Change is hard, but necessary. It seems that changing things is almost always challenging, especially in church settings where people often cling to traditions that make them resistant to even the smallest changes.
Knowing this as I began my job three years ago, I vowed to go slowly and not to make any significant changes during my first year of ministry at my new church.
My vow lasted less than a month before I realized how much my ministry needed to change for the good of the youth. So I disregarded these commitments and began tweaking my ministry, adding games, talks and small group discussions while secretly hoping no one would notice the changes.
Unfortunately, people did. Six months into my new position, my mid-week youth gathering looked very much like every other ministry I had led, but nothing like what the youth at my church had come to expect.
A clash of gargantuan proportions resulted, forcing me to backpedal and undo most of the tweaks I’d made. This left me discouraged and frustrated, afraid to make any changes to my ministry even though I still believed change was necessary to minister to students more effectively.
The result? Ministry paralysis that lasted for almost a year, until I took Kara Powell’s class, “Assessment Strategies for Youth Ministry,” through Huntington University’s Masters of Youth Ministry Leadership Program. This class taught me how to assess a ministry by engaging shareholders, collecting and analyzing information, then using that information to make changes. Though complicated, the assessment process proved invaluable to my church. I’m confident it could be invaluable for yours, as well.
Getting Started
To conduct an assessment, begin by determining what you’re assessing and why. According to Kara Powell, you might conduct an assessment to determine whether a program is needed, to measure the effectiveness of a program or to try to increase funding or support for your ministry. Once you’ve determined the purpose of your assessment, decide who to speak to and how best to collect the information you need.
In my case, I wanted to explore how my church might better transition junior high students into our high school ministry. To assess this, I talked with people involved in both ministries, including active and inactive students and parents, as well as leaders. I used a written, multiple choice survey with junior high students and held separate focus groups for each target audience, something that allowed me to ask different groups of people different questions. I also met individually with people willing to talk, but unable to attend a focus group.
At the focus groups, I served as the facilitator. I asked questions and transcribed people’s responses, being careful to avoid reacting to responses so as not to bias them. I also asked follow-up and clarifying questions and specifically invited quiet individuals to enter into the conversation.
By listening rather than reacting to people’s responses during these focus groups, people felt heard, valued and respected. This translated into an increased confidence in my church’s youth ministry.
Focus Group Fellowship
Additionally, focus groups created a sense of community among participants by enabling them to invest in our youth ministry by sharing their opinions. For the first time, many focus group participants left seeing themselves as stakeholders in our church’s youth ministry. In and of itself, that was transformational for my church.
The process of holding focus groups also did something else: It connected previously disconnected parents and students to our church’s youth ministry by communicating to them that even though our ministry, for whatever reason, previously had failed to reach them, we still loved and cared for them. This actually reconnected people to our church family. For example, one previously disengaged parent left our meeting so excited about the direction of our ministry that she encouraged her son to participate in this year’s mission trip. He did, and she has since become an incredible behind-the-scenes servant in our ministry.
Focus groups also had a profound effect on parents. Listening to parents gave me a way to show them tangibly they are the most spiritually influential people in their teen’s life. Rather than look to me to tell them about their child’s faith, at these focus groups parents told me about their child’s spirituality. They expressed joy, frustration and sometimes heartache over their child’s journey of faith and their role in it, enabling me to see the hearts of the parents I serve, reminding me these parents love and care for their children far more than I ever will.
Ask Good Questions
Aside from listening, I learned that another key to having a successful focus group is asking good questions. Good questions are open-ended and direct, targeting information about a specific aspect of what you’re trying to assess. I also found that using appreciative inquiry to create questions that allowed focus group participants to focus on ministry strengths was extremely valuable to this process. (To learn more about appreciative inquiry, check out Mark Lau Branson’s book, Memories, Hopes and Conversations.)
Examples of good questions might include:
• What do you hope your child will gain by participating in this ministry?
• What relationships, programs or events have been most powerful and helpful in fostering your child’s relationship with Christ?
• Make three wishes for the future of this ministry. What would this ministry look like if those wishes came true?
