A New Kind of Superstar
7
Searching Right
A Primer for Youth Ministry Search Teams
We encouraged volunteers to think of themselves not as people who run errands to keep a program going but as spiritual directors in the lives of students.
Chris Folmsbee
You may think that the successful implementation of a management strategy is dependent on finding amazingly competent managers— people with finely honed “people skills,” with degrees from management schools, with highly sophisticated techniques for dealing with and developing their people.
It isn’t.
You don’t need such people.
Nor can you afford them.
In fact, they will be the bane of your existence.
What you need, instead, is a management strategy.
Michael Gerber
The Church of the Good Shepherd had seen five disappointing youth directors appear and disappear in three short years. When this church contacted us, they seemed to be suffering from a chronic case of search committee amnesia, having convinced themselves that, in spite of their consistent 0-5 record, they were simply suffering from a string of bad luck.
One day someone else will be doing what you are doing. Whether you have an exit strategy or not, ultimately, you will exit.
ANDY STANLEY
Amazingly, when we arrived, the church leaders were energized, not because their youth ministry was moving forward but because they had “successfully” removed their previous youth director. I could just imagine their search team meetings—huddling together around a conference table, thinking positive thoughts and repeating the mantra, “This time we’ll find the right one.”
We explained that blind optimism could not be a long-term solution, that they would never find the “right” staff person until they had become the right kind of church (or at least the right kind of youth ministry). When the right kind of system is in place, we suggested, a moderately gifted staff person would thrive.
So we began asking the hard questions: What might there be about the way the Church of the Good Shepherd has been doing youth ministry that would cause its youth staff to spiral into failure with such consistent regularity? And might there be something about the climate of the congregation that had become so toxic that it turned capable youth workers into “the wrong kind of people” for the job?
After the information gathering was complete, our first recommendation was the last thing this group wanted to hear. We suggested that the church postpone its search for replacement staff for a few months until they had built their foundational infrastructure—in other words, that they not hire the dancer until the dance floor had been repaired.
As we entered into the dance-floor restoration process, helping the church hire interim staff, the predictable soon began to happen: anxious church members had all kinds of Easy Buttons to recommend—purposes, programs, promotion plans. In short, almost everyone wanted a new dance to begin—and begin immediately. But the leaders in the youth ministry—the 0-5 team—knew that following this tried and true method would likely result in the same mangled mess the previous youth workers had experienced.
The view that youth ministry is a place where pastoral leaders “do time” until they qualify for “real” ministry is alive and well, thanks to the self-defeating practice of throwing clergy, seminarians, and unsuspecting volunteers with little experience and less support into positions where adolescents, searching for fidelity, demand more than we have to give.
KENDA DEAN
Would the Real Interim Please Stand Up?
In my twenty-plus years as the youth pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, I’ve seen more than my fair share of transitions. Of my eight bosses (count ’em, eight), five of them have had the title “interim.” By the time the third or fourth interim rolled around, I came to a profound realization: everyone is an interim.
We all have to make our exit someday. It’s true for every human being, with most of us getting to serve on the earth less than a single century. It’s true in business, where few great CEOs last longer than an “interim” of twenty years. It’s particularly true in ministry, acutely so in youth ministry.
The average youth minister serves a single church for 3.9 years. And even those of us who blow the curve with a longer tenure are, just the same, interims.
Think about the role of interims: they proactively prepare the way for a future that does not include them. Interims are midwives, not mothers. Interims help a congregation recognize, celebrate and stand guard over its core, momentum-building traditions.
Good youth ministers know that to build their ministries around themselves and their relationships with students is to fail in their calling. Though a church’s ministry may thrive in the short-run under an interim-centered approach, the long-term result will be less than positive. Like a hub being pulled out of the center of a wheel, each time a staff person pulls out, momentum stalls. Whether the church is left grieving or grateful, each successive leader leaves the church no further along in the journey, with the unspoken expectation that the next “interim” will have to start back at square one.
What would happen if we didn’t change our youth ministry model or vision or structure each time there was a staff change? What if we designed our ministries with the very real probability that our youth staff may be around less than four years? What would happen if every youth director (every minister, for that matter) placed the word interim in front of his or her title?
