Last month Dan Kimball blogged about Youth Ministry 3.0 and said something I knew deep down inside somewhere, but had never struck me until he articulated it.

“Youth Ministry sets the path for the whole church to follow.”

It’s perhaps the most important ministry of your church. The old saying is somewhat true: “Teens are not the church of the future; they’re the church of today.” Yes, they are they church of today, but they are also the church of tomorrow. And as these teens grow into adults, their church will become the church of the future. This is why you must evaluate yourself and the youth ministry and lead with a strong vision.

Something I have been wondering about and this book stirred this up in my thinking again, is how influential youth ministry is to the church at large. What I mean by that is wondering if what youth ministries do now will become what churches are like in the future. I have been interested in looking at in particular the rise of some “adult” churches in the Bible belt. This may just be my perspective and incorrect – but some of the very large ones, look almost identical to youth ministries of the 1990’s. The lights, the bands, the smoke machines, the whole shebang in what the worship gatherings are like.

Youth ministry may be critical in so many more ways than you ever considered.

About two years ago we had around 20 jr. highers involved in our “go deep” Bible study. It’s a two year course where they study the Old Testament one year and go through the New Testament the next year. By the time each jr. higher transitions into high school, they have a basic understanding of the entire Bible. It sounds like a great program, except that the kids who came were only there because their parents forced them. The jr. highers felt like they were learning very little and the amount of life change we saw coming out of that Bible study was very disheartening.

So, we stopped the program for a summer (like we do with most of the regular programming) and did a lot of hard evaluating, refocusing, and renewing the vision for what it should be like. In short, we decided that it was too academic and needed to be more intentional about connecting God’s Word to jr. highers’ individual lives. The plan was to take the curriculum out of the classroom and put it into small groups where two adult leaders could co-teach gender and grade specific groups of about 5 to 8 jr. highers for two years. We also changed it from a Sunday morning to a Wednesday night and updated the curriculum to include personal journaling about assigned scripture readings every weekday.

The changes were met with some debate, opposition, and pushback from several people in our church, including people in leadership. When it eventually came before our church board, they debated long and hard about the changes. Although the vote narrowly passed, it left me feeling very unsure if the season of evaluation and dreaming would be worth it the road ahead.

But two years later I can look back and say it was definitely worth it. This past year we had about 110 jr. highers actively involved, 24 adult leaders passionately teaching in small groups, and amazing stories of life-change like you wouldn’t believe! It’s not just a special kid here or there that’s been impacted, it’s almost every single one! In fact, you can watch many of them share their testimonies right here. Plus, most of these jr. high small groups will now transition into being high school small groups, meaning our transition rate from jr. high to high school ministry is poised to jump from about 25% to 80% this year.

Maybe you think taking a couple months (or even a year) off is too long of a period to step back and refocus, and for you and your ministry, maybe it is. Or maybe you’re the kind of person who has to be busy doing something in order to feel like your ministry is accomplishing anything. In my humble opinion, ministry is not as much about “doing” as much as it is about “being.” Identity precedes function. Function flows from identity, not the other way around. I take time to focus in our identity for a season and let the function flow from it for the rest of the year.

If I didn’t, then our jr. high ministry would still be struggling with about 20 kids involved. Was the season of a “time out” from jr. high programming worth it for us? Absolutely. Lives are now being changed exponentially because of it.

Don’t be afraid to slow down or even shut down programs for a season in order to change lives. It’s really not as counter-productive as you might think.

Last Sunday night at our sr. high large-group meeting I took the teens through Matthew 9 and specifically focused on Jesus’ illustration about old and new wine skins. After digging into the text a bit, I applied it to our youth ministry and the discontentment I feel toward are ineffectiveness. Sure, there are glimmers of life-change here and there, but nothing close to what I believe God wants to see happen through our ministry.

I concluded the night by doing a bit of vision casting for the fall and asked them to take a survey evaluating our high school ministry based on our deep and wide ministry strategy. I’ll make the survey available as a free download for this week’s Freebie Friday in case you’re interested, but here is a general summary of the results from my group.

[UPDATE: The survey and my lesson are now available to download.]

