YWJ: When people haven’t heard of Jon Acuff, what do you think they get after hearing or reading your stuff?
Acuff: I’d guess they get some unexpected insight and humor. Chris Rock said there are some topics people won’t listen to unless they’re laughing at the same time. I hope I give people that, as well as some actionable things.

YWJ: When other people hear the name Jon Acuff, they’ve grown to expect something. What is that?
Acuff: My hope is they’ve grown to expect honesty. A lot of leaders or people in the spotlight make themselves the star of their success story, where it’s a half hour of “I’m awesome.” If my wife and I got into a fight, I want to share the ups and downs of how we’re trying not to let the sun go down on our anger, so again, hopefully a lot of honesty and humor.

YWJ: Have you ever felt trapped by your own platform?
Acuff: I don’t know if I’d say trapped, but sometimes when people meet me they think they have to be funny or super sarcastic. I have found it’s harder to be honest when your audience grows. If five people are following you and you say something off-base, you might lose those five and then gain five different ones. When you cross into the thousands or millions of followers, you feel the pressure more.

YWJ: You’re a pastor’s kid. What did you observe about the church growing up?
Acuff: I learned it’s not easy. I have a lot of respect for what pastors do and how challenging it is. There are a lot of moving pieces in a church, and part of it includes how churches grow and shrink. A church is an accordion that ebbs and flows. That’s natural, but it doesn’t always feel natural.

YWJ: The tagline for your book Start is Punch Fear in the Face. What if what a youth worker fears is his or her senior pastor?
Acuff: You have to establish why the youth worker fears the senior pastor. If it’s illegitimate fear, feel it out and figure out where it came from. If it’s legitimate fear, maybe that youth worker is in the wrong place. Also worth noting is some youth workers just generally have an irrational fear.

YWJ: What do you mean?
Acuff: Maybe the youth worker got a bruise from a previous pastor or church and now has a jerk filter. If they hear they have a meeting in the senior pastor’s office, they immediately think, “I’m getting fired.” That’s why you have to figure out if it’s illegitimate or legitimate fear.

YWJ: What if it is a legitimate fear?
Acuff: Then you and your family have to ask, “Is this something we have to figure out here, or do we have to leave here?” We’re such creatures of deflection, so again you have to try to get at the heart of what it’s about. I have a friend whose dad left her; and her mom said to her, “Make sure you don’t upset your husband, because he can bolt at any second.” Can you imagine what’s happening in that marriage?

Hopefully your spouse is someone with whom you can talk. Maybe like my friend this is less about what’s happening in your job and more about how a previous situation created a filter. The thing is, spouses amplify situations, not to be negative, but because they’re there to support. So maybe it isn’t serious, or maybe it is and they’re the ones picking up on it.

The other thing is if you do have to get out of there, that’s OK. You’re not a hero to stay at the wrong church. You end up blocking the person who is supposed to be there and blocking yourself from where you could be awesome.

YWJ: You mentioned in your book about five life stages people go through: Learning, Editing, Mastering, Harvesting and Guiding. How can someone navigate that learning curve?
Acuff: I talk a lot in Start about having a support network. In other words, what does your personal board of directors feel about what you’re going through or about to go through? Every human should have people they can bounce topics off of for more than the usual feedback. They’re mirror friends who reflect truth back to you versus others who just tell you what you want to hear. Your spouse can’t do that always, so make sure you have friends who can. Sometimes you’re so close to the painting you can’t tell what it is.

YWJ: You’ve spoken at major conventions for youth workers. What have you observed about them?
Acuff: I personally think being a youth worker is one of the hardest things on the planet. People compliment and take from you at the same time, saying, “You’re so great with kids. When are you going to be a real pastor?” Sometimes youth workers cultivate that by treating their jobs today as a rest stop along the way to something they think is more important.

Youth workers who get it make a real difference, though. You’re doing something the average person has no interest in doing. If you ask the average person if he or she would like to be a teen again, they’d say no. I have friends who created home entertainment systems so they could avoid going to theaters where all the teenagers are. Your job actually requires you to be around young people!

The other thing is the success rate seems so low. I spoke at a retreat of 200 students and only two gave their lives to Jesus there. I’m not trying to underplay those decisions as if they didn’t matter, but it seems on the surface to be a 1 percent success rate. Can you think of any other profession where that wouldn’t make you suicidal? Imagine you worked at a car factory and 99 percent of your cars exploded!

Youth ministry takes tremendous patience. God lets you be one lyric in His story of a kid’s life. That kid may walk away from church and not return until he or she is 35 with his or her own kid. To me, that’s tough. To youth workers, that’s reality.

YWJ: Would you say a youth worker should aim for having one great thought that is memorable or having the ability to converse with students at deeper, theological levels?
Acuff: Hopefully it’s not an either/or scenario, but I would ask: How many instances have you really had where a teen wanted you to communicate more theologically versus practically? If you have a 30-minute window to talk with kids, I sense they’re more interested in knowing if you’re real and care about them before they give you a listening ear.

