforward: “I want to get my youth committee out from under the children’s committee on the organizational chart.” Others are more far-reaching and global: “I want to move my youth from apathy toward becoming more fully devoted followers of Christ.” And still others are plainly pragmatic: “How can we get more kids involved?” or “How can I recruit more leaders?”
But beneath them all is the same fundamental passion: the drive to create change.
Those who learn to be change agents impact almost everything they touch. And those who never learn this skill stay trapped on a treadmill of frustration, working with greater and greater intensity but traveling nowhere. These treadmill captives are often the quickest to fall victim to the attitudes of youth ministry’s doomsday prophets who declare, “Youth ministry just doesn’t work anymore.”
We’ve discovered that just the opposite is true. Youth ministry does, in fact, “work,” and it does so with almost predictable regularity. In a wide variety of contexts, across a wide variety of denominations, there are youth ministries that have learned to catalyze change, not only in young people’s lives but in their churches as well. More often than not, when we find those youth ministries, we also discover that a particular kind of culture has been established, a culture in which leaders don’t simply push for change, they cultivate it.
In the last chapter, we looked at the core structures that initiate and sustain strategic change—the architecture of transformation. But beyond and beneath the work of the architect (with the blueprints, the steps, the strategies and structures), there are deeper, more fundamental processes that impact change, what we call the work of the alchemist.
Alchemists (and the chemists who later followed in their footsteps) did not simply engage in processes in which 1 + 1 simply equals 2. Rather, by combining chemical compounds, the alchemist combined substances, which, in an almost magical way, formed an entirely different substance altogether. 1 + 1 equals 12.
Any attempt to architect the “hard” structures of a youth ministry (e.g., control documents, visioning documents, recruitment processes, etc.) will produce little lasting change if those efforts are not combined with at least equal attention to the “soft” attitudes—culture and values (the atmosphere)—that lie beneath those structures. Though sociologists refer to this social atmosphere as the ethos or culture of a group, throughout this chapter I’ll be using the term climate, because terms like “ice cold” or “warmed up” or “stormy” give us not just the meaning of the terms but their feel as well.
Climate Control
Most new youth workers step into their roles with the luxury of inexperience, armed with little more than raw enthusiasm to love kids and lead them to Jesus. Certainly not a bad start. But because so few come with any awareness or training in the power of climate in ministry, many are set up for failure from the start. They may know how to find skits and programs and curriculums and websites; they might even know how to do contact work and network with other youth workers. But they all must, if they are to navigate the turbulent waters of ministry, do something much more foundational.
I like to call it environmental architecture (a term borrowed from Erwin McManus). An environmental architect begins with the confession that we have no power to make young people grow. We cannot make our churches or youth ministries or senior pastors into what we want them to be. We cannot make parents, volunteers and students do what we want them to do. What we can do is create an environment in which this kind of growth and change is not only possible, but probable.
Think greenhouse. A greenhouse is a place where living things grow well, a place protected from the unpredictability of the elements, where fragile plants are able to grow strong regardless of the conditions outside. Fragile plants thrive when the climate is controlled. The right temperature, light, food and water supply produce living things that grow strong enough to thrive in a more hostile environment. In the same way, the environmental architect focuses on creating climate in his or her youth ministry, spending very little time worrying about the climate outside, those things that can’t be controlled, like busy kids, complaining parents, demanding senior pastors.
Periodically I get calls from people who ask if they can come to observe our youth ministry. I warn them to prepare to be underwhelmed. By the time they leave, I can see it on their faces. They don’t say it, but I know what they’re thinking: “We could do that! Why is it working here but not for us back home, when our programs are actually better than these?”
As much as I might hate to admit it, they’re usually right. It’s not that we try to have mediocre programs; it’s just that they seem to happen with disappointing regularity. Yet the ministry continues to thrive. We continue to see surprising transformation in young people’s lives. After two decades of doing ministry in the same setting, I’ve begun to discover why.
