There is a picture hanging in my office at Trinity Seminary that I have somewhat jokingly labeled “The Death of a Youth Minister.” The picture shows me during a youth group backpacking trip to Colorado, lying spread-eagle on the ground, totally exhausted.
A few of the kids were tired that day and were moaning and complaining, so I had agreed to carry some of their gear. That day of lugging what felt like a gargantuan pack up the side of Mt. Blanca-while the kids kept on grumbling-forever pictures for me the frustrations and the sweat that can come with youth ministry. When I later left the church, the glass over the picture cracked in the move. I decided to leave it that way. It seemed appropriate.
Now that’s not the only picture-or memory-I have of my decade and a half in youth ministry. So much of it was happy. They were great years, marvelous years of ministry. I think of special people, of encouragement. I love young people and consider ministering to them a privilege, which is why I study, teach, and write about youth ministry, and enjoy talking with youth workers. But I keep that picture on my wall to remind me of the frustration I faced in ministering to young people. Much of the frustration, I’ve realized since, stems from a few assumptions we hold about youth ministry that seem plausible but upon closer investigation don’t hold true. I’d like to suggest five axioms I’ve had to fine tune along the way.
Myth 1: The Harder the Leader Works, the Bigger the Youth Group Will Grow
When churches hire youth workers for the first time, it’s most often because the current lay sponsors are either not doing the job well or have worked so hard they are burned out. So the board’s thinking runs something like this; “Right now, the group is averaging twenty people each week. A full-time professional should easily double or triple that. I mean, look at how much time he or she will be able to put in.”
You never see that kind of numeric expectation in writing, but talk to youth ministers, and over and over they’ll say, “Yeah, that’s what’s expected. The group must grow.” And after all, we do want to reach kids.
But the problem is that this idea runs smack into a simple sociological fact: Most youth groups reach peak effectiveness when attendance reaches twenty to forty students. Unless the youth minister is an especially charismatic person with excellent communication skills, merely injecting additional time into the group is not enough to overcome the social dynamic. I know church after church that may have fifty young people on the rolls, but the average attendance is between thirty and thirty-five. If attendance increases, other kids are lost out the back door.
Recently I read a comment made around the turn of the century by Francis Clark, founder of the Young People’s Society for Christian Endeavor: “I am inclined to think that any society that has an active membership of . . . seventy-five is already too large for the most efficient work.” There were no studies behind that; the field of sociology had barely begun. But Dr. Clark had already realized what recent researchers have confirmed.
Peter Wagner and Elmer Towns have both pointed out in their church-growth studies that the average person feels known and accepted by not more than thirty people. Sometimes the figure may stretch to sixty, but the point is that there is a natural cohesion in groups that are small enough for people to know each other’s name, frustrations, skills, and attitudes. When students sense that others care for them, they develop a high degree of commitment to that group. Based on his research among 3,600 Canadian young people, Donald C. Posterski writes: “Young people . . . are attracted to circles of relationships in which their presence matters. … Bigness is not necessarily better when trying to touch people who have tasted intimacy and have experienced what it is to belong. Large size alone is threatening, it can alienate the very people the organization intends to help.”
I wish I had known this when I started out in ministry as youth director for Cicero Bible Church. The church’s Christian education director wasn’t able to put time into youth ministry, and the one couple that was working with the kids wasn’t able to carry a lot of weight, so when I came, everything was focused on me. My wife and I worked incredibly hard, trying everything that was supposed to work, but we couldn’t get the group beyond twenty-five.
Then I went to another church, and we did some innovative things. We saw the group grow significantly, and I thought, Ah, we’ve broken through that barrier! But later, group attendance came tumbling down. During this period, I was working on my master’s thesis, and when I was giving my oral defense of it, Gary Collins said to me, “Mark, it sounds to me like the Hawthorne Effect.”
I said, “What?”
“At Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant in Cicero,” he said, “productivity experts adjusted the lighting, and production went up. They painted the walls-and production went up. They changed several other things, and after each change, production increased. They finally realized the increases were not coming from the specific changes but from the very fact that they were studying the workers. Giving special attention is what encouraged the people to produce more.”
Social scientists have learned from this that the presence of the researcher may influence the results of a study. But I learned something that day about youth groups: increases don’t come so much from extra work or innovative strategies as they do from simple personal attention. And most youth workers can’t give that personal attention to more than about thirty students.
