After 30 years of working in youth ministry in almost every capacity imaginable, I felt God opening a different ministry door for me. My wife and I sold most of our possessions, packed up our home, and headed to the mission field (something we had done once before). This time, though, our call was to work primarily with adults. Shortly after we arrived in the Dominican Republic, our oldest son landed a job as the youth director for a third campus that our home church was launching in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Thrilled that he was going into the family biz, I was overcome with a deep desire to impart to him the church bus-loads of insight I had gained during the past three decades. My motivation was to help him to enjoy some of the fruits of ministry I have enjoyed, while avoiding some of the same mistakes I made. What follows is advice that I wanted to pass on to my 23-year-old youth worker son (and every other youth worker):
Work Hard (and Smart)
Youth ministry, like most professions, is hard work. You need to learn to juggle many tasks. So many youth workers, especially those starting out, have a difficult time managing their weekly schedules. Often what compounds this problem is they have very little experience working in the real world, where they have a boss daily looking over their shoulders, expecting results.
If you are to succeed in youth ministry, you must learn to work hard and smart. You may be tempted to use your time unwisely. After all, you have a lot of flexibility with this job. You can take two-hour lunches. You can run personal errands almost any time of the day. These are great luxuries of this job. You still have a job to do, though; in order to honor your church, and most importantly the Lord, you still need to put in the hours required.
My advice to you would be to figure out what you need to get done every week and begin to experiment with (and document) how long these things take to accomplish. In any given week, you have many different things that demand you to focus. Here are some of the things you need to figure out how to fit into your week:
1. Study for teaching
2. Time with students (individual meetings and attending their events)
3. Prep for meetings other than study
4. Time with leaders
5. Administration
6. Future event/camp planning
7. Educational reading
8. Prayer
9. Set up meetings
Once you have figured out what you need to get done each week and approximately how long it takes, work hard at doing each thing well. You need to learn to discipline yourself to stay focused on the task at hand and not allow yourself to get distracted by the tyranny of the urgent or with things that are not a priority at that moment.
Churches can be breeding grounds for sloppy work habits. Fellow staff will come into your office and shoot the breeze for large chunks of time. You and a staff member will bump into each other and end up chewing the fat. None of these things is wrong or bad in and of themselves; but when it happens fairly regularly, integrity is breached. When you have lots of non-work-related activity in your day and you don’t make up for it later, you will add stress to your life because you will find yourself behind in your work—not to mention your church is paying you to work a set amount of hours. Honor that.
You need to learn to excuse yourself from non-work-related conversations or activities if you find them eating up chunks of your days. One again, these activities are not wrong in and of themselves. It’s when they begin to interfere with you getting your work done in a timely manner that they are wrong. You don’t want to get in the habit of having to take work home with you or working on your days off because you aren’t efficient with your time at work. I will address this more in depth later.
Youth ministry is filled with never-ending tasks and people needs. The best way to do what God has called you to do is know what needs to get done, figure out the best way to do it (which could mean delegating the task to someone else) and work hard at it. I would suggest you start your day doing the things you enjoy least in order to get them out of the way so you always have things to look forward to in your day. “Success depends not merely on how well you do the things you enjoy, but how conscientiously you perform those duties you don’t” (Developing the Leader Within You, John C. Maxwell, p.165).
Working hard means you are being faithful to your church, your direct boss, your students and volunteer leaders, parents and ultimately God. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (
Network
I remember being a new in youth ministry and craving to know how best to do all of the things necessary to have a successful youth ministry. I read every book I could get my hands on, though I found the best thing I ever did was connect with and build relationships with more seasoned youth workers. Picking their brains and observing their programs gave me tremendous insight.
As a matter of fact, I found networking with other youth workers to be such a tremendous blessing to me and to them that I did it right up until I left youth ministry. I found that networking was so encouraging to me that I once headed a network of youth workers in my area for a few years mainly so we could come together to support and pray for each other, along with sharing ministry insights. We collaborated on a few events, but that was not our purpose for meeting. We needed each other.
As the adage goes, “You need to stand tall on the shoulders of those who have gone before you.” Some things about doing ministry you just need to figure out for yourself, but don’t waste time trying to figure out things that people already have figured out and will work great for you.