Transformation doesn’t happen primarily because specific tasks get accomplished or because of consistently excellent programs. Transformation becomes habitual for a youth ministry when a unique “climate of transformation” is established. I’m afraid I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
The High Cost of Ignoring Climate
A few years back, I helped to lead the charge at our traditional church to move us toward an alternative, “less traditional” option for worship. We structured the process almost perfectly. We established a subcommittee of the worship committee, and they did their work well. They presented a strong case to our elders. And the elders, though a bit uneasy about the unsettledness such a move might create in the congregation, affirmed the report of the Alternative Worship Subcommittee and gave the green light to move forward.
So we went to work, diligently planning our first month of alternative services. We established prayer groups, wrote promotional newsletter articles, made plans to ensure that the gymnasium would be full on those Sunday mornings.
But we never thought about the climate.
The seven-week experiment came and went. We assumed that the overwhelming support of hundreds of people in the congregation would be enough to sustain approval. What we ignored was that the “success” of our very structured process had sharply divided the congregation. Within a month or so, that fissure erupted into a bitter battle from which it took us years to recover.
We had a game plan fully in place. The rationale for the change was airtight. We had attended to creating the vision; we were willing to do the work. But a vision statement and a strategic plan were not enough. Because our programmatic changes totally ignored the importance of creating the right culture, the well-intentioned plans withered like tomato plants in the Sahara.
If instead we had paid attention to climate first, if we had been careful to listen to the concerns of those who were “opposed” to the innovation, if we had paused and paced the implementation process, things might have ended very differently. Instead, we naively assumed that the “approval” of our elders gave us license to ignore the climate of distrust surrounding the content issue. We were wrong.
Climate, Vision, Tasks
Ask any youth director what his or her job is and chances are you’ll hear a list of tasks: “I hang out with kids,” “I teach the Bible,” “I go to meetings.” Sadly, most youth workers are almost obsessively focused on tasks. They react to the demands placed before them, daily racing against the clock to try to get more done in less time, to get all the phone calls and emails answered, all the lessons written, the programs prepared. But eventually, almost every youth worker, no matter how organized, realizes that there is simply not enough time to get all the tasks completed.
The completion of a fragmented set of tasks, as much diligence as that process might require, can be the very thing that prevents youth workers from building momentum for their ministries. When this realization comes, it’s not unusual for a youth worker (or a church) to send out the call for a “vision.”
And the scurry of meetings begins. We’ve seen churches spend hundreds of volunteer and staff hours to hammer out a vision for the youth ministry, write mission statements and values statements, prepare measurable goals. The best of these create structures that keep the visioning documents consistently before those responsible for building the ministry. But sadly, vision, in itself, is not enough.
Too often, even the most compelling vision is thwarted because, in spite of all the right structures being in place, little to no attention has been given to the climate. Like working in a building that’s structurally sound but filled with noxious gases, these youth ministries may have a fine, well-structured vision. But the climate is toxic, preventing sustainable change from ever taking hold.
The Usual Youth Ministry Pyramid
Here’s the way we picture the approach of most youth ministries, starting with tasks, moving to vision and seldom (if ever) finding time to create the right kind of climate:
Figure 4.
This process is exactly the opposite of a ministry that becomes sustainable. You’ll notice that the pyramid here is upside down, with all the weight of responsibility placed on the shoulders of a single person. The person at the bottom of the pyramid—typically the youth director—gets less and less done, and the work that does get done seems more like a chore than a calling.
At this point, it’s normal for a youth worker to fall into a victim mindset and begin complaining about the unrealistic expectations and lack of support from the church, the parents, the students. With frustration bubbling over, the youth worker is asked (sometimes demanded) to create a vision for the youth ministry.
But the visioning that occurs at this point typically takes place in a very tense climate, both for the youth worker, who knows the process has been created because people are criticizing his or her work, and for the parents, whose dissatisfaction with the youth ministry has become acute. And so the anxiety-driven vision simply raises the expectations of those who are already frustrated, often compounding the negativity.
Of course, the climate of negativity continues to poison the youth director, who becomes even more obsessively focused on the completion of tasks. But now, he or she is expected to complete all the additional tasks required by the new vision.
