Reflections from 15 Years of Youth Ministry Research
Humility is a teacher’s best friend.
It’s the deepest character quality of a truly hungry student. Gurus high in the Tibetan mountains get visited by humble truth-seekers. Four fishermen (at least) swallowed their pride and left their manly profession to hang on Jesus’ every word. Many of us share recurring fantasies of our students showing up early, staying late, and fighting for front row seats just so they don’t miss anything we say. Great learners make teaching a joy, and the best learners are genuinely humble, which perfectly describes one of my youth ministry heroes.
Bill Eakin has started on the second half of a century in a youth ministry career that he still can’t believe God has allowed him to enjoy. Fifty-five years of loving kids in Jesus’ name! A tireless encourager, barnstorming rally-speaker, and program pioneer with Youth for Christ—he’s done it all, seen it all, heard it all.
He can even remember when his beloved Indians won the World Series. As a Cubs fan, I can only pray for such a memory in my lifetime.
And to this day, Bill still shows up in the front row to take notes throughout a presentation, even though he’s got cologne bottles older than the teacher. Bill is genuinely humble. He really believes he can learn something new and valuable to help his life and ministry from the tatted, orange-haired youth evangelist thpeaking around her tongue thtud and through her lip rings.
He’s the kind of learner I always want to be—which is why I’ve loved research. So much to know, and so little time! Ten different research projects over the past fifteen years have sharpened many of my current convictions about youth ministry practice. What follows is the best I’ve got so far. It’s a hot list of the most important lessons I’ve learned from doing original research and asking the queen of all questions: So what? I offer them as a humble and open invitation to join me in the Always Learning Club. According to Solomon, it’s where kings hang out: It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings. (Prov. 25:2, NIV)
1. Let’s define our leadership by those who join us as we follow Christ.
It’s a simple target, within reach whether you’re coordinating multiple staff at a mega-church or volunteering in a fellowship that pays no one to be a professional. The Study of Protestant Youth Workers in America confirmed that our number one ministry priority is the spiritual transformation of young people. It’s why we do what we do. My most recent research suggests that urban youth workers see leadership as a package of the personal and the spiritual, dirt practical, and revealed by the fruit of our followers (see sidebar). No wonder that a top concern for all of us is the time tension we experience between our home lives and the jobs we do, expressed most dramatically by the fact that many of us sacrifice our personal devotional time when we get too busy. We know what we’re called to do, and we are also aware that we will lead others out of the vitality or impoverishment of our own relationship to Christ. In the most concrete terms, this reflects a simple metric to measure our leadership effectiveness. Who are the students and volunteers who are attracted to join us, and do they become more deeply like Jesus because they have done so?
2. Let’s keep our vision clear and communication skills sharp to lead well.
Urban youth workers attend to the ultimate goal of helping youth follow Christ when they include planning, communicating the gospel well, and even leading good discussions. In fact, their leadership confidence around this combination of inspiration and practical skills is also affected by their ability to relate well to young people and maintain a disciplined personal devotional time. It’s a priority for Protestant youth ministers, also, to operate with a clear sense of direction for their ministries. And during another national study I learned how important it is for outstanding student leaders to have their adult youth ministers constantly remind them of the vision by teaching God’s word. Whether it’s been from research or personal observation, effective leaders know their vision well and drive it home with communication excellence.
3. Let’s maximize our leadership by normalizing our vision.
When vision gets modeled and supported by lots of people doing the little things to go in the same direction it has the best chance to actually get practiced. For instance, Youth for Christ’s new president, Dan Wolgemuth, has sought to re-culture the veteran movement around the priority of prayer. He’s making headway by setting a personal example and inviting others to join him. The regular routine of most meetings has changed to include significant prayer, and a simple 15-minute conference call each Monday morning has started to feel normal to the YFC family scattered all over the country. Not surprisingly, his leadership equity keeps building. The opposite is also true. Urban youth workers who work in local churches are less likely than those in para-church or youth-serving agencies to network with others in the city, expand their work into the community, or engage in gang ministry. Chances are pretty good that they simply do not experience normal congregational support for this larger vision.
4. Let’s use big events to call others to our vision.
Here’s how it works, according to a number of different research studies I’ve been involved in. The event delivers a powerful message that reinforces a value already present in our ministry. Thousands of students experience—and respond to—this message by making personally meaningful commitments that jump-start their own visions. So DCLA has effectively called Christian young people to the cause of reaching their friends for Christ. A regional event in the Midwest used a music festival design to invite young people to make commitments to sexual purity. This is what big events are best at, so we ought to use them to help us work our vision into our students’ lives, one decision at a time.
5. Let’s empower other leaders if we want to extend the influence of our vision.
Both adult volunteers and selected students can assume significant responsibility if they are equipped properly. Developing adult volunteers is a top priority for almost everyone in youth work. Urban youth workers have found it meaningful to think about a well-functioning youth ministry team, and creating a team structure has also been important for those who do exceptionally well at developing student leaders. The best empowerment tactics include frequent personal coaching, and when such face-to-face encounters happen often it is more likely that student and adult leaders will become vision multipliers.