Even then, I’ve never heard of a single teenager who left a youth group because there wasn’t enough meat. It’s usually, “The youth minister felt fake and didn’t care for me,” or, “I needed to talk with someone about porn and didn’t feel I could.” If you’re trying to become a senior pastor and only putting in your time with them until then, they feel that.

Students hear the same message from me at every camp I speak at: “Be sick. Be loved.” In other words, “Be as sick as you are. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Then come to Christ and be loved. Follow Him with your life.” Do that, and then wait until a kid asks you to go theologically deep.

YWJ: Do you think most youth workers settle for average or continue after their dreams?
Acuff: I think a lot of youth workers fall prey to what a lot of church workers do—they’re really overworked. So many churches run really lean and burn people out. We don’t want to say no to what we’re asked to do because we feel as if we’re saying no to baby Jesus. The reality is youth workers, by the nature of their jobs, already have chosen something extraordinary and awesome. Just think—when was the last time you heard a church having a staff meeting where the title was “How to Say No More Often”?

YWJ: One review of your book Start said you wrote more about the starting line than about the finish line. Would you say that’s accurate?
Acuff: I guess I would in the sense that anyone who tells you what the finish line is is a liar. There’s no honest 75-year-old who says, “Here’s what the finish line looks like.” Most people are still trying to figure it out at that age. I’d rather try to get people going after something awesome and inspire them to finish that idea somehow. Then you start the process and do it again.

Andy Stanley didn’t say at the beginning of his ministry, “Northpoint will be a massive church with this many parking lots.” Dave Ramsey didn’t think when going bankrupt, “I’m so glad this happened so I can start a ministry that tells people how to manage their finances better.” Just imagine the cockiness of a 37-year-old such as me writing a book on a finish line. It’s why I put 82 action steps in the back of the book so I can look at someone and say, “Pick any of these. Which one will work for you?”

YWJ: You’ve mentioned that you were found by Dave Ramsey. What should the average person be doing until a Dave Ramsey-type comes knocking?
Acuff: Keep in mind I already was booking my own gigs before Dave Ramsey. I had a successful blog and platform. Now, I’d be a liar if I said Dave Ramsey wasn’t a crazy greenhouse on all of that, but I wasn’t on my couch waiting for Dave Ramsey to arrive like a pizza. I hustled up to his office and took a vacation day to speak for him on my own free time. He discovered me because I was on the road hustling.

I’m a big believer in the opportunity that social media offers everyone. Five years from now, you’ll say, “I’m really passionate about students” and someone will ask, “What’s your URL?” Regardless of where you are, you can start creating that content today. Start a blog. Plug into a community. Post today’s talk online for someone to listen to tomorrow. Start hustling on what you actually can do.

YWJ: What do you think is realistic to expect out of young people when it comes to church involvement or student leadership?
Acuff: I like to teach students that they’re already good at sharing the gospel—they just don’t know it. I did an event with 1,500 teenagers and said, “Everyone tweet, ‘I love this camp. I can’t wait until next year.’ Then let your friends ask you about it. You’re amazing at sharing stuff you love. If you say, ‘No I’m not,’ I’ll ask if you ever tweeted about an album, movie or TV show you love.” Get them to recognize how to be a leader by doing it in ways they already know how to do.

YWJ: How are you imparting what you’ve learned into your own kids?
Acuff: That’s a good question. I am definitely all over the applicable parts. For instance, I’ve talked to my kids about how to use social media. Parents have missed this. They’ve had the birds-and-bees chat with kids, but we are the first generation of parents who need to have a digital-footprint conversation with them.

YWJ: How does that look?
Acuff: The average parent feels overwhelmed by a false assumption of having to keep up with the latest technology. I always tell parents they don’t have to be as tech savvy as their kids. What I do say is, “Get the truths of your house right, and apply it to any technology.”

Imagine sitting down with your kids and saying, “If you were to have a sleepover with other kids, would you have a problem with us wanting to know who these kids are, where they come from or who their parents are?” Most kids understand that.

Then you add, “You being friends online with people we don’t know or ones you’ve never met is similar to having strangers in our house for a sleepover. At your age, it’s not a way we want you to meet new people. We know the people we invite into our house. It’s going to be that way with who you connect with online.”

YWJ: How do you think leadership in the church will feel in the years to come?
Acuff: It’ll be more about getting people involved at a grassroots level. We’ll likely learn some techniques from the business world about how to do this, but we can start making pathways now for conversations to happen across from each other versus so much being top-down. Teenagers already have the framework for this in place through social media. We’re just not fully utilizing it yet. Imagine if we did.

This generation wants to change the world now—not eventually.