I guess there’s a student such as Melanie in almost every youth ministry—the student who always shows up but may not stand out, the one who seems to be doing well and doesn’t cause drama, the one who may have more pain than he or she would want us to see, the one whose story we might be missing out on…Melanie was that student for me, and I almost missed out on her story completely because I didn’t take the time to slow down and listen.
Melanie grew up in our church and checked all the boxes of an involved student: rarely missing a Sunday, attending all the retreats and big events, participating in small groups, and going on a mission trip. She usually sat quietly in the back, often with a book lying next to her or intently pressed up to her face. She didn’t say much to anyone. Her parents and sister were very involved in the church and also on the reserved side, so I chalked up her quiet demeanor to genetics. I was grateful she was a student I didn’t have to worry about.
Right before her senior year, it felt natural to ask Melanie to join our student leadership team, which also meant an invitation to travel across the country with me and five other students to a leadership conference. If you’ve ever traveled with students, you know one of the biggest challenges is dealing with long waits—waiting in lines, waiting at the gate, waiting for someone to come back from the bathroom (which seems to be always). Because we didn’t have smart phones back then, time moved slower and the wait felt that much longer. The unexpected blessing, however, was that it gave us a lot of time to talk. For the first time in a long time, I could actually slow down to listen.
One by one, each student had a chance to share something deeper about themselves and their hopes for our youth ministry. We got to Melanie’s turn. Quiet as usual, she began by saying how much she enjoyed the trip to the conference, the opportunity to be a part of the student leadership, and some other things she was looking forward to in the coming year.
Something happened when we asked Melanie how we could pray for her. Her face turned red, and tears began welling up in her eyes. Her quiet voice trembled nervously, but she had something to say. Finally looking up at us through her tears, Melanie shared about how much she didn’t like coming to church, how she felt as if she were an outsider whom no one took the time to get to know, and all the pain she had been carrying around for the past five years.
My heart broke with every word. We surrounded Melanie, asking her to forgive us, thanking her for her courage, and expressing how much of a gift she was to all of us. It was as if we were seeing Melanie for the first time. In her own words, that moment was a turning point in her life and her faith. It was a turning point for me, too.
While I celebrated that transformative moment in Melanie’s life, I wondered why I as her youth pastor hadn’t noticed the pain and struggle she was carrying in all the weeks, months and years before. One reason (and this is hard to admit) is that part of me thought I had Melanie all figured out. After all, she attended youth group every week, had loving Christian parents who were active in the church, and had the same ethnic background as me (second-generation Korean-American). Based on that alone, I thought I had a pretty good handle on who Melanie was and what she was going through as a high school student. However, without realizing it, I had made assumptions about Melanie that weren’t all true. In fact, those assumptions got in the way of really getting to know Melanie’s story, and I didn’t know it until that moment.
Learners, Not Experts
It’s easy to believe we can figure out a student in 15 minutes. The reality is every student has unique experiences, pains, joys, talents and dreams. We love reminding students they are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (
When we don’t stop and listen, we’re giving up one of the joys of being in youth ministry: hearing the stories of our students and being invited to be part of them. I’m not suggesting we seek to dig up every secret students keep; I’m actually saying the opposite. Our role sometimes comes with the expectation that we are experts on teenagers, but when it comes to any individual’s story, the only expert is the one to whom the story belongs. I’ve found that the more expert I think I am, the less prone I am to listen. Think of each student as a new language we are trying to learn. The more we take that type of learning posture, the more likely we’ll hear their deeper stories.
It took five years, a cross-country trip, and the absence of technology for me to hear Melanie’s story. Obviously, I can’t do that with every student, but I have learned to slow down and listen much more than I did before. Practically speaking, I’ve made it a priority to spend time with a small group of students other than Sunday mornings at least once a week. I’ve found that face-to-face meetings outside the normal routine of church allow me to hear students. I’ve made slowing down and listening to them part of my job description—as important as anything else I do. This, by the way, isn’t a job we are meant to do by ourselves; it’s an opportunity given to the entire church. We have the amazing opportunity to invite others to live slow, to listen, to embrace stories of joy and pain.
I’ve always loved this quote from David Augsburger, professor at Fuller Seminary: “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.” When we don’t slow down and listen, we miss out on opportunities to love students, and that is definitely not a price worth paying.
