It’s a fact of life: teenagers become twentysomethings, who then reach their 30s, then their 40s and beyond. Today’s youth group is tomorrow’s elder board. So why don’t more churches actively engage youth ministries, especially as they struggle year after year to find people willing and qualified to serve and to lead?
Doug Franklin is the founder and president of LeaderTreks in Carol Stream, Illinois, a ministry that uses trips, innovative training, and curricula to help youth workers develop students into leaders in the church. Franklin spoke with Laura Leonard, editor of BuildingChurchLeaders.com, about how churches can better support their youth ministries and prepare both students and adults to lead in the ways God has called them.
Why did you start LeaderTreks? What did you see happening in youth ministry that you wanted to address?
Twenty years ago I was a youth worker and my youth group was growing quickly. We didn’t have enough adults for everything, so more and more I relied on putting students in leadership. I noticed that when my students got into leadership, they took things more seriously. If I would raise the bar for them by putting them in leadership, they would jump over that bar. I started looking for resources, and it seemed to me that nobody thought leadership development was core to youth ministry. So God laid on my heart to create resources and experiences that would help youth workers develop their students as leaders. When you think about all the things a youth pastor is already doing—outreach, evangelism, discipleship, missions, dealing with parents, reporting to the church, budgeting—to ask them to add to all that student leadership seemed like it was just piling on. I wanted to create an organization that would help them grow as leaders so that they could transfer that to their students: because if you haven’t been developed as a leader, you’re not going to be able to develop somebody else as a leader.
How would you define a leader? Can all students be leaders? What is the difference between making disciples and making leaders?
With over 850 published definitions of leadership, I feel like another definition would only be lost in the white noise. The truth is, mature disciples of Jesus are leaders because they have to influence others to make more disciples. So yes, leadership and discipleship are tied to each other, and because of this, all students have leadership potential.
What do you wish churches understood better about their students, and their role in the church?
Churches have to make a decision these days: Are they going to have a ministry to students, or are they going to equip their students to have a ministry to their world? There’s a big difference between those two. Because of prolonged adolescence, and because parents aren’t taking their role as the primary faith influencers in students’ lives, churches have to step up. We need to flip the switch from, we feed you to we’re going to help you feed yourself. We need to get churches to understand that helping students own their faith is more important than having students like the church.
When churches have a student ministry, they tend to say, We’re going to put on great events and retreats, we’re going to play paintball, we’re going to get a great band in here. We’re going to try to attract them with what we do for them. But MTV is going to spend $3 million today on programming, and you’re going to spend $5,000 this year—students are probably going to go the other direction. That model’s not working.
We all know the statistics: if someone is going to come to know Christ, they’re most likely going to do so before the age of 18. Parents are the most important person in a student’s life; number two is peers. So our students, every day when they go on to their campuses, are in a target-rich environment to share their faith. If we were to get strategic, if we were to look in our churches and ask which group has the most potential to reach people for Christ, it would never be our adults. It would always be our students. Does our church budget reflect that? Of course it doesn’t. We challenge churches to change their thinking on this. Instead of inviting kids in and trying to entertain them with the big band and the funny skit and the great ski retreat, why not equip those students in our churches to go out on their campuses and to meet the needs of a hurting generation with the Good News of Jesus Christ?
How can churches help support and develop student leaders in their congregation?
They have to change. They can’t keep doing things the same old way. They need to build a ministry that is church-owned, a sustainable youth ministry that will last for the next 50 years that’s focused on developing disciples for Christ—students who know how to share their faith, who know how to disciple another student, who know how to make disciples because they are disciples. If the church began to change its thinking and got involved in what was going on in youth culture, they would find that it would actually do all the things that they want it to do: grow the church.
How can churches better prepare volunteers to mentor and disciple these teenagers?
Discipleship. We don’t know how to build strong disciples among teens, because we don’t know how to disciple adults. We just don’t have a plan for it. You ask most churches about their plan for adult discipleship, and they’ll say small groups. Is small groups a strategy? Or a methodology of delivery? It’s a delivery method. It’s not a discipleship plan. We don’t have any strategy to develop adults into disciples and thus we don’t have the disciplers to disciple students.
What role do parents play in this process?
Huge! It’s pretty clear in Scripture that they’re the primary faith influencers. But we’re so used to outsourcing the education of our kids to professionals—teachers, coaches, music instructors—and that mindset filters into church. We have parents that are afraid. They’re saying to themselves, If my kid can get through high school not having sex and not drinking and doing drugs, I think that’s a win. They have lowered the bar so far it’s shocking.
We also have a fatherlessness issue. We have a lot of homes that don’t have a father, and when they do have a father, the mom is the one who is praying over dinner every night and encouraging the family to go to church—I’m generalizing, but these are huge things that are happening in our churches and we need more and more men to stand up and say, I’m going to be the primary faith influencer in my student’s life, I’m going to be challenging my student about where they are in their faith, and I’m going to use every aspect of life—not making the football team, making the drama, or whatever—to talk to them about how to live as a Christ follower in different environments. That’s what we desperately need.