Attend to the Things that Are Most Important
In my 30 years of ministry, especially in my earlier years, I admit I very often didn’t keep the Main Thing the Main Thing. For me, the main thing is actually two things: my relationship with God and my family. As a single guy, you will be tempted to work way more than you should (I sure did, even after starting a family). As I said, being faithful in ministry means working hard and smart, but that’s in part so you can stop working. Those who are undisciplined in their work habits often will find it difficult to stop working at the end of the day and never really “clock out.” Things don’t get done during the workday, so work is taken home physically, mentally or both. This is detrimental to your spiritual, personal and family life.
If you never are able to put work away—in front of you and in your mind—the constant distraction will cause you to pay the price in the form of a dry personal and spiritual life. Work will begin to invade your prayer life (as a distraction, not as matters of prayer). Work will invade you personal life by constantly invading spaces that should be reserved for friends and family.
Some suggestions:
1. Put everything on your schedule/calendar, including your quiet time and times with friends and family.
2. Keep a daily to-do list and stick to it as much as possible.
3. Keep a clean office and desk. A cluttered office and desk only add to the chaos and make it more difficult to focus.
4. Decide which nights you will keep sacred for friends and family (as much as possible).
Be a Team Player
I believe one of the big reasons youth workers come and go so quickly in churches is they are not team players. Too many—for reasons of insecurity, pride or both—come into a ministry convinced of how they want to do ministry, and after a year or two wonder why they keep butting heads with students, parents, church leadership or all of the aforementioned. Chances are, if you end up having conflict on a somewhat regular basis with any one of these parties, the problem is you.
To me, being a team player in youth ministry means being committed to the vision of your church’s overall youth ministry and ultimately the vision of the church. As a good team player, you need to know your role and how that role fits into the overall vision of your ministry and church.
This means you need to be a student of your church. You need to be a learner. I will talk more about this later. For now, one of the best things you can do, especially for the first year or so, is learn all you can about your church. Where has it come from? What are some of the significant events that have shaped the church culture and youth ministry? What is your church’s vision for the future, and how does it plan to see it fulfilled? How does is expect the youth ministry to fit into that vision? Make sure you go to different leaders and members of your church for this information.
Every church has its unique culture, and getting to know that culture takes time—lots of time. It’s crazy to think you can execute your plans for your ministry and hope they will succeed if you don’t understand the culture in which they will be executed. What works wonderfully at one church may totally flop at another, often because of the different church cultures. If you don’t take the time to get to know your church’s culture, you most likely will end up not being a team player and find yourself constantly bumping into problems.
You also need to work at being a team player with other churches and youth ministry organizations. Never assume your ministry, however established it is or becomes, has all the answers. Your ministry will have a specific role in your community. Because you are going to want to have a ministry that has an impact on your community, you need to know who the other players are in your community. Who else is ministering in your community, and what do their roles seem to be?
This is not a very popular thing to do in most youth ministry circles. By default, most churches, especially youth ministries, become very ingrown and focused only on what their calling is in a particular community. This makes sense because running a ministry takes a lot of work, but this still gives you no excuse to not engage with other youth ministry colleagues in order to better reach your community.
Always Be Teachable and a Continual Learner
To be teachable not only means you can be taught how to do ministry, but it also—and more importantly—means you are able to learn from your mistakes and from others’ advice. To not be teachable is to be arrogant and ultimately a sub-par youth worker.
How can you know if you are a teachable person? A teachable person welcomes input into his or her life and ministry (and then implements it), especially input that is tough to hear but necessary. A teachable person longs for input that will in any way make him or her a better person and help foster a healthy ministry. If you find you are hypersensitive to input that goes against your ideas or that you are less than positive about getting others’ input, you are not a teachable person.
As I said, making assumptions that you know how to do ministry can be your Achilles heel. The reality is the moment you stop learning, you die. Having the mindset of a continual learner will help you to stay fresh and keep the people you work with fresh and excited about ministry and their faith. Knowing your church and community culture is vital. There are other things, though, about which you need always to be learning.
First and foremost, it is important to be a continual learner in your faith. You are young. Don’t assume that what you believe in now is all that God has for you. You may find that as you pursue learning, some of the theological beliefs you held near and dear as you grew up or learned in Bible college aren’t necessarily true or as concrete as you thought. Is Reformed Theology 100 percent true? What are your end times beliefs? Young or old earth? NIV or ESV? These might seem unnecessary for youth ministry; but believe me, you will come across these and more as you forge ahead; you will want to know what you believe, not what others have told you to believe, especially if you are a teachable person.