This reality, oddly, helps take the pressure off youth ministers who are working like crazy but feeling like failures because attendance has plateaued. They’re not incompetent; they’re normal. Normally, groups reach that size.
Nor does it mean the end of outreach. In fact, it helps us understand how to minister to more than thirty or forty kids. The trick is delegating, bringing on adults who can each work with a smaller group. Soon you have one sponsor working with five kids, another adult leading twelve in a Bible study, and so on until the total number of kids you are reaching moves beyond the thirty-to-forty barrier. I know that’s simple and recommended a lot, but it isn’t often done effectively. Usually I hear one of four reasons why.
“I want to do it.” This comes from youth ministers who simply enjoy young people so much that they never want to lose the chance to spend most of their time in face-to-face contact with students.
“What will I do if I hand over what I’m doing to someone else?” is a question from youth workers who fear the church will mistake delegation for laziness.
“Students will come to me anyway” is the objection of some who have built close ties to certain students.
“I can’t get qualified adults” is a problem in many churches; it may be the reason the youth minister was employed.
My point is not that these reasons are untrue, but long-lasting growth in youth ministry comes only when we work to overcome these and share the ministry with others. I remember thinking, I’ve got to give adult sponsors some responsibilities, but in my heart feeling, No, I can’t. It was the hardest thing for me to give up being needed by the kids and to allow other adults to be needed in my place.
I started by asking specific people to come into the youth group and take specific responsibilities.
“Would you be the coach for the music group?” I asked one. “Will you be in charge of a play?” I asked another, and explained that meant praying with the kids, inviting them over, and building a relationship while they worked on the play. Another adult was tutoring children in Chicago, and three high school students got close to him through that. Later, another led a group of guys in working on the youth group newspaper. Consequently, we did break through that barrier again.
As we did, my role went through stages. I had been working exclusively with the students. Then I began spending some time with students directly, and some time with adults who were working with other students. Finally, I was working through other adults nearly all the time. You will take criticism for that: “He’s not even on the high school campuses anymore.” But what can happen is amazing. You’ll still be working hard, pouring your life into those adults, but your adult team will be reaching many more students than you could on your own-no matter how hard you worked.
Myth 2: Youth Ministers Are Most Important in Young People’s Spiritual Development
Every pastor feels a sense of spiritual urgency for the people in his or her care. There is a sense of being responsible to convey biblical truth. And when we look at the families young people come from, we realize many of them hold spiritual convictions that are discouragingly vague.
This urgency, however, can lead us to believe, unconsciously, “The responsibility for this young person’s spiritual development really rests on me.” Like Elijah, we feel “only I am left.” I’ve known this feeling. It’s only natural to feel discouraged when we see kids in our group fall into trouble. We were the ones entrusted with reaching them, and we somehow failed.
A bunch of guys in my youth group called themselves “The Gutter Snakes.” You name it, they did it. One of them, Tony, came to me after a Bible study. “Mark, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just let me finish a few things here.”
“I’d really like to talk to you.”
“Okay. Let’s go over on the couch and talk.”
“No, I’d like to go upstairs.”
We went upstairs into my office. He swung my door shut, sat down, and looked at me. “Mark, I just robbed a bank.”
“You what? C’mon, Tony, quit kidding me. What’s really up?”
“No, I did. You know I’ve been working for that janitorial service. Well, we were cleaning a bank this evening, and I walked by a drawer and saw it was open. I don’t know what made me do this, but I picked up a stack of twenties, dropped it into my trash can, and kept going.”
We spent the rest of the night on the phone. The president of the bank was on vacation, so we called all over to reach the chairman of the board to find out how we could make an appointment with him, confess what Tony had done, and return the money.
When Tony graduated, he went out of state to technical school to become a mechanic. The school wasn’t exactly a spiritual hotbed, and I thought, What’s going to happen to him?
Then one day Tony knocked on my door.
“Tony, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“I thought we ought to get a college Bible study going this summer,” he said.
This wasn’t my doing was all I could think as we parted that evening. Maybe I had been a small part of the puzzle, but his parents had influenced him far more than I. And when I resigned to take another position a few months later, it was Tony who assumed leadership of that Bible study.
Another member of the Gutter Snakes, Hank, was from a good family-a very good family-but he wasn’t distinguishing the family name. We had our annual senior banquet at the end of the year, and Hank brought booze and drugs. I had to confront him, but nothing seemed to get through. He went away to college, and I felt like a total failure with him. Later he graduated, went to the Boston area, and started a church.