Though such questions are designed to draw out positive comments, inevitably weaknesses also will surface. Yet having weaknesses surface as a byproduct of your conversation rather than its focus preventing focus groups from becoming gripe sessions. This, in turn, enables focus groups to be a healthy experience for those involved.
For example, using this method, the energy in the room was palpable during the six focus groups that I held. People left these conversations excited about our youth ministry’s future rather than stuck on our ministry’s past successes or worse, its failures. This, in turn, created a renewed excitement and interest surrounding our youth ministry, spurring people’s support for it to grow.
Analyze and Articulate Your Results
Once you’ve gathered information from your ministry’s stakeholders, analyze it. Look for surprises, recurring themes and inconsistencies; and clearly articulate each. Then, begin sharing your findings with those stakeholders who have been involved in the assessment process, your congregation at large and your colleagues and ministry leaders. As you share your findings, highlight your ministry’s strengths while also unapologetically bringing to light its weaknesses. Though difficult, allowing people to see your ministry’s weaknesses is critically important for creating a climate ripe for change.
This is something I learned the hard way and one of the major reasons why I now believe my prior attempts at instituting change failed. In those instances, in an effort to protect people and perhaps even to save my own face, I sheltered people from the true state of our youth ministry, desperately trying to focus on its strengths rather than on its weaknesses. Unable to see our ministry’s weaknesses, people saw no reason for change and resisted it at every turn.
Communicate and Involve Others
As you begin sharing your ministry assessment findings with others, also remind people that change is coming as a result of your findings. Continually tell people these changes will enable you to meet the needs of the families your ministry serves.
As you continue to communicate with people, simultaneously use your findings to make specific recommendations for your ministry that will allow you to build on its strengths while also addressing its weaknesses. Specific recommendations are another key to bringing change to your ministry as they allow you to address people’s actual needs rather than their assumed needs. Additionally, specific recommendations validate people’s participation in the assessment process, concretely demonstrating their feedback is being taken seriously. This increases people’s confidence in your ministry and in some ways, even their ownership of it. As I learned from Powell, people support what they create, however large or small a role they have in that creation process.
That’s why it’s important to continue involving people—students, colleagues, adult leaders, and parents—as you move onto the next stage of your assessment: The implementation of your recommendations.
The people I worked the closest with at this stage in my assessment process were my colleagues: My church’s senior and associate pastors and our director of family ministry. Together in the months following the assessment, we explored and prioritized my recommendations and dreamt about how best to implement them. In the process, a true collaboration formed that allowed us to use our gifts to serve our church, giving us the courage to reexamine our responsibilities and in some instances reconfigure them. This collaboration also enabled us to learn from one another’s expertise. As my church’s associate pastor told me, “This process has completely changed the youth ministry paradigm I’ve used for 25 years!”
Perhaps most significantly, because of the newfound collaboration and shared ownership of my church’s youth ministry among the staff and the nearly one-quarter of my church’s active members who participated in this assessment process, our youth ministry is no longer personality driven or dependent. For this reason, if I left tomorrow, I can honestly say my church’s vision for youth ministry would continue. In this way, the assessment process has unexpectedly brought stability to my church’s youth ministry.
Finding the Courage to Change for the Better
Finally, this process of collaboration gave my colleagues and me the courage to overhaul our confirmation (junior high) and high school ministries, making significant changes to each in order to connect students and parents better with each other, our community of faith and Christ.
Six months after beginning the assessment, my church unveiled its newly re-imagined confirmation and high school ministries, and it did so with hardly a peep from our congregation’s usual naysayers. Instead, the congregation responded to these changes with gratitude, a renewed confidence in our church’s staff, leaders and ministries to teens, as well as an increased support for these ministries, sensing God at work in them in powerful ways. In so many ways, the assessment process breathed life into two ministries that previously had been struggling to survive, transforming those ministries, as well as all involved in them.
Make no mistake—an assessment is no silver bullet. Implementing change is a hard and lengthy undertaking no matter how you go about it; but by using an assessment process such as this one, you no longer have to fear change. Instead, an assessment can help you build the momentum and consensus needed to affect lasting changes that can truly transform your ministry.
