Terry Carty: Founder, Youth Worker Movement
20+ years

Terry is the Director of Ministries with Young People for the United Methodist Church and founder of the Youth Worker Movement. Terry has been in student ministry for more than 20 years and travels the country leading and teaching adult workers with students.

YWJ: What makes for long-term success?
Terry Carty: Pace yourself by setting goals. The only way to pace yourself is by setting goals. I have a long-term vision that I can articulate, and I’m intentional about setting short-term objectives. Every year I take a week of personal retreat—a lot of time spent in prayer to discern if there’s been any change in the vision and in setting short-term objectives for the next year. Goal setting helps me pace myself so I don’t try to get everything done in the first year. You can so lose yourself in planning retreats and programs that you don’t work toward faith formation with your kids in the long term. Determine which short-term objectives are low-hanging fruit that you can do and people can notice when it’s been done. That will make some immediate impact toward short-term goals.

YWJ: How have you adapted your content through the years?
Terry: I’ve spent the last 15 years working on a national level with the United Methodist Church. I’ve honed my content and have a much clearer focus of the image of God being the goal of the Christian life. I try to help youth workers of all ages see that God is taking us on a journey to become what He originally created us to be—in the full image of God. God is moving us into the moral image of Himself in the image of love. It’s not about retreats and lock-ins—those are just means of helping kids see they’re made in the image of God.

The second piece is to focus on the journey more than the stops along the way. We are moving from one place to another. Moses and the people of the wilderness are similar to what’s going on in youths’ lives—they know there’s a promised land because it’s been told to them, but they have no clue where it might be. I show them on a map how little that area actually is and ask how they could have wandered for 40 years in that small an area without figuring out where to go. The third thing is taking seriously accountability in our discipleship. Yes, we’re accountable to God; but we take God for granted a lot. We don’t take our other relationships as much for granted. If we say to another person, this is what I see in Scripture, and this is what I’m going to do. To see that person the next week and them ask you, “Did you do what you said you were going to do?”—that kind of accountability is the way that we grow.

YWJ: What do young leaders most need to succeed as they start out in youth ministry?
Terry: These young leaders already have the passion; when I talk to fresh youth workers, I don’t talk to them about passion because that’s there. What they don’t have very much of is knowledge and experience. Later on when they become veteran youth workers, that’s when I start talking to them about how to ignite that passion again. When young leaders are starting out, the number one thing they need is a supportive, proactive pastor. Some preachers are complicit with churches who hire a youth worker, dump everything on them, wait for them to do something they don’t like and then squash them like a bug. The youth worker is a partner in ministry with the pastor and needs a supportive pastor who is in his or her life and sharing ministry alongside each other.

The number two thing a young leader needs, especially if he or she is not a parent, is to get someone to be a parent mentor to them about the care and feeding of parents and the relationships between parents and children. As soon as my first child was born, parents started viewing me in a different way, and I started viewing parents in a different way.

The third need is to have a spiritual life apart from one’s youth ministry. The youth ministry will be a part of one’s spiritual life, but our spiritual lives need to be apart from our ministryies because we have spiritual highs and lows; if they’re tied together, our youth ministry takes the same low as our spiritual life.
 
YWJ: What is one perennial problem that all youth workers face, and how can they address it?
Terry: The pastor or the church that doesn’t back up the youth pastor. In other words, everything’s going along pretty well, then you make a mistake and everybody, including the pastor, is down your throat. Often it results in losing your job. This is a perennial problem and one that fresh youth workers don’t even see coming many times. To address this, have a cardinal rule that says, “Never let the pastor be surprised about anything.” Pastors don’t want to be surprised; they’re embarrassed, and they always come after the youth worker. They can have the feeling, “Boy, have I been let down.” For instance, the youth worker plans a missions day on Saturday and doesn’t get any other adults to come—just the youth director and 25 kids. That’s not acceptable. If it surprises me and I get a couple of calls from parents, my first reaction is to come down like a ton of bricks. Don’t ever let the pastor be surprised about anything; it doesn’t matter how bad it is, be the first one to call and explain what happened or what you’re planning. Similarly, never let parents be surprised.
 
YWJ: What developments in youth ministry have encouraged/concerned you?
Terry: When I read Kenda Dean and Ron Foster’s book The Godbearing Life, it restarted me and made me think about youth ministry from the very roots of it theologically again. Kenda’s book Practicing Passion was another one that helped me understand that it was passion that brought me to youth ministry, that passion came from God and I have to get back in touch with God so that passion can be renewed. As a long-time youth worker, those are the kinds of things I’m looking for when I go to Youth Specialties or the bookstore, I’m looking for something that is going to make me think again about the way I do things and the way I think about God.

On concerns, I have seen us move from youth-led ministry to youth-director ministry in which the adults do most of the planning. Often the youth group programming is some contemporary worship where the youth director gets up and gives a little message. I think that’s pretty dangerous. I think that’s leaving the youth without developing the leadership in them so they’ll be the leaders not only of their own generation, but of future generations. The best way for youth pastors to share their passion is to lead alongside the youth, to actually think of ourselves as “co-journers”—how do we walk this spiritual journey together for a while?
 
YWJ: Any other insights you would like to share?
Terry: This is by far the greatest life imaginable. To be in youth ministry as a career and keep this kind of passion and vitality and be able to change from season to season of life from leading kids almost as a peer to becoming a parent and beginning to understand the importance of family in youth ministry to training other young adults. I can’t imagine how it could get any more exciting.