Those of us in ministry might free ourselves just a bit from the tantalizing illusion of our own indispensability. Maybe that interim title would help churches and search committees come to grips with the fact that they are never searching for the youth director but for someone who can, for a season, steward a vision much larger than themselves.
Search Committees and the Illusion of “Permanent” Staff
I never cease to be amazed that churches are surprised when they have to search again for a new youth staff person. They say things like, “We just weren’t expecting this.” From my vantage point, it’s like saying, “Christmas just snuck up on me this year,” or “This bill for my car insurance came out of nowhere.”
Okay, maybe it’s not as predictable as the annual holiday season, but every church large enough to hire youth staff needs to have a plan in place, not just for hiring the next person, but also for hiring those who will follow. But almost none do. When is the last time you heard of a youth ministry with a succession plan, a plan for how the church will transition seamlessly from one youth staff person to another?
It’s time for us to stop obsessing over the “problem” of short-term youth directors and simply build on the landscape we’ve been given: by and large, most churches will be utilizing short-term youth workers whether they choose to or not. Most churches simply can’t afford the alternative.
When an anxious, crisis-oriented church searches for a professional youth worker to solve all its problems, that church faces only two possibilities:
If the church has hired someone in the second category (which is almost always the case), the church will face only three not-so-pleasant options:
But what if the church’s gamble pays off? What if they’re fortunate enough to hire “just the right person”?
The results can actually be worse.
The new youth director likely will create a spike in enthusiasm for the program as their new vision for youth ministry is implemented. At this point, the church will face just two possibilities:
A church that heads down this staff-centered track may naturally experience a transition not unlike the Alabama football team after the departure of Bear Bryant in 1982. Since that time, the past-powerhouse bounced from one floundering season to the next, from one hoped-for superstar coach to the next and the next and the next.
We’ve seen a discouragingly similar pattern in churches with once-thriving youth ministries: churches whose youth programs flounder through three or four post-glory-days youth directors, until finally someone picks their head up and recognizes that their superstar left them with little more than a house of cards, just waiting to fall when he or she pulled out. Each successive “permanent” youth director builds on little more than the ashes of the golden years, with a ministry no further along than before the original superstar first arrived.
The Better Way
We get more calls and emails from churches searching for youth staff than for any other reason. The callers are laser focused on a single question: Can you help us with our search?
But after much soul searching (and a few mistakes along the way), we made the firm decision that we would never just help a church search for its next youth director. We determined to help churches with their searches, but only when it’s a part of helping those churches get their systems (their architecture and atmosphere) right.
Though this policy has frustrated many would-be clients, the words of Doug Fields kept ringing in our ears: “I’ve heard too many horror stories of men and women who’ve been emotionally abused, fired, hurt, or who have left youth ministry because their blind enthusiasm matched a church’s desperation for a youth worker and everyone said yes before knowing enough about one another.”
To provide search services for a church that has not first built an infrastructure that will allow its staff to thrive would simply perpetuate the illusion that all a youth ministry really needs is “the right person.”
When we recommend a systems approach to staffing a youth ministry, some assume that we’re suggesting that making the right hire doesn’t matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ironically, we agree with Tom Paterson’s simple mantra, “Get the right person in the right job and the problems will melt away.” But the system must be in place first.
Three Essential Staff Roles
On any successful building site, there are three essential jobs, and the more complex the building, the more important it is to separate these roles. In the youth ministries we’ve observed, the same three positions are essential. Though there are rare instances when all three are present in one person, we’ve not seen it often.
1. The craftsperson. This is someone who can do the hands-on building. Though laborers and craftspeople come with various skill sets, their primary focus is not on designing but on following a designer’s plans. This is not someone who will be thinking about the big picture but who will do excellent work completing assigned projects—electrical, woodworking, plumbing and so on.
The craftsperson has very clear direction about what he or she is to do. But in the absence of a general contractor, the craftsperson can easily lose focus and be diverted into redesigning the whole building.
