5 Easy Excuses for sub-par Youth Ministry

One of the lies that is easy to buy into, particularly for new Youth Pastors in small towns, is that our ministries are not as effective as others. I mean, this past week, my dad sent me the video his youth pastor made at their church for their Student Ministries Promo, and man, it made you want to be a part of that ministry. It was awesome! There was evidence of lives being changed, kids coming to Christ, Parents supporting the ministry. It was enough to make one jealous.

So if you are feeling in the dumps about the effectiveness of your Ministry, here are five simple excuses to help you feel better about yourself and help your supervisors understand why your not having the same results as down the street;

1. Facilities – if I just had better facilities, we could do so much more.

2. Volunteers – if we just had more volunteers, we could do so much more

3. Student leaders – if I just had some student leaders, we could do so much more

4. Time – if I just had more time, we could do so much more

5. Budget – if we just had more money, we could do so much more

The problem here is that these are all valid excuses. We could do more in our ministries if we had bigger spaces, bigger budgets, and more bodies.

But be that as it may, God doesn’t care. When it all boils down, God has placed you in your specific ministry in your specific church with your specific context to do his specific work. Just because there are other youth groups that can afford to give away iPad’s for door prizes doesn’t mean that that is what your called to do.

Does that mean we shouldn’t seek those things? Absolutely not. You could do more with more space and more money and more bodies.

But should that be an excuse to run a sub-par ministry? Absolutely not. If you can’t find a way to make what you have run effectively, you stand no chance of being more effective with those things.

So quit making excuses, quit being content with sub-par youth events, and make the most with what God has already entrusted you with.

Weekend in Review Volume #6

Series: He Said What? A look at the words of Jesus Christ, wk. w

Sermon in a sentence: The key to friendships/relationships that last is to Love Differently, Love Unconditionally, and Love out Loud

Understandable Message: We all long for deeper friendships, but sometimes we aren’t aware that friendships take work, they don’t just happen. In John 13, Jesus laid out a model for better relationships, to Love Differently than the world (the world tells us if it feels good, do it, so we do it as long as it feels good, but that leads to the second point…), we must Love Unconditionally, and we must Love Out Loud.

Element of Fun: We are going to be going to the One-by-Youth In St. Louis in a few weeks, and so last night we gave someone the chance to go for free, but to win they had to make an impossible shot. Really all it was was a bucket on one side of the room that they had three chances to throw a ball into. Fairly simple game, but since our participant didn’t win, we will try again next week.

Music playlist: Shane and Shane – Dare2share unending worship cd is what we listened to pre-service. ( we dont have a worship team yet, but check out this post and you’ll see I am working on it)

Memorable Moment: One of our questions in our break out time dealt with the difference between loving with our words and loving with actions, and why words aren’t good enough. Two groups got stuck on this question and couldn’t quite understand it, a guys and a girls group. I gave the same example for the most part, but slightly different, and my guys group that it was pretty great. The guys version involved their city being under attack by evil invaders, and one of them building a wall while the rest sat behind him “encouraging” him. If they really wanted to show love, they would help him by taking action. The girls scenario was that the human race was becoming extinct and one of them was placed in charge of gardening all of the food for the rest of humanity to live on, while her friends sat back and “encouraged” her.

Up Next: He Said what? wk. 4

 

Big Church Envy

If you ever have a disagreement with someone and you want to win, just call them prideful. It’s flawless, because from that point on, anything they say is just their pride swelling up. As long as your the first person to play the pride card, you win, every time.

So say your having a disagreement over the vision of a ministry with someone, they aren’t seeing things the way you see them, just blame it on their pride. Case closed.

I hate that. Because unfortunately, more often than not, the person who plays that card is the one who’s pride is really in the way. Sure, there can be exceptions, but if you play that card, you better check yourself.

I got that card played on me a while back and it infuriated me. There was a real issue that needed to be fixed and is still yet to be fixed because of pride. I knew my intentions and motives going in, and they weren’t flowing from my pride.

But it did get me searching for ways I was being prideful, and unfortunately as a Human being, pride is always to be found.

I take pride in my education. I feel this is a good kind of pride, for the most part, because be it as it may, graduates from my school are sought after more than any other Christian college, and so being able to say I hold my degree from there gives me a bit of a swagger, which can be good or bad.

One of the negative ways it plays out, however, can definitely come out quite a bit. I am blessed to still keep in touch with my old class mates and see them in thriving ministries. It’s amazing to me that some of the guys I was in class with have been able to achieve some of the things they have done right out of college. It’s amazing to me how many went from classes and very little experience to big churches in big cities with established healthy ministries.

Unfortunately, I can often become envious of them. Being in a small town in a small church and seeing several of my good friends with less experience than I have graduate at the same time as me and get job offers from great, large churches, where as Im having to build in an extremely small town with what sometimes feels as not the greatest support, it can cause me to be jealous.

But I feel like this is something every small town youth pastor deals with. There is this unfortunate myth that small town student ministry isn’t as good, isn’t as important, isn’t as effective. We may not every even outright say that, but if we looked at our ministries, its being yelled.