The evaluation results

• Kids who claimed to have experienced significant spiritual growth over the past year are also the same kids whose parents have regular spiritual conversations with them at home. These kids also said that the #1 influence on their spiritual growth is their parents. No huge surprise there, but it’s good to have it in writing.
• Students who claimed to have experienced little to no spiritual growth over the past school year said their parents have infrequent or no spiritual conversations with them and that their friends are the primary influence in their lives. I guess that’s okay as long as they have solid friends, but how mature can their peers possibly be?
• Our sr. high large-group gathering (game/worship followed by me teaching with interruptions for small group table discussions) was almost unanimously “a little bit” influential in their spiritual growth this year. Follow-up questions indicate that it is not due so much to my content as much as it is due to how it is delivered. The teens want to talk, discuss, and control the conversations themselves. They want to ask their own questions and have less structure. But they also want more depth and they want it to convict them, not just let them feel okay.
• Almost every teen comes to our large-group gathering because of friends, which tells me that if a couple key people stop coming, the meetings would drop to 0 attendance really fast.
• Conversely, the high school small groups were almost unanimously “pretty influential” to “it helped change my life” because they say that they feel safe, people are open with each other, and they talk about how God’s Word interacts with their daily life.
• Most of our kids are not really having spiritual conversations with unbelievers because they’re afraid and nervous. The “go wide” aspect of our strategy/vision/values/purpose/mission isn’t really taking place in kids’ individual lives.

My response

Based on this, I’m talking with the other pastors at my church about ditching sr. high large groups to create another small group that’s more of an open-forum discussion of life issues while I pray that somehow I’ll be able to join their conversation and take it deep into His Word without the prep I’m used to. However, there are a couple things I need to consider:

• Jesus’ had his small group, but he also saw value in teaching to the multitudes. He didn’t do it the way the religious system called for in his day by using a synagogue, rather he taught from hillsides and boats off-shore, essentially, where people were already gathered. Because of Jesus’ example, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to eliminate large-group teaching times completely, but something must change to make those times more effective in facilitating spiritual growth.
• Although our small groups are highly influential, do the large-group teaching times play a part in making those groups effective? Maybe the large-group time is what sets the biblical context and background for the small groups to have their effect.
• I’m not sure how teens defined “spiritual growth” when they filled out the evaluation. It’s possible that some kids equate spiritual growth to an emotional feeling at a camp or conference, in which case, their input about spiritual growth in the survey may or may not be helpful or accurate.
• An open-forum/deep theological format may be appealing to teens, but part of leadership is knowing what teens needs to hear and think through because they may not know what they really need. We often have to give kids what they need, not just want they want.

I think the next step is to have several of the high school teens over for dinner sometime to talk about these results and the future direction of our high school ministry in the fall. I’m also going to experiment with their “open forum/deep theology” discussion approach in our summer small groups here at my house. But that’s only the beginning. If we keep the large-group meeting time, the changes have to be deeper-rooted than re-microwaving the same large-group ministry or just trying to a different format. I’ll be sure to let you all know what comes from it.

It’s not a complete list, but here are some biggies for me.

1. The pressure is to perform — have big events, lots of kids involved in activities and bible studies. I have trained sr. pastors about how to work with their youth leaders and I know they often feel the same pressure to perform. Sometimes the pressure is self-inflicted, sometimes not. Youth pastors feel it, too, and unfortunately it’s the teens who feel the results of it.

2. The adults and parents who pay my salary are looking for a youth ministry like the one they experienced when they were in grade school, even though that was 20-40 years ago. Today youth ministry sometimes means doing very “non-performance” based things, like not coming into the office in order to spend the day with a kid instead, or taking kids deep into the Word as the group shrinks because it’s not solely entertainment anymore. I’m not sure why people think that having kids involved in programs somehow equals spiritual growth. To me, that means we’re just keeping kids busy.

3. Perhaps my biggest frustration is that parents are often not taking ownership of their kids’ spiritual growth. They outsource it to the “experts” (i.e. church youth leaders) expecting us to make their kids grow. I’m not sure how that can be possible, though, when parents are just as spiritually apathetic as their kids, except they hide it at church on Sunday mornings. Their kids, on the other hand, don’t feel as much of a need to put on a church show each week. Then, when they graduate and are finally on their own, they decide that church and a relationship with God isn’t worth their time because they never saw it at home. I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle that cannot be won until parents own up to their own responsibility to grow and model Christ for their kids, and to initiate spiritual conversations with them.