In youth ministry, the craftsperson is typically an inexperienced, enthusiastic young adult who has the ability to build relationships with students, develop creative programming and sleep (or not) comfortably on gym floors. It’s not unusual for a church to hire a craftsperson and expect him or her to oversee the larger issues of the ministry as well. Such a decision may be the most common structural reason that youth ministries never get off the ground.
2. The general contractor. This is someone who can supervise the work and make sure that all the right steps are being completed according to the design. The general contractor is usually the first one to work and the last one to leave, making sure the materials are on site when needed and that laborers with the right skills are present. The general contractor hires or recruits workers and coordinates everyone’s work so that the various laborers don’t work against each other, such as finishing the drywall before the wiring is in.
Like the craftsperson, the general contractor doesn’t create the plans for the building. He or she simply “works the plan” designed by architects and engineers, who are trained to design buildings that don’t fall down. It’s normal, therefore, for the general contractor to spend a good bit of time in conversation with the “architect in the trailer” (below) for troubleshooting and coordination.
Without a general contractor, work flounders as the competing agendas of various laborers clash. The general contractor may or may not be skilled in carpentry, plumbing or electricity, but he or she is skilled in making sure the appropriate workers are in the right position at the right time.
Perhaps an additional image will add clarity: We don’t hire a captain of a battleship and ask him to reenvision what the battleship does. We hire a captain to get the battleship to do what it was made to do.
In youth ministry, we’ve found that the typical general contractor is often a parent or at least someone a bit older than the laborers. The general contractor youth worker is typically high on organizational skills and does a good deal of work behind the scenes to make sure that events and programs run efficiently.
One warning: Because the general contractor for a youth ministry plays a key role in setting its climate, it’s imperative that he or she be more than just organized. Many churches end up hiring highly anxious, highly defensive people into the general contractor role, just because the potential candidate is “highly organized.” Such types often try to do all the work themselves, which usually multiplies the negativity. The most effective general contractors bring with them a calm playfulness and joy that has a way of profoundly infecting the climate of a youth ministry.
It isn’t unusual for a church to hire a general contractor type and then expect him or her to demonstrate skill as a laborer, to be the creative, entertaining kid-magnet like the youth director at the church down the street. We’ve seen churches bounce between hiring a general contractor (who doesn’t work out because the kids want someone younger) and the fun laborer (who doesn’t work out because essential details keep getting dropped) with dizzying consistency.
3. The architect in the trailer. This is someone trained and experienced in designing the plans for a building, someone available throughout the building process to troubleshoot strategic challenges that inevitably arise.
On every large construction site sits a trailer with a large table on which blueprints can be spread and reviewed, a place for meeting with the architect who makes periodic visits to the site. The architect may or may not be skilled as a builder. Instead he or she makes sure the plan is followed, so the building will last beyond the departure of the beloved contractors and laborers.
The architect is the person who holds up construction until the plans are complete, the person who makes sure the workers don’t waste time, money and energy building something that will later fall apart or, worse yet, have to be torn down to build it right the next time. This is the person who lays out the scope and sequence of the work (a sequence managed by the general contractor and carried out by the craftspeople) and who has experience handling the predictable surprises that are a part of every building project.
The architect brings a broad range of contacts, enough to ensure that the right person is hired at the right time. He or she brings a specific kind of competency, described by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their classic book, Built to Last, using the metaphor of a “time teller” and a “clock maker.” A time teller has the skills to use available resources and technology available. A clock maker, on the other hand, knows how to build the timepiece from scratch. When a youth ministry hires a time teller and expects that person to be a clock maker, frustration is the predictable result.
In the typical youth ministry, churches simply assume that the craftsperson or the general contractor will take on all design responsibilities. As a result, most youth ministries are Scotch-taped and paper-clipped together.
A strategic church looks for an architect for its youth ministry first. The architect helps the stakeholders come to a consensus on their vision for the youth ministry and then draws up the plans for building it. Throughout the building process (typically a year to eighteen months), the architect ensures that all the right players are in place and keeps a finger on the pulse of the progress being made.
But the youth ministry architect need not be in a full-time, permanent position. I play this role at my church part-time. And our Youth Ministry Architect team plays this role for all the churches we work with.