Experiences like that taught me the relieving news that I’m only one of many influences in young people’s lives. The Holy Spirit doesn’t place a young person exclusively in my care.
Youth for Christ conducted a survey once to identify the significant people in five or six areas of students’ lives. The youth director rated high in spiritual development, but in area after area, the answer was parents or friends.
Recently I conducted five, one-hour interviews with youth workers. I asked them just one question: “What brought you to your current level of spiritual maturity?” These youth leaders didn’t talk much about their own high school youth directors. Without exception, they identified two things: a period of personal difficulty or hard times, and a warm relationship with one or both parents. Surprisingly, it didn’t even seem to matter whether the parents were Christians.
So youth leaders can take comfort they’re not alone, and then try to capitalize on that. A key part of my role as a youth director is to help students have good relationships with their parents so they in turn can have good relationships with God.
To do that well, I try to understand how a student is responding to his or her family. There are four general responses kids make.
Conscious affirmation of what their mom and dad are doing. That’s the kid you love to see-if they have committed parents.
Unconscious affirmation; teenagers don’t realize they are affirming what their parents are doing. Frequently this comes in a family with a mediocre spiritual life.
Moratorium: The kid says, “I don’t know whether I like what’s happening in my family. I don’t know where I am.”
Rebellion, which sometimes is toward Jesus Christ and sometimes away from him.
I try to help kids see which response they’re making, sort options, and see consequences. In some ways adolescence is by nature a moratorium period. A majority of kids we work with go through this stage. It’s exciting to be a helpful part of their decision process.
Understanding this, I established quarterly breakfast meetings with parents to tell them what was on my heart and to listen to them. They helped me, when talking to a kid later, to understand the family dynamics and be of most help.
Myth 3: Kids Get Most of Their Theology through Bible Studies and Sunday School
It’s interesting to ask kids why they come to Sunday school. I usually hear three reasons.
Many kids will honestly say, “I’m here because I have to be. My parents make me.” A minority of students will say, “I want to learn the Bible” or some other answer that indicates a desire to grow spiritually. It tends to be less than 30 percent. The primary reason for most kids is “to see my friends.”
This makes you begin to ask, “What is the role of the Sunday school?” You quickly realize that the most significant thing happening there, in the eyes of most students, is relationships, the bonding among friends. This is especially true of kids in junior high or early high school.
Kids come to youth events looking for friends. Even in discipleship groups, high school students are not necessarily doing careful Bible studies. They usually are spending most of the time talking about their problems and praying together. In short, a teenager will not become theologically mature until he or she is sociologically comfortable.
This means two things. First, Bible studies may be teaching theology; they may not. It depends primarily on whether students feel comfortably part of the social structure. If they feel left out, our best teaching will usually be left out as well. Second, some type of theological education will be happening wherever students do feel socially comfortable, though that may be in contexts we’d never expect.
I remember getting frustrated with kids who would come to youth group meetings but not seem to catch what I was teaching. Or wondering why there weren’t more kids like one thirteen-year-old who said, “I get tired of the fun and games in youth group. Let’s get into the Word.” Learning that Sunday school and Bible studies aren’t necessarily the only, or even best, place for kids to learn theology helps take the pressure off.
Students living biblical truth is always our primary purpose; we want kids to learn theology clearly and then put it into action. But we don’t have to feel vaguely unsettled about seemingly unspiritual icebreakers and group games. These things can prepare kids for learning. We can feel less frustrated about the kids who would rather carry on with their friends than sit and discuss the doctrine of the Trinity. They may not be so much immature as normal.
Finally, knowing this has helped me become more effective in communicating biblical principles. I’ve realized, for example, that Christian music is a big part of many teenagers’ theological education. When a kid goes to a rock concert, or rides in a car with the tape player on, he has all his buddies with him and they are having a great time. He feels socially comfortable, so when the musicians sing something, he’s open to it.
The unfortunate aspect of this is that not all the things students learn through contemporary music are, shall we say, theologically precise. To capitalize on the educational power of contemporary music, it’s important to help kids sort out what they are hearing. I do this with my own kids as we ride in the car. Sometimes a song will come on, I’ll listen, then play like I’m naive or can’t understand the words.
“Nick, is this what that song is saying?” I’ll ask my son.
“Oh, no, Dad.”
My daughter, Jori, who’s older, will say, “Yeah, that’s what it’s saying.”
