Youth workers desire growth in the lives of their teens. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be in youth ministry. Yet, how we tend to evaluate and plan for growth can be totally messed up.
I’ve read articles recently that provide some steps toward having a healthy, growing youth ministry. The place most authors begin is by having youth workers evaluate their group by trying to see it from the perspective of a teenager or a parent. Sadly, most youth workers simply have forgotten they are not a teenager; and many are not parents, much less parents of teens. How can a decent evaluation happen when we have no foundation to provide a point of reference?
As has been the case for too long, many youth workers still are trying to make things work on their own. In their conversations, you hear things such as, “I tried this event,” or “I had this great idea,” or “I’m reaching out.” If the focus is on what “I” (the youth worker) am doing with youth ministry, I’m still missing the point.
We are called to serve; therefore, we need to spend more of our time listening than we do talking.
We serve teenagers. We should listen to what teenagers are saying about the ministry and hear the struggles they are having personally. We tend to hear statistics or trends on a national level, but less often we think about the statistics and how they differ in our local context. How can we know? We listen. God has given teens responsibility for living out their own faith, and many would love to rise to the challenge (
We serve parents. No, they are NOT the enemy; they are God-ordained leaders (
We serve God’s family. It is so easy to isolate teenagers from the larger church community. We get used to it in children’s ministry and capitalize on it in youth ministry. When our teens graduate, why would they want to be part of a local church community? They never have been valued and connected within one before. They never have interacted with the young or old as the body of Christ. Youth ministry serves as a passing phase rather than an enabling facet of the greater mission of God. God has adopted us into a family, and we need to understand that many in our church community have a desire to fulfill their responsibility to invest in teens (
It bears repeating: We are called to serve; therefore, we need to spend more of our time listening than we do talking. “He who answers before listening–that is his folly and his shame” (