I’ve been told that the notion of ministry assessment is not naturally attractive to today’s young, postmodern youth worker. Being 55 years old, I need to confess that is not how I’m wired. I’ve always wanted to know—check that: needed to know—that what I’m doing is making a real difference in the kingdom of God.

Having taught youth ministry for more than 20 years, I also have wrestled with the theoretical foundations of paid ministry leadership jobs. Given our limited resources it simply does not make sense for dollars to be invested in hiring people who make little impact. Every job is a statement of value. Because the Body of Christ has been designed for all Christians to engage in some form of ministry (Ephesians 4:11-16) it seems wise to reserve salaries for those who can accomplish much through others.

This financial scrutiny is a way of life for those of us who work in parachurch ministries. That’s my world; I’ve been associated for years with Youth for Christ. Indicators of effectiveness are necessary for our nearly 1,500 full- and part-time staff across the country to make the case in their communities that investing in YFC is good stewardship for those whose hearts are inclined toward the mission of enlisting young people everywhere to become lifelong followers of Jesus.

For years we blended our assessment and accountability in two ways. We’ve told stories of how individual kids’ lives have changed and inferred that this happens commonly as a result of our ministry all over the school/city/region/country. We’ve tossed around as many reliable numbers as we could to supply a picture of the scope of what we are doing with young people. At a national level, we seem to “work with” about 300,000 young people each year. What does that mean, especially when this formula translates to about 200 kids per paid staff person?

To be perfectly candid, we have struggled for some time to understand that numerical indicators could give us the feedback we crave about mission effectiveness. We’ve settled in the last year on a system for collecting data that fits us well, measuring our efforts to be faithful while giving us some sense of how the Lord may be using us to bring about fruitful life change in young people. We call it YFC Impact and hope to make it available to others who want to assess their mix of ministry strategies.

YFC Impact Helps Us Count What We Care About
Our Youth for Christ national ministry strategy is pretty simple, really. We want to deliver what we call our 5 Essentials through as many locally customized ministry sites as possible. We have long recognized that our mission can be accomplished only as we cooperate with the Holy Spirit to bring about real conversion in a teen’s life. The 5 Essentials give us common biblical ground for our practices while allowing for methodological diversity based on geography, assets or target populations to be reached.

For instance, we have Campus Life ministry sites that are built around middle and high schools, so the target population is as wide and diverse as the demographics of the school. We also have Teen Parents ministry sites that might target all of the unwed mothers and mothers-to-be from one zip code in a county. YFC’s City Life or Juvenile Justice Ministries each have different strategies and distinct audiences for ministry, and we can encourage even more creative niche ministries as long as we all practice the same 5 Essentials.

Because what we hold in common is also what we hold most dear it has made sense to design YFC Impact around assessment indicators for each of the 5 Essentials. Here’s how it turned out.

1) Widespread Prayer
We deliberately engage lots of Christians to intercede on behalf of the ministry site.

Sometimes we can’t reconcile what we can reliably measure with what we really want to know. In the case of prayer, we can’t really track how often people pray on behalf of the work we’re doing at a particular ministry site. However, we can get a good handle on what we do to facilitate those prayers and what people have said they will do. Our message of ministry effectiveness could not be simpler: Let’s get more people to pray more specifically, and more often, for what happens at the ministry site. We use one question with three categories of response to assess this essential and nudge our staff toward the best practices:

• How many people receive communication that facilitates their promise to pray for the specific needs of this ministry site—at least three times a week, about one time a week, or about one or two times monthly?

2) Loving Relationships
We consistently pursue lost kids and engage them in lifelong relationships with Jesus.

YFC staff can be obsessed with one idea from our mission statement: “Youth for Christ reaches young people everywhere…” The idea of finding youth regardless of where they are and sharing the love of Christ with them is an important part of our mission. No less than six questions are dedicated to helping us stay focused on the progression that is a part of this essential and reflects the entire arc of our mission statement:

• Potentially how many young people can be engaged through this ministry site?

• How many young people have connected to YFC programs or persons through this ministry site?

• How many young people—Christian or non-Christian when first engaged—have come to the place in their relationships with adult mentors through this ministry site where there have been initial conversations about how God wants to relate to them?