Let’s grow students well via relational strategies; avoid program dependency.
Too many youth workers get trapped spending all their time at the fast food window of programs when their students are starving for the love of God delivered through the love of another person. A recent research study gathered evangelism stories from new Christians and confirmed that students’ friends were the greatest factor in their decision to become followers of Christ. Student leaders, too, demonstrated that the example of friends who led peers to Christ was a more important predictor of their own fruitfulness than anything else. But a surprising finding also revealed that if students spend too much time planning and leading programs they were significantly less likely to invest time with friends relationally, thereby reporting that fewer of their friends had come to Christ.
7. Let’s coach students to habituate personal Bible reading and prayer.
If they do, chances are pretty high that good things will happen. Students who engage in this behavior most frequently were the most likely to practice the peer evangelism values taught at DCLA. They were also most likely to sustain their commitments of sexual purity. That’s the good news. The rest of the story is that no study I have been part of suggests that a significant percentage of students practice regular Bible study. In fact, it’s safe to say that if we find a student who makes a habit of personal Bible reading and prayer, we have probably found a leader-in-waiting. The recent research among urban youth workers confirms my fear about our future biblical literacy: those who are student volunteers in city ministry are most likely to be in deficit when it comes to this discipline.
8 . Let’s show students how to talk openly and naturally about Jesus.
Kids have very little trouble talking about most anything, which makes me especially curious when I observe how tongue-tied they get if called upon to chat up the Lord. There’s a lot of fear involved on their part; they think they’ll mess up. We can help them best by sharing our similar fears but witnessing regularly, anyway. When friends articulate the gospel it has been shown to be especially helpful to those from non-religious backgrounds, helping them understand enough to make their decisions to follow Christ.
9. Let’s remember: there’s always more to the story than we think.
One entire study was built upon the conviction that Barna’s research about the age of conversion didn’t really tell us the whole truth about evangelistic ministry among adolescents. It didn’t, but it didn’t claim to, either. This is something I’d call a meta-lesson from research. I designed my doctoral research around a gap in the knowledge, even though there had been over 30 studies done on the subject. In fact, there’s hardly been a study I’ve done where some finding within the research didn’t surface to make me scratch my head, wondering what’s going on. In each case, it was trying to make common sense of what I had learned that drove me to deeper thought and analysis. The same is true for people. Just about the time I think I’ve got someone figured out, she surprises me with something unpredictable, forcing me to listen better and care more if I really want to understand her depth. And that’s after 30 years of marriage!
Well that’s it. Nine major lessons I will hang my hat on. Change that. Let’s make it an even ten. I think it would be a mistake to not put that humility-to-always-learn thing on the list, probably at the top, though humility never likes being first. May we all find ourselves in life’s front row, taking notes always, with Solomon: The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, for the ears of the wise seek it out. (Prov. 18:15, NIV)
Sources Resources
The nine lessons in Dave’s article came from the following publications and research studies:
Bergler, Tom Rahn, Dave (2006) “Results of a Collaborative Research Project in Gathering Evangelism Stories.” Spring, Journal of Youth Ministry, 4:2 pp 65-74.
Rahn, Dave. (2006). “New Christians Tell Us Their Stories.” Spring, Network, 24:1; pp 27-29.
Rahn, Dave. (2003). “A Faith that Matters: Domain Distinctions in Late Adolescent Judgments of Right and Wrong.” Marriage and Family: A Christian Journal, 6:3; pp 401-412.
Strommen, Merton and Jones, Karen and Rahn, Dave. (2001). Youth ministry that transforms: A comprehensive analysis of the hopes, frustrations, and effectiveness of today’s youth workers. Zondervan/Youth Specialties Academic.
Rahn, Dave. (2000). “The truths that matter most.” July/August, Group, 26:5; p 32.
Rahn, Dave Linhart, Terry. (2000). Contagious faith: Empowering student leadership in youth evangelism. Group Publishing.
Rahn, Dave Lamport, Mark. (1995). “Do big events make a difference?” May/June, Group, 21:4; pp 12-14.
Dave’s latest research was done on behalf of Urban Youth Workers Institute. Findings were presented at the October 2006 meeting of the Association of Youth Ministry Educators. This article is the first place where these results have been published.
The UYWI project involves exploratory research designed to explore the similarities and distinctions urban youth workers may have relative to the core values and objectives of UYWI. The research summary presented to UYWI represented an analysis of 1031 surveys collected from random sampling methods over the course of 11 months beginning with their national conference in May of 2005 and continuing through 19 different one day RELOAD conferences ending in April of 2006. The survey instruments had nine questions about demographic variables and 47 box-check items related to UYWI core values. Sophisticated factor analyses identified from among the 47 different survey items 11 distinct, interrelated sets of items that clustered together to form reliable scales of measurement and offer some of the insights discussed in this article.
YouthWorker Journal contributing editor Dave Rahn is a popular speaker, busy researcher, prolific author who writes regularly for Campus Life and Group, and Director of both the youth ministry masters program and the Link Institute at Huntington University in Huntington, Indiana.