Too often the acrimonious and divisive departure of the failing youth director sends the church even further into the negative. The “vision” is put in a file drawer somewhere, awaiting the arrival of a new youth director, who will step into the same toxic climate and likely be overwhelmed by the same tasks that plagued the previous youth worker. And the cycle starts all over again.
Flipping the Pyramid
But what would happen if we flipped the pyramid?
A systems approach to youth ministry places the first focus on climate, not tasks. In the context of a healthy climate, a vision is developed. Only then can a church hope for its youth ministry to manage its tasks and content issues well.
If church leaders express one desire more consistently than any other, it’s their wish for more kids to be involved in the life of the church. These are not numbers-obsessed tyrants. They’re typically godly men and women who simply want to see the church be more faithful not only in nurturing its own children in the faith but also in engaging the kids who stand outside the normal reach of the church.
Figure 5.
Our experience has been consistent: we’ve never seen a youth ministry with a singular focus on boosting numbers actually be successful. More often than not, an urgent demand for numbers has just the opposite effect: increasing the level of toxic anxiousness in the climate surrounding the youth ministry, resulting in less, not more, youth becoming involved.
Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, and sometimes an obsessive focus on getting results as quickly as possible is the slowest path to achieving sustainable results. (Again, we need look no further than the initial attempts to build the Panama Canal.)
Several years ago, we began working with a committed, enthusiastic, gifted youth worker in a wealthy church that had struggled for years with getting its youth ministry off the ground. The youth director undoubtedly had the right combination of gifts—a deep love for Christ, an engaging, fiery personality, and a commitment to do whatever it would take to create a thriving, sustainable ministry. Quite honestly, I assumed transformation would come quickly, easily within a year.
So we set to work building a sustainable foundation for this ministry, deliberately attending to structure and climate. But within the first six months of the building process, we discovered termites: a highly anxious colleague who undermined the youth director’s every attempt to build the youth ministry, multiple agendas whispered by volunteers who had little interest in being connected to the church, and a volunteer in his midtwenties surreptitiously dating one of the girls in the high-school group. All these combined to hamstring any effort to structure an effective youth ministry.
Now, after three long years of tenaciously attending to the systemic climate issues, the youth ministry has righted itself and begun to grow. It is often in the process of “failing forward” that youth workers learn to manage the culture of their ministries, rather than becoming victims of their ministry’s culture.
A Primer on Environmental Architecture
So, if we are to achieve a different starting point for our ministries, if we are to be environmental architects who work to create the right climate for our youth ministries, where do we begin? We’ve discovered the five decisions that most profoundly affect the building of a healthy climate: delivering results, trusting the process, importing joy into the chaos, embracing stories and metaphors, and instilling rituals and traditions.
1. We deliver results. By far the most dramatic way to change the climate of a youth ministry is to provide its stakeholders with visible evidence that something good actually is happening. Nothing accelerates climate change quite like speeding up the results.
To illustrate, I don’t have to look any farther than across town at the Vanderbilt Commodore football program. A few years ago, the team was in the middle of its predictable losing season. No one expected much more than one or two games where Vandy would spoil the hopes of some SEC football powerhouse. Few even held out hope for a winning season. But all that changed the day after a visit to Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, a game in which the Commodores broke their twenty-plus-year losing streak to the University of Tennessee. If you happened to be in Nashville the week after that game, you would have thought our ’Dores had just won the Super Bowl. One key win dramatically shifted the climate.
To begin tilting the climate of a youth ministry in a positive direction, its leaders need to identify a small victory, a single visible result, and go after it. The climate of a youth ministry can change with something as simple as recruiting a new team of volunteers (and commissioning them in front of the church). Another church tipped its youth ministry toward a healthy climate with a single mission trip that attracted just a handful more students than the year before.
Churches are a lot like horses—they don’t like to be startled or surprised. It causes wild behavior. . . . If you’re the lead youth worker, fast changes can appear arrogant or reveal a maverick’s personality to your church.
