Tom McKee
What aspect of your church’s youth ministry has cost you the most sleep?
I put this question to several pastors across the country, wanting to know what goes wrong most often. Some of the stories sounded familiar. Others were the stuff of which nightmares are made.
“It was the phone call from an irate parent after a boy with ‘punk orange’ hair sang a Steve Taylor song in church.”
“We had a bus wreck that put four of our high schoolers on the critical list in the hospital. One boy was paralyzed.”
“A young man was shot while two high school boys were hunting on a youth mission trip.”
“Our church is in the middle of a $5 million dollar lawsuit over an incident with a gun at one of our young-singles retreats.”
“I had to pull the plug on a music group performing in our sanctuary at an area youth rally.”
“We just fired our youth pastor. This is the fourth youth pastor we have let go in four years.”
“I had to explain to our board why our youth pastor had put a $2,000 dollar deposit on a retreat center for a youth camp and then canceled it because not enough people registered for the camp. We lost the $2,000.”
As I heard these stories, I was reminded of the best seller by Mark H. McCormack, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School. We could entitle this book Lessons We Didn’t Learn in Seminary. However, just because we have graduated from school we are not finished learning. The pastor must always be a student, eager to learn from those who struggle as well as those who are successful in the church. We develop our style of pastoring primarily from experience, not from books; from living in the church, not in libraries.
But lessons from experience can be costly, as the above war stories indicate. So what can we share with one another? The major problems of youth ministry seem to revolve around six headaches, which make up the following chapters of this book:
Headache One: Where do I find good volunteers to run an effective youth ministry? That issue is by far the key in any size church. If the pastor can find dynamic, successful youth sponsors to make up the youth team, the other problems usually fade away.
Headache Two: How do I keep workers from getting burned out, discouraged, or joining another church? As one pastor said, “I just get a great team recruited and trained, when some key people quit. Then I have to start all over again.”
Headache Three: How does the pastor of the small church build an effective youth ministry? Can you reach and hold teens without calling a salaried youth pastor?
Headache Four: Larger churches wonder how to find and keep a good youth pastor. The average stay is only eighteen months.1 Where does the pastor find an effective youth pastor for the amount of money the board will approve who will stay at least five years? Once the person arrives, how do the pastor and youth pastor work as a team and yet keep a line of accountability that is effective?
Headache Five: Vision and administration often do not mix. This tension means finding a balance between being nosey about every detail on the one hand and not showing any concern on the other. How does the pastor encourage the visionary and at the same time retain some control over the direction of the ministry?
Headache Six: How should the pastor handle parents, especially those who call upset about some of the youth activities or because their teens are not involved? Another great concern of the pastor is effective counseling ministry for hurting parents. Many of these parents are single, and the pastor often becomes a surrogate parent.
This book is not intended to be a youth ministry how-to. Instead, it deals with the relationship of the pastor and the youth program. I write as a pastor who spent almost fifteen years in youth ministry before taking my first senior pastorate. I have a great love for youth and am a parent of two teenage boys. Four years ago when we planted a new church, and I saw only three teens in the youth group, I was tempted to jump back into the role of youth pastor again—at the same time I was carrying the load of the pastorate. I realized, of course, that I could not do everything.
But I had to examine the role I should take with the youth as senior pastor. Now we have a youth pastor. Questions remain. What is my role now? I am learning how to deal with my concerns in ways other than direct involvement. From my talks with other pastors, many others struggle with this problem, also.
Paul Borthwick, “How to Keep a Youth Minister,” LEADERSHIP, Winter 1983, p. 75.
© 1986 Christianity Today