Actually, having a full-time architect on a youth staff is no more necessary than having a permanent, full-time architect on the staff of a building project. The architect’s role will be heavy on the front end of the process and then transition to a more strategic, troubleshooting, maintenance role after the ministry is up and running.
Though there are a few veteran youth workers who can play all three roles at the same time, a church’s best chance at building a sustainable youth ministry will be to have three different people, each playing his or her position well. Though in some churches, volunteers will need to carry one or more of these roles, our experience is that defining the positions in this way dramatically maximizes a church’s ability to build a sustainable youth ministry. There are obvious advantages:
Inoculation Against Stupidity: Survival Tips for Search Teams
The church had spent almost a year searching for its next youth director. Though the search committee interviewed some candidates multiple times, they weren’t excited about any of them. After that, potential candidates trickled in slowly.
As the church moved closer to the one-year anniversary of their youth director’s departure, they became increasingly anxious. Though the ministry was continuing to move forward with steady, if slow, momentum, the search committee was getting tired. They simply couldn’t imagine starting over again. They had to hire someone. As one member of the church admitted later, “We wound up hiring the best of all the people we didn’t want.”
You’re better off hiring temporary help or holding back expansion plans than you are rushing this process. . . . It’s more expensive to keep hiring, training, and losing recent seminary graduates than it is to just offer a larger salary to someone with a proven track record.
MIKE WOODRUFF
It wasn’t long after the new youth director stepped onto the scene that folks began to wonder if they’d made a mistake. As kids began voting with their feet, parental complaints multiplied like rabbits. Within two years, the new youth worker—clearly gifted, but a mismatch for this church—left devastated and defeated.
By some estimates, a bad church hire can cost a church as much as forty thousand dollars. But the cost of a bad hire is so much more than financial, puncturing the sense of call of the mismatched staff person, deflating the momentum of a youth ministry, erasing the trust of students.
For all kinds of reasons, it makes sense to get it right the first time.
We’ve often observed that those responsible for a search frequently step into the process with two strikes against them:
As a result, most search teams make almost all the same mistakes.
So You Want to Hire a Youth Minister? Don’t Follow Me.
I’ve tried to imagine what sadder-but-wiser search teams might say if they could give us their best advice. I imagine that their handbook might contain the following kinds of information:
The bolder our plans, the more competent the people we attract.
MIKE WOODRUFF
The people you hire will do what they like to do, so hire people who like to do the things the job requires. Not long ago, youth ministry guru Dean Trulear described to me the difference between skills and talents. Talents, he explained, are like writing with our dominant hand. Skills, on the other hand, are like writing with our nondominant hand. The research he shared shows that if a person’s job requires that more than 40 percent of his or her time be spent on skills (work that doesn’t access talents), that person will never thrive in the job.
Far too many youth directors avoid the tasks that are central to success in their jobs. For instance, an amazing number of youth directors have a hard time spending time actually with kids—not all kids, mind you, just the kids they aren’t comfortable with. Other youth workers feel intimidated talking to adults, the very people they need as partners if they are to build a sustainable ministry. And the vast majority of youth workers we know simply can’t find the time to look beyond this week’s lesson.
Hiring the right person has little to do with his or her youth ministry theory. Whether a candidate believes in an “emergent” or “family-based” or “purpose-driven” philosophy has little to do with his or her ability to do the job effectively. The best test of what a future youth worker will do is what he or she has done, or at least what he or she loves to do.
If you don’t know where your youth ministry is going, the new staff person will take it somewhere else. Search committees that wait for their new youth ministers to tell them where the ministry should go are setting themselves (and the future staff) up for failure.
I was finishing seminary when I was interviewed for my current position. As the pastor and I headed for the airport, he said the words that totally closed the deal for me: “If you come here, you will have carte blanche. You can bring your vision and build this program the way you would want it to look.”
To an eager twenty-seven-year-old who didn’t know how much he didn’t know, that heady invitation was too much to resist. More than anything, I wanted to be in charge (though I would have been loathe to admit it at the time), to create the ministry I wanted, to try out all the ideas I’d been studying and generating for the past few years.
But if I’d stayed in my position for the 3.9-year average (there was a quiet little mob who would have been happy to see me go by the 3.9-year point), I’m certain I would have handed the ministry to my successor in a bigger mess than I received it.