Nick will say, “You’re kidding. Really?” Then we’ll get into a discussion.
The same kind of thing can happen in a thousand ways in a youth group. Whenever young people are together and feel accepted, we can be there to ask questions, to stir their thinking, and to bring in biblical ideas. They may learn as much theology in an informal talk as during our finest Sunday school presentation. I’ve learned that it’s the skills of a shepherd that produce the insights of a theologian.
Myth 4: Youth Need to Be Well-Grounded Before They Minister to Others
In his book Dedication and Leadership, Douglas Hyde tells how when he was converted to Communism, the first thing party members did was hand him stacks of the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper, and send him to a factory to sell them. That was his first day.
When he started selling the papers, people asked questions, and he had to come up with answers. He didn’t know enough about Communist dogma to be able to take a stand for Communism, but he tried to give the best answers he could. As soon as he got back to the party office that afternoon, he said, “Hey, they were asking me this and this; and I said this and this. Was that right?”
He was ready to be taught. They talked into the wee hours about Communist doctrine.
When Hyde later became a Christian, he was surprised to find the church does the opposite. It takes a new convert and says, in effect, “Take our new believers’ class for two years and then you’ll be prepared to witness effectively.” By the end of the class the convert has lost his contacts with nonChristians and his zeal as well.
This account made me reconsider how I approached youth ministry. Was I looking for every opportunity to put kids into service, or was I largely thinking, This is their time for preparation and learning before they become adults and really serve?
Glenn Heck, a professor at National College of Education, says that in the junior high years there is a period of brain development that apparently triggers a desire to serve. Junior high students want to baby-sit, to run movie projectors. When they come to church and say, “Can I help out with little kids?” we feel a little unsure entrusting our preschoolers’ spiritual development to an eleven-year-old. So we say, “You need to be in your Sunday school class.” Then ten years later, when we really want a Sunday school teacher, these kids have already been trained not to serve.
I think of Paul, a friend who graduated from seminary and has just returned from two years in the mission field. When he was in junior high school, he went to the C.E. director of his church and said, “Can I teach? I want to teach the little kids during children’s church.”
She said, “Yes, you can teach. But since you’ll be missing the morning service, I want you to attend the evening service, take notes on the message, and turn in those notes to me each week.”
So he went to Sunday school, then taught children’s church, and in the evening took notes on the message and turned them in. The church happened to have another morning service during the same time Sunday school met, and after a while he realized he missed that, so he started going to the morning service instead of Sunday school. He dropped out of Sunday school. How tragic.
And he ended up in the ministry.
Certainly any time you allow people to serve before they are ready, it is a risk-so you have to do it carefully. But not letting students serve is a bigger risk-the danger they’ll never learn real Christianity. You learn to walk by walking; you learn to play basketball by picking up a ball and starting to dribble. And you learn to be a Christian by living out the Christian life.
Whenever my youth group was staging a concert or putting on a dinner for people in the inner city, I saw the kids learn things about the Lord they could have learned in no other way. Time and again I’ve seen it’s not “Learn, then do,” as much as it is “Do, then learn.”
Myth 5: It’s Best for a Youth Minister to Stay a Long Time
I often hear lamented the statistic that the average youth ministry tenure is eighteen months. “If you’re really committed, if you really care about kids, you’ll stay,” goes the reasoning.
I agree in general that the “stay and minister” emphasis is wholesome. There’s truth in the teaching that staying for one high school generation gives students someone they can depend on; it teaches them to trust adults in the church. And you can’t get much going in youth ministry in less than two years.
But there are two problems with the way the eighteen-months statistic is generally presented. First, it doesn’t take into account the many college and seminary students who are doing youth ministry during the school year, or other temporary or part-time situations.
Second, and more important, it implies that longer ministry is always better. Often it is, but there is a time to go. Sometimes staying can be counterproductive.
One time for a youth leader to move is when he or she is in conflict with the senior pastor or has lost respect for the pastor. There is a tendency for the leader to feel in those situations, I’ve got to stay, or these kids won’t have anything left. But staying usually creates greater tension than leaving. The kids may not understand a leader’s leaving, but at least they are not getting a negative impression of Christianity as they see two mature Christians in a cold war.