• How many non-Christian young people have decided to begin lifelong relationships with Jesus through this ministry site?

• How many new Christians from this ministry site are now involved in the fellowship of a local church?

• How many Christian young people are leaders, engaged in Christ-sharing relationships with their peers?

3) Faithful Bible Teaching

We accurately handle biblical truth, regularly coaching kids to apply it in their lives.

In the face of today’s pluralistic worldviews, we still believe the Bible has a unique role to play in the Spirit’s regenerating work with teens; and we think of it as God’s words to be practiced rather then a scholarly project for analysis. The bottom line is that we want our YFC staff to be opening The Book with young people as often as possible, especially given our missional call to evangelism. Three questions help us keep this essential as part of the focus of our ministry routines:

• On how many occasions/in which settings (appointments, small groups, large groups) did a leader use the Bible to share part of God’s story?

• On how many occasions/in which settings (appointments, small groups, large groups) was the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection for our salvation shared?

• How many of the new Christians from this ministry site have completed a relationship-based, follow-up program emphasizing appropriate biblical learning?

4) Collaborative Community Strategy
We intentionally work together with local churches, agencies and other partners to provide sustainable youth and family ministry.

It’s not hard for many of us to see the practical value of collaboration, but this essential is linked to the prayer of Jesus for us (John 17:21), an acknowledgement that we reveal the Father by practicing unity. For staff eager to dive into relationships with hurting kids it can feel like a bothersome distraction to work within the community, listening and loving until MY agenda becomes OUR mission—but that’s what we want our YFC folks to embrace. Here’s the question that keeps this essential on our radar screen:

• With how many of the churches, like-minded Christian ministries or youth-serving agencies located in the community of this ministry site does YFC collaborate?

5) Adults Who Empower
We strategically develop leaders to reach young people from every people group.

What we have realized by doing this for a while is that Jesus’ fundamental strategy of deploying those who can multiply their lives simply can’t be beaten. YFC-ers of old loved huge rallies, but we’ve seen our most lasting impact come from those leaders who surfaced while we pulled off those big events. With an increasingly diversified culture (my son works in a high school with 26 languages spoken!) we know that we simply must involve more people with more “range in their game” for the task of reaching kids. A single question does the trick on this essential:

• How many adult mentors are engaged in Christ-sharing relationships with young people at this ministry site as volunteers or part- or full-time YFC employees?

YFC Impact May Be Helpful To You
Our 12 YFC Impact questions first were designed for an Excel spreadsheet and still can be implemented through that application. Any reader who would like the template for these foundational ministry assessment questions can download it for free from the Youth for Christ Web site. Some might feel enough kinship with the biblical values undergirding our 5 Essentials to adopt the tool for your own use. I have come to understand these 5 Essentials are really just YFC customizations of universal biblical principles, writing about their wider appeal in two recently published books: Evangelism Remixed: Empowering Students for Courageous and Contagious Faith (Zondervan/ Youth Specialties, 2009 summer release) and (especially chapter 12) “Restoring Adolescents: Essentials of Worldwide Ministry” in Ronald Habermas’ (ed.) Introduction to Christian Education and Formation, Zondervan, 2008.

Not everyone has the same mission focus as we do at Youth for Christ, so there may be interest in using this model to custom design your own assessment indicators. Feel free to, as a friend of mine likes to say, “Take it, tweak it, make it your own.” Clarifying your own “essentials” is a critical starting point.

This is the first year we’ve provided our YFC Impact reports online, adding features that allow for even more customization by users and generating virtually instant graphs, charts and reports to help our ministry staff use this assessment data in their planning with volunteers. We hope to have the technological capacity in the near future to invite others who want to use our system to do so. Our assumption is that those who have this kind of interest are those who find their ministries aligned with YFC’s mission and the 5 Essentials.

It’s clear to me that a kingdom mission can be advanced by using—and even making available—a ministry assessment tool such as YFC Impact. Very cool.

The YFC Mission: YFC reaches young people everywhere, working together with the local church and other like-minded partners to raise up lifelong followers of Jesus who lead by godly example, devotion to the Word of God and prayer, passion for sharing the love of Christ and commitment to social involvement.