Thankfully, my sr. pastor gives me the freedom to fail, to think outside the box, and to not follow the performance-driven ministry model that leads me to nothing but frustration. Actually, based on my suggestion, all of the pastors in my church meet every week to pray and help me think through some of these youth ministry issues. We went through “Ministry Mutiny” by Greg Stier together, now we’re reading “Youth Ministry 3.0” by Mark Oestreicher, and next we’ll do “Inside the Mind of Youth Pastors” by Mark Riddle. The best part about it is that the entire church is starting to think along the same lines about how we do (and don’t) do ministry. Essentially, it’s not as much about doing something as much as it is about becoming something: a community of believers.

Of course there are many more challenges than what I mentioned above, some of which are discussed in more detail in an old 2006 guest blog series called, “Issues in Youth Ministry: What needs to change?”

What are your toughest challenges in youth ministry?

[ This post is based on an interview I did last year. ]

These lists could be a lot longer, but here are a couple to get you started. I’d love for you guys to continue these lists in the comments below.

Current problems

1. Youth leaders are not internalizing the Word themselves before they teach it to others, and thus a disconnect between real life and faith is unintentionally communicated.

2. Parents are not being the spiritual role models their teenagers desperately need.

3. Youth ministries are too wrapped up in “doing” ministry rather than “being” ministry. Ministries find their identity in their function instead of seeking the Lord first for their identity and vision and then letting function flow from that.

4. Youth leader don’t pray enough. If we truly believed in the power of prayer, we’d spend more time in prayer than anything else.

Future challenges

1. Perhaps the biggest challenge for youth ministry in the next several years will be defining what community is, and then somehow enabling it to organically take place. The Internet and youth culture continue to change how people view relationships and how they interact. Since we are made in His image and one of the core essentials of that is relationships, we know that community will never go away, but the church’s ideology will either have to shift or be intentional about making a stance. Forming small groups and telling the participants to talk to each other for a couple years is not necessarily community.

2. Somewhat related is that our communication and teaching styles may need to change. Rather than lecturing from a stage or even discussing in a classroom small group, perhaps teaching will need to change to a community-driven experience that interacts with the real world.

What problems do we have? What future challenges do you see for youth ministry? Perhaps most importantly, how are you addressing these problems and challenges in your youth group?

…before I started.

1. It’s very emotional, unlike any other job. You’ll experience the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows.

2. It’s very messy, and always will be as long as you work with people who are just as imperfect and sinful as you are.

3. It’s constantly changing. Youth culture never stays the same from year to year, and neither do the kids, values, nor worldviews. Youth ministry must always morph along with it. As soon as you think you have a handle on it, think again.

4. It requires strong vision casting. Any leadership position does, but leadership in youth ministry does especially. Your leaders, teens, parents, church and community all depend on it.

5. Don’t think you need to do it all. In fact, the ministry is healthier when you enable others to serve instead of taking responsibility for every youth event, trip, fundraiser, small group, idea, and strategy that furthers the vision.

6. No matter what people at your new church say, don’t make deep rooted changes in the ministry until after two years of building trust and respect.

7. Live a life that is above reproach in everything. Eventually even “little things” will come to light and you will be held to a higher level of accountability for it (and rightly so).

8. Kids really don’t care how “cool” you are or how well you know scripture as much as they care about how much you love them as individuals, not as a group.

9. Have a firm grasp on what your values are in ministry and make sure they’re are aligned with a church’s written and unwritten values before accepting a paid youth ministry position there.

10. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t see results and life-change take place right away. Sometimes it takes years, and even then you won’t always hear about it.

What do you wish someone would’ve told you about youth ministry before you got started? We’d all love to hear it in the comments below.

Last week in a conversation with my mentee, he asked, “How do you know if you’re called to ministry?” If we’re all honest, there have been times when each of us has questioned our calling to ministry, particularly during the difficult times. My mentee is not currently in that situation, but the issue of feeling “called out” of ministry is still a difficult one.

When we go into vocational ministry, we often use language like, “God is calling me to serve at this church.” Or, when we leave one ministry position and go to another, we say, “God called me away from that ministry to this new one.” Sometimes we’re clearly over-spiritualizing a situation, sometimes not.

But when we start to question the calling, let’s not confuse those emotions with ones of discouragement or insecurity. For example, if you had a lot of people encouraging and supporting you, would you still feel “called out” of ministry? If you felt affirmed by key people in your ministry, would your calling change?

Remember, our calling into ministry does not come from people, nor should it be retracted by people. It comes solely from the Lord.

If you’re doubting your call to ministry, don’t confuse it with feeling discouraged or insecure. Deep down, we all feel that in ministry.