Next, be a continual learner as far as how you communicate with young people. As you learn the style of communication and teaching that you feel most comfortable with, it is important that you not think that it is the final word. You will find that as you mature as a person and minister, how you communicate also will mature. The adage by which I always have lived when it comes to communicating and teaching is, “You are never as bad as you think, and you are never as good as you think.”
Lastly, always be learning about how best to reach the students God has called you to reach and minister to. Just because a camp, retreat, style of worship, room set-up, time of meeting or a program is working great, don’t assume it will be that way in the future. Never adopt the, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” mindset in ministry. Look around you. The most successful endeavors in society, especially with technology, happen because people are watching and learning how to best stay effective.
Not that you need to adopt the world’s way of doing things per se, but to assume something always will work just because it has been working is ludacris. The needs of your youth group will change. They’d better change! If you are pouring into your ministry as you should be, change will happen—in you and in others. Needs will change. Learn to discern when these changes are taking place, and always be learning what you need to do to facilitate these changes.
Develop Yours and Others’ Leadership Skills
“Leadership is influence—the ability to obtain followers—the growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” Your students don’t need your friendship as much as they need you to lead them. They also need you to help them develop their leadership skills. “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership” (Developing the Leader Within You, John C. Maxwell, p.179).
Leadership seems to be more and more of a lost art in youth ministry. It is so easy to get lost or buried in the week-in-and-week-out responsibilities of lesson and meeting prep and all the other details that can engulf you in youth ministry that you neglect to build into yourself, your leaders and you students what they need most: the joy of knowing how God has called them to lead in whatever situation in life they find themselves.
Let’s face it: If leadership is influence, then everyone in your ministry is and will be a leader. You have the privilege of helping people learn to lead where they are and to learn skills that will carry into their marriages, families, businesses and ministries.
You do this by helping them see where they are gifted and allowing them to try on different ways of using their gifts. If all your time is spent developing your program and trying to be successful (whatever that is), then you will end up neglecting the development of leaders.
This means more than just helping your students and volunteers figure out how to lead. It means first and foremost helping them understand what it means to be a servant leader. They need to know what the heart of a leader looks like. They need to see a true leader ultimately serves those he or she leads out of love for them and a desire to see them succeed. Focus on helping them learn to have the heart of a leader.
Now this is all fine, but if you are not constantly developing your own leadership skills, you constantly will bump into your own shortcomings in this area. I suggest you do a few things to develop your own leadership skills:
1. Read books on leadership.
2. Ask others how they perceive you as a leader. Ask for an honest critique.
3. Put yourself in situations that stretch your present leadership skills.
Teach the Word
I have found that of all of the things I have poured into my ministry that have had the biggest impact on individual lives and on groups as a whole is good, solid biblical teaching of God’s Word. That means different things to different people. What I mean is regular (weekly), verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter teaching. Such teaching allows God’s Word to teach God’s Word, not choosing a topic to teach and then searching for various verses to back up the message you want to get across.
There is nothing wrong with topical teaching. I actually believe a short stretch of a certain topic once in a while that pertains to your students is very healthy, but a regular diet of topical teaching is similar to feeding your students ice cream week after week. They need the meat of the Word, and that means expository teaching.
Many people will disagree with this, and I believe they mainly do because they either have not seen this type of teaching during a long period of time impact lives, or they are ignorant or lazy. Expository teaching is hard work. It takes much more time and effort to dig for what a passage really means, what it meant for the people to whom it was written and what it means for its hearers now.
You will do your students an injustice now and in the long haul if you fudge in this area. We live in a world of extreme biblical ignorance, and I believe that is mainly the church’s fault—starting in the youth ministry. If you focus your attention on developing your ability to teach the Word in a way that truly feeds students solid meat, the impact of your effort will be seen in the lives of your students now and in their lives down the road as they continue to crave the meat of the Word.
Last Words
Youth ministry is a wonderful, unique, challenging, often misunderstood and rewarding career. It’s no longer as much a stepping stone to being a real pastor as it is a very specialized ministry that requires a disciplined work ethic along with the ability to learn how to focus on what one specifically has been called to do. This takes years of patience, endurance, faith and heart to get it right. In my experience, more than 30.