DOUG FIELDS
A small victory can begin the process of climate change. But sustaining such a change requires a pattern of little victories tied together by the climate-control processes that follow.
2. We trust the process. Moving from where we are to where we want to be takes time—so much time, in fact, that many youth directors short-circuit the process. If we’re going to engineer a climate of transformation for our youth ministries, we will not do it by stepping in with guns blazing.
Sustainable change happens when leaders recognize the power of incremental revolution, the power of one small change after another, until the incremental changes result in exponential change. Architecting a healthy climate for ministry is usually a lot more like growing bamboo than like a construction project.
Try watching bamboo grow sometime. (You won’t be entertained.) After waiting for weeks, then months, then up to three years, you may begin to wonder whether your plant has issues. You might compare your inferior specimen to the other successful bamboo plants you’ve seen. You might be tempted to exhume your mutant plant, to analyze its problems.
But people who know bamboo relax when they see no visible signs of growth in the first few years. They know the process, and they trust it. If the environmental conditions are right, eventually the tipping point comes, and growth happens. In fact, some bamboo plants, when they hit their growth season, can grow up to four feet in twenty-four hours.
Those of us who work with junior-high-schoolers know the feeling, don’t we? For years we wonder if we’ll ever see signs of change, if anything is sinking in. Then suddenly the process takes hold, and those young people begin to explode with questions, with honesty, often with compassion and faithfulness that must have been buried beneath the surface for years.
Too many churches and youth ministers distrust the process and find themselves changing focus every few years, gambling their hopes on the next superstar on the court. As a result, they never experience the profound momentum that builds when a team moves together in the same direction for years.
3. We import joy into the chaos. Once every few months, I meet with Andy, my spiritual director. For the past six years, he has prodded me, listened to me and pointed me to a life truly lived “in Christ.” In the first year of our visits together, Andy noticed that I’d almost always come to his office rushed, apologetic for being late, embarrassed that I had so little control over my life. More than once, he looked at me and said something like this: “Creative chaos . . . it’s the way you were made. It’s where you thrive. Stop fighting it.” Furrowing the eyebrows, tightening the muscles and working harder is seldom the answer. In fact, seriousness, anxiousness and drivenness can work against us, sabotaging our efforts at making progress.
In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman tells of a study that revealed the power of a joyful climate in maximizing people’s ability to solve problems. In this study, two groups were given the very same problem and asked to solve it. The only difference between the groups was that the first watched a video of funny television bloopers before trying to solve the puzzle. The second went straight to work. The laughing groups were consistently better at solving the puzzles (another word for “problems”) than the folks who went straight to work.
Family-systems experts suggest that the only way to impact a stuck system is to maintain a non-anxious presence in it, to do more than just react. Many youth workers find themselves in a highly reactive posture, blaming their senior pastors or critical parents for “making them mad.” But youth workers who successfully initiate change in their churches have learned to maintain a playful detachment from those triggers that cause people to spiral into negativity and reactive blaming.
4. We instill stories and metaphors. The Hopi proverb is right: “The one who tells the stories rules the world.” If we want to create a climate of transformation, we’ll do so by creating an “intentional mythology” for our ministries.
The primary skill for leaders is the ability to clarify and reconceptualize stories, essentially to be one of the best storytellers around the campfire.
DIANA BUTLER BASS
Consider the positive mythology created around a building project. There’s the thrill of visiting the site, seeing the progress from week to week, walking people through the skeleton frame, imagining what each room will be used for. Though there’s a mess everywhere, though the space is totally unusable, excitement still grows because the mess is seen as a part of the process.
Youth ministries in a building or remodeling phase are often more of a mess than a construction site. But without someone to tell the story of what’s coming, without someone to re-mythologize the mess, complaints and criticism can become overwhelming.
Every youth ministry is either buoyed up or dragged down by its mythology, by the stories and metaphors used to describe it. For most youth ministries, this mythology is almost entirely accidental. But those of us who lead have the power (and responsibility) to craft the stories that will define the climate of our ministries.