Affirmation and encouragement are absolutely healthy and necessary things to have in your ministry, but never should we base a calling to ministry on the praise or opinions of others. Base your calling on the Lord’s direction in your life.

Last week I wrote a guest blog post for YouthMinBlog.com on their weekly topic of building relationships with teens. I decided to take a bit of a different approach, though. In fact, I argued that the #1 key ingredient to building healthy relationships with teens actually has nothing to do with the teens at all.

[ Read the full article over at YouthMinBlog.com ]

It’s a good idea to interview every new youth leader before unleashing them to be a spiritual role model for the teens. If you’re the paid youth director, you’re the one who stands between a potentially harmful adult and the teens, so be very careful with this process. Even if you know the perspective youth worker very well, have a formal meeting anyway where you sit down with the individual and clarify some very important issues.

Your church’s insurance company may have a list of questions they want you to go through with each youth leader, so be sure to check with them if you haven’t already done so. Here are some additional questions I like to ask:

SPIRITUAL

• When and how did you become a Christian? List any circumstances or people that influenced you to make this decision.
• How is God working in your life now?
• How would you describe your spiritual journey and your relationship with God today? What are your struggles (we all have them!)? What’s going well?
• In what ways has God used your gifts, talents, and abilities to bring glory to Himself? How has that tied in with your heart for student leadership?
• How well do you know your Bible? Do you feel comfortable teaching it to others?
• How have you gained the amount of Bible knowledge that you presently possess?
• Do you have a spiritual accountability partner?
• Are you open to greater spiritual accountability?

PAST HISTORY

• Have you ever gone through treatment for alcohol or drug abuse?
• Have you ever been ticketed for reckless driving or driving under the influence?
• Have you ever been arrested, detained, or questioned by police for any other illegal actions of any type?
• Has there been alcohol abuse, drug abuse, physical or sexual abuse in your family background?
• If yes, what steps have you taken to minimize the impact that those issues will create for you, both now and in the future?
• Have you ever been treated for any type of psychiatric disorder?
• Have you ever been accused, charged, or alleged to have committed any act of neglecting, abusing or molesting any child?
• Is there any circumstance or pattern in your life which would make it inappropriate for you to serve with minors or would compromise the integrity of Alexandria Covenant Church?
• Do you have any communicable diseases, such as TB, Hepatitis B, HIV, AIDS, etc.?
• Are you under medication or treatment for any disease or condition?

MINISTRY

• How do you decide which movies are acceptable for you to view?
• Would you feel comfortable recommending all of your music to a student? Why or why not?
• Please list the dates and activities of other ministry experiences that you have been involved in here at Alexandria Covenant Church.
• What is your personal vision for ministry at Alexandria Covenant Church? Do you have any ideas of how God might accomplish that through you?
• Why would you like to join the youth volunteer leadership team.
• Is there anything else you feel that we need to know about you?

Please note that the none of the answers to these questions will necessarily eliminate someone from serving in our youth ministry. They’re just here to open the dialog and make sure we bring up the issues.

PRAYER PARTNERS
In addition, we also ask each youth leader to find 5 prayer partners, other adults who will commit to praying for them on a regular on-going basis about their ministry to the teenagers. The youth leader turns their prayer partners’ names and contact info in to me so I can add them to our ministry’s prayer mailing list.

REFERENCES
Each youth leader also submits two references, which we either call and interview, or ask them to fill out a questionnaire about the perspective youth leader.

BACKGROUND CHECKS
Do it! No exceptions. No excuses. Make sure the church has a background check on file for you, too! Having worked in two churches where youth leaders were taken to court for inappropriate sexual conduct with youth (one went to prison, the other didn’t), I know first-hand just how critical this is. No one is immune or an exception. Do it now before it’s too late! Seriously. Do it.

A common criticism: It’s been said that this process of interviewing leaders, setting boundaries and expectations is too rigorous. They say, “We’re just thankful to get people to work with the youth! This process is a obstacle — no one will take the time to be so scrutinized.” My response: “It is absolutely an obstacle, one that is totally necessary. If a potential youth leader is either too apathetic toward the ministry and teens to go through the process, or is nervous about being scrutinized, then I don’t want that person on the team in the first place.” Anyone who is passionate about teens is glad to go through it and sees the value in being very careful about which adult leaders are officially established to be spiritual influences and which ones aren’t.