Another time, and this is tough for individuals to recognize, is when relationships with the kids have largely become more buddy-buddy than adult-student. (A similar situation is when a youth worker becomes romantically attached to one of the members in the group.) I remember one adult sponsor who became such a close friend of certain kids that she was no longer able to help them. Their growth was slowed because she was operating more as a youth than an adult. I finally had to talk with her and some of the kids to help them wean themselves. Many of them didn’t like it, and that was hard to do, but it was in their best interest.
A third indicator that it’s time for a youth director to move on is when youth ministry becomes too routine: there’s no growth or challenge, no sense of spiritual warfare. The last two times I made job changes, I felt, I’m not growing as an individual, and in two years they’ll be able to tell that. I don’t want to minister leveled out. For my own integrity, it’s time to move.
A move is hard. When a leader leaves, something is going to fall. Ministry won’t continue the same. But when youth ministry gets too routine and easy, it’s time to seek new challenges. Most churches are not prepared to say, “Well, you’ve done a nice job as youth director, so now we’ll let you expand and direct young adult ministries as well,” so usually the new challenges mean a move.
The time to move may come in two years, or it may come in seven, but it doesn’t mean failure as a youth minister. Ministry involves some moves. Well-timed, they can be productive for the kingdom.
I had a young fellow as an intern who agreed to work with me for one year. We worked together for a year, and in that time I gave him everything I could. He could have stayed for another three years and done a marvelous job, but his growth pattern would have leveled off. He needed to be out on his own.
Well, he stuck around for two more months, and finally I said, “This is now fourteen months. We agreed to twelve months. For your development as a minister to youth, you’ve got to go.” I gave him a date by which to find some other place to minister. And that felt horrible to me. That felt horrible to the kids in our youth group.
But three years later, a year after I had left, he returned to that church fully prepared to be the youth director. Had he not been kicked out of the nest, he may not have been ready. Not only did he minister there, he stayed longer than I had. I’d been there seven years; he was there eight or nine. I felt like my ministry thus stretched over about fifteen years. It happened because we were willing to face honestly, without feeling guilty about it, that there is a time to move.
Based on the successes and failures of a generation of youth ministers, I’ve offered five youth-ministry myths, generally accepted insights that don’t fully hold up. You may want to take issue with them or refine them. I welcome the dialogue. If we work together, we won’t myth the mark.
Mark Senter is assistant professor of Christian education at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
* * *
THE ULTIMATE YOUTH PASTOR
Periodically, LEADERSHIP receives resumes from people seeking pastoral positions. But rarely has one stood out like the following, which was forwarded to us by Michael Simone, assistant pastor at Virginia Beach (Virginia) Community Chapel.
Joe Phizgeschichte
1640 Wittenburg Dr.
Energy City, Tennessee
OBJECTIVE:
Position in local church that will utilize creative leadership abilities such as: memorizing fifteen Ideas books, driving straight through to any destination on the West Coast, counseling one-on-one in fast-food restaurants, and knowing how to do ninety-nine things with bananas.
QUALIFICATIONS:
1. Do not desire the pulpit.
2. Ran three bicycle trips to Disney World last year (lost only two kids).
3. Can drive a bus, forklift, or twenty-year-old church van.
4. Have card file of toll-free numbers for all major film distributors.
5. Able to role play any family crisis (acting out all the parts myself).
6. Never went to senior prom (and thus understand the emotional pain of adolescence).
Age: 28 (going on 16)
Health: Excellent (some hearing loss, providentially)
Marital status: Married, two children. (Family has me on videotape for use during long absences).
* * *
YOU KNOW YOU’RE TOO OLD FOR YOUTH WORK WHEN …
You think Swatch is past tense for switch.
“The Boss” refers to your spouse, not Bruce Springsteen.
You can’t resist asking:
-Girls to tuck in their blouses under their sweaters.
-Boys to wear their suspenders on their shoulders.
-Boys or girls to tie their sneakers.
You think pizza ought to be reheated before it’s eaten for breakfast.
You assume shopping malls are for shopping.
You volunteer to host the senior-adult Bulgarian travelogue in order to avoid another lock-in.
You lose the spiritual gift of sleeping with one eye open at youth camps.
You think retreat means rest.
Your third fifteen-passenger van has 99,000 miles on it.
You begin to question, on a summer trip, why you often drive more consecutive hours than the federal government allows truckers to.
You dream about going into a nice, relaxing occupation like being an air traffic controller.
Your grandchildren ask you what you want to be when you grow up.
-Doyle Sager
First Baptist Church
Sedalia, Missouri
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