Here’s what I’ve learned: The church didn’t need me to tell them what my vision for youth ministry should be. The church needed someone who could help the congregation discover its own vision.
Organizational expert Michael Gerber suggests that hiring organizations not even announce their job openings until they’ve written an operations manual of “the way we do it around here.” He goes on to give a surprising description of the person most organizations should be looking for:
Be honest about numbers. When Doug Fields asked parents in his church what they were looking for in a youth director, he received forty very different expectations. He notes only two in common:
Make no mistake about it. Almost every youth worker will be expected to cause the ministry to grow. And almost every youth worker will face the expectation that he or she will create a ministry that students want to come to.
To tell a youth ministry candidate, “Our church is not concerned about numbers,” though perhaps well-meaning, is dishonest and unfair to the person being interviewed. An effective committee communicates growth expectations clearly. If they can’t agree on what those are, they’re not ready to begin the search (do not pass go; do not collect two hundred dollars; do not make the first query call).
If you want someone to stay, find some way to pay. A decade or so ago, the average full-time youth worker’s salary was $26,625 (including those with decades of experience). But figure 6 gives us more recent averages.
Figure 6. Median Salary by Years of Experience—Job: Youth Pastor (United States) (Data provided by PayScale, Inc. © www.payscale.com)
A church (intentionally or unintentionally) communicates how long it wants its staff to stay by how much it’s willing to pay. Of course, ministry is not just about dollars and cents, but what we pay our staff does say something about how we value them. Too many churches pay new youth workers at a level that, as soon as they become experienced enough to be effective and old enough to start a family, the only way they can earn enough is by moving to another church—or out of youth ministry altogether.
We offer churches the following general rules in identifying normal youth ministry salary patterns (not including the cost of benefits):
Of course, the real dollar amount may vary widely in different parts of the country, but these figures can give search teams a reasonable starting point. In addition to salary, a church will want to consider the less tangible value of benefits such as car or travel allowance, continuing education, pension or retirement contributions, professional supplies or book allowance, and health insurance.
If you want your youth worker to succeed, define what “success” will look like. Most youth workers think they’ve been hired to build relationships with students and develop creative programs. Few realize they’ve been hired to run a complex organization.
No one told them that they were not only in charge of developing the program but of marketing it as well. No one told them they were not only responsible for building relationships with students but also for building a team that makes sure someone is building a relationship with every student.
Seldom do unspoken expectations rear their heads in the context of a calm, clarifying discussion. Most often they come in the form of multiplying complaints that leave the youth worker feeling as if he or she was lied to somewhere in the interview process.
Search teams do candidates a favor when they’re clear about the standards they use to measure progress. The standard doesn’t need to be limited to the number of youth attending programs. It can include less bottom-line-driven metrics like
The best way to protect a new staff person from the chaos resulting from “terminal vagueness” is to make expectations as clear as crystal.
A New Kind of Superstar
Though transition is part and parcel of managing a sustainable youth ministry, seldom is any thought given to what sort of long-term infrastructure will be put in place to prevent the new staff person’s eventual departure from creating widespread panic. As in basketball, the game of youth ministry is won or lost in the transitions.
As strange as it may sound, over and over again we have seen youth ministries we work with actually gain momentum during an interim period because the appropriate systems are in place.
When we hire the least experienced to do some of the most complex and challenging work in the church, a high casualty rate is predictable. When a church chronically underinvests in youth ministry and expects Superman results from a Clark Kent youth director, it should not surprise us when that youth worker leaves the job less passionate about the call to ministry than when he or she first arrived.
But what would happen if more churches felt called to cultivate—not just find—superstars? What would happen if churches spent time creating an intentional process that would maximize the possibility that their current, young, inexperienced staff would, one day, become the kind of superstar (not just in youth ministry, but in their homes and their personal lives as well) every church seems to be looking for?
In addition, many of the most effective leaders in today’s churches had significant experience in effective youth ministry before moving into senior leadership. Sustainable youth ministry is a fertile training ground for well-equipped, effective leaders for the larger church.
What would happen if churches saw the cultivation of this kind of superstar as central to their calling?