I had a parent about 15 years ago whose son had come to him in high school and told him he wanted to be in the military. He called me before his son was going on a mission trip with us and he said, “My son has got this idea about what he wants to do with his life and I want to help him get ready. And I want to challenge you to help my son get ready. So I want you to teach my son leadership on this trip. Be very focused, challenge him, push him, and when the trip’s over I’d like to spend an hour talking with you about what you saw in my son and where I need to push forward.” This dad sent his son on trips for four years in a row and checked in with me, talked with me, partnered with me. His son went on to Wheaton College, got involved in ROTC, became an officer, and led men into battle in Iraq. That partnership with that dad was an amazing thing for me. But I’ve worked with thousands and thousands of kids, and I can only tell you one story.
What do youth pastors need from their churches?
The number one thing that youth pastors need is evaluation. The reason they don’t get evaluation is because the church doesn’t have a goal for the youth ministry. It doesn’t have a mission and a vision for it. So they ask the youth pastor how it’s going, and the youth pastor says things like, “Well, we had 35 kids last night”—because he or she doesn’t know how to answer that question, because they haven’t set any goals. And the senior pastor walks away and says, “All that youth pastor cares about is the numbers.” And that youth pastor walks away and says, “All my senior pastor cares about are the numbers.”
For sustainable youth ministries to happen, the youth pastor can’t set the vision. The church must do that. And if the church sets the vision and mission, then it could actually evaluate the youth workers on how they’re doing in the mission and vision. That’s the key to igniting youth ministries.
I get calls from senior pastors looking for a youth minister for their church, and I’ll ask them what they’re looking for. They’ll say, “For someone who’s 30 years old and married with two kids, seminary degree.” Basically they want Jesus, married. So I’ll ask, “Say someone interviews and doesn’t really fit that description but the kids like him, do you hire that person?” Then there’s a long silence. And then: “Yeah, I would.” So the real job description is someone that the kids will like. And I will tell them, “You probably need to rethink what you’re looking for, because you’re going to settle for something that is not going to work for your students long-term.”
Talk to me about failure. When you’re teaching students, or anyone, to lead, you have to make room for failure. How do you lead someone through that process, to give them that space and also to help them grow from it?
Our students live in a perfect world. They go to school, they get a bunch of information, they take that two weeks of information and they regurgitate it perfectly on a test. Then they start the next week forgetting what they just learned for two weeks. What they really learned was that they can’t make mistakes. So on our trips we let the students make decisions for everything that’s happening, and they have to live with the consequences. We only step in for safety issues. I have stood in the noodle aisle of a grocery store and had students break down crying, “I don’t know if I should get bowtie pasta or I should get spaghetti, I just can’t decide.” Students tell me all the time, I want to make the decisions for my own life. And I say, “Okay, tell me about the last five decisions you made about your life.” They can’t come up with five. When I ask them, “What were the last three risks you took in life?” They can’t come up with one, because they live in a world that has been sanitized for them by parents and society. So one of the things we try to do is make failure a positive thing. When you failed, you took a risk. One of the things I like to say to students is, “Let’s get out there this week and have a couple of good failures. And when you have a failure, I’m gonna high-five you, hug you, and tell you, ‘this is great, let’s go.'”
What does that look like?
On a student mission trip to Guatemala, we planned to build the first home in a children’s orphanage. The student leaders, who had been on four previous trips together, made a huge goal before the trip: dig and pour the foundation, level and pour the floor, and lay the blocks up to the bottoms of the windows. This would normally take four weeks for two high-performing teams to finish. The team tore into the project and everything was going according to plan. But as the last day approached, the students realized we would need to lay 500 blocks in order to reach the goal. Everyone knew we could not stay past dusk for security reasons and as the sun began to set, it was clear we were one row of blocks under the goal (roughly 150 blocks short). For two weeks they had given it their all and were so close to the goal. The team begged the student leaders to work into the night, and the student leaders begged me to change the rules…but I couldn’t. I told the student leaders that they needed to find a way to communicate to the rest of the team why we were finishing one row short. The student leaders felt like they had failed their team. After cleaning up the site, the whole team gathered and the student leaders asked, “Why did we make this goal?” One student responded, “We made this goal to challenge ourselves and bring out our best.” The student leaders then asked, “Did we reach our goal?” And with that conversation, a failure was turned into a win.
When you have a student going through failure, ask three questions. What was the problem you were facing? This is a discovery question and allows the student to discover the real issue. The second question I like to ask: What life principle did you use or not use? These are biblical principles. Did you not use honesty? Did you not use good communication? What did you use? What made that a good experience? And then I’ll ask them an application question: What do you want to differently in life because of this? When we learn that really simple way of talking students through failure, we can help turn their failures into wins. We need to let students fail, learn, and grow, and walk that road with them, asking good questions, debriefing with them, and holding them accountable to the applications they make. When we do that, we grow disciples.