I could never do that, my church is too small. I could never make a an atmosphere  in our youth services that beckons for visitors, I don’t have the resources. I could never plan as great of a camp as that church, I don’t have the time. Whatever it is that you feel you can’t do because of your context.

And though some of it may be true, and some of it may be unnecessary (like how I think it would be awesome to incorporate video’s into our pre-message every week, thats not necessarily important, nor do I have the time to invest in that because there are other important things to get done.)

So though that may be true, its also false, because there are things we could do, we just aren’t. We have boughten into the myth that our ministry can’t be as great as first united church down the street, so we stop trying those things and get content with what we have.

This is a very dumbed down sentence to describe it, so don’t hold this against me, but the #1 thing that grows any ministry is its leadership. I say its dumbed down because you could come back and say ” Well what about relationship with Christ, or biblical dependency, etc. etc.”

A real leader in a ministry already has that, its a given. But whats missing from that is the leadership attributes such as Vision, Delegation, Mobilization. A real leader in youth ministry will not only be teaching his students the bible, but also the vision of them mobilized to make a difference in their school. A real leader will give their students a purpose that is more than showing up on Sunday or Wednesday nights.

If you want to see your ministry grow, your students need to grow. And if you want to see your students grow, then you need to grow. Continually.

When tool’s are no longer tools

One of my frustrations is that I don’t think I am a good small group teacher. Every week, I pour into a lesson, then the night comes, we go through the lesson, I ask some questions which students give answers too, and thats it. There isn’t a whole lot of conversation that comes from the lesson. But every week, with out fail, we close in prayer and say Amen, and then discussion starts about who knows what.

Last night, we got, somehow, on the topic of tracts. Now I personally am extremely against tracts. I think one of the reasons why I hate them is because of living in Lynchburg, VA the last 4 or 5 years, and just seeing how waiters and waitresses hated working on Sunday afternoons because the church folk would come out and instead of leaving a tip, they would leave a tract.

I think the main reason why I hate them, though, is because to me they symbolize the weakness of the american church when it comes to discipleship, because in essence, when most people give out a tract, they are saying to the person receiving it “Here, Go save yourself. Good luck with the rest of life.”

What’s frustrating about that is that the great commission doesn’t say “Go out and make converts” but rather it says “Go and make disciples.” Handing someone a tract is something that people do if they are trying to just get people saved and then they move on.

So I hate tracts with a passion.

But as I am explaining this to our students, my wife butts in to tell of how her Mother got saved because of a tract. But she also noted that it wasn’t just the tract that saved her, but the people who gave her the tract went through it with her, and invited her to church and to their home.

See for this couple that saved my mother-in-law, a tract served a purpose for their discipleship, it led to a further conversation. But for many who hand out tracts, this idea is foreign.

So it got me thinking about the idea that maybe its not necessarily tracts that I hate, but the fact that people don’t know how to use them that I hate. And that got me going on one of the buzzwords that has been going around youth ministry the last decade or so: Programs.

If you have read anything Youth Ministry related since 2000, you have read how evil programs are and we need to get rid of them. The Pizza nights don’t serve a purpose and aren’t making any converts or disciples. “What you save people with is what you save people to.” You know what I am talking about.

But if my mother-in-law got saved with a tract, shouldn’t she still be only reading tracts?

I get the notion of that saying, I do. But I also think, maybe we are just a little off with that sort of thinking. Maybe we need to realize that there are tools we can use to get people saved. But if something doesn’t have a clear purpose behind it to move that person to the next level, then yeah, we are just saving them to that level.

So if a tract has a purpose of starting a conversation to open doors for other conversations, then it has a purpose. If we just hand someone a tract and walk away praying “God let them see you in that tract” then yeah, maybe we have great faith, but we really aren’t being purposeful.

In that same way, If I am having a Pizza night to bring in students who don’t come to my ministry so that I can build a relationship with them and get them back to a regular youth service, then I think Pizza Nights are great tools. But if the Pizza Night is the end of the line, If I get up and think “this is my one chance to reach these kids, I better preach the heck out of them right now,” then I would say thats a bad purpose. I’m not pouring into them, I’m just hoping to get them to say a prayer and then maybe they will come back.

I don’t know if that resonates with you. But these are just the thoughts I get challenged with after hanging out with my students.

We need more Leaders

The world of Youth Ministry is in dire need of more Leaders. I’m not simply saying “we need more Youth Leaders” as in Pastors to Youth, I’m saying we need more Leaders in the world of Youth Ministry, and a lot less followers.

It strikes me as odd that at most Christian Universities that offer a degree in Youth Ministry, you will take classes in Evangelism, speaking to teens, helping hurting teens, etc., but rarely if ever will there be a class on Leadership thrown in there.

This is Detrimental to the health of Youth Ministry around the world.

Think about this alone; How many blog posts or chapters in books could you find right now that deal with attracting volunteers in Youth Ministry?

And I mean, this is great for those who are succeeding from writing those books or blog posts, and don’t get me wrong, they are