Almost every struggling youth ministry we’ve worked with has been surrounded by a mythology of negativity, a mythology that almost guarantees that the ministry will remain stuck. Consider the impact these kinds of stories and metaphors (all of which we’ve overheard) might have on a youth ministry:
As we listened to comments like these from youth and adults in churches around the country, we couldn’t help but wonder if the struggles of these youth ministries were not compounded and reinforced by a mythology of hopelessness.
In The Friendship Factor, Alan McGinnis describes an experiment in a second-grade classroom. Psychologists observed a teacher who told the children in her class to sit down an average of seven times every twenty minutes (obviously with limited success). When the teacher increased her demands that students sit down to 27.5 times in twenty minutes, misbehavior increased significantly.
At the prompting of the psychologists, the teacher tried something different. Instead of telling the “problem” children to sit down, she affirmed and encouraged the students who were sitting down. The result? Behavior improved dramatically.
Children—and churches—tend to live into the words that are spoken about them. Focusing on the negative gets more negative, while focusing on the positive results in a much more positive climate.
Leaders of thriving youth ministries are harbingers of what God is doing and is about to do. They’re the bards of their youth ministries, telling students and leaders the tales of who they are and what God is up to. They’re the environmental experts, cultivating the ethos by seeding it with stories and metaphors that affirm that, although the picture is not yet completed, signs of progress are popping up all around.
5. We embrace rituals and traditions, signs and symbols. Allentown Presbyterian Church is a strange place. With about five hundred people in worship on an average Sunday, this small-town church in New Jersey often has more than two hundred youth each week attending its youth groups. Led mostly by parents who never got the memo that kids didn’t want them around, this extraordinary ministry has the kind of climate most youth ministries long for.
The first time I visited, I was struck by the power of its rituals and traditions, little things like lighted candles on the tables (even in the presence of junior-high boys) and the way the tables and chairs were magically taken down by kids after dinner. But one tradition gave me (and anyone who walked through the door) a powerful picture of who this group is: every person who entered the room was greeted in the same way—with cheers and applause. Is it any wonder the biggest problem facing this ministry is what to do with all the kids who keep coming?
Each year on the first weekend of May, our youth ministry sponsors an event we affectionately call Crud Day. To the outside observer, it’s nothing more than a typical messy youth group event. But for us, it’s one of our most important rites of passage. You see, Crud Day takes place on the afternoon of Confirmation Sunday, when the sixth-graders who’ve just completed the confirmation process make their profession of faith before the entire church. As these youth move from childhood into the youth group, we mark their transition by putting them on teams with youth from all the other grades. The mud, shaving cream and water balloons give a clear message: “You are one of us. You belong.”
When I was a teenager, seemingly insignificant traditions and rituals held our small youth group together. Whether it was the fact that we all spoke with equally unrecognizable accents when we were together or the nickname we used for the senior pastor, our identity was confirmed. Those very traditions and rituals had the power to create and sustain a climate that fed personal transformation for many of us, despite the fact that the content of our programs left something to be desired.
Closely related to rituals and traditions are signs and symbols. Signs and symbols have a way of locking in a group’s rituals and traditions. Some groups create a logo; others invite youth to paint their names, their handprints or their favorite Scriptures on the wall of the youth room; still other churches collect pictures for years and present a photo album of memories to students when they graduate.
When we dropped our youngest daughter off at college this year, I couldn’t help but notice the signs and symbols she placed around her room—posters of music groups, pictures of friends and the silver communion cup she was given at our church’s senior banquet as a reminder not only of her identity in Christ but also of her connection to her church family.
Whether the symbol is something as simple as a pneumonic rock (a single “reminder” stone given to students at the end of a class or youth group) or a baby pin presented at the end of a class, signs and symbols help establish a climate in which community identity can be cultivated.
Changing the climate of our churches is hard, but often not as hard as changing ourselves. In the coming chapters, you’ll find a few practices that we’ve found to be the greatest accelerators for change in the youth ministries and youth workers we’ve had the privilege of working with, practices that we hope can provide baby steps for transforming the climate and structure of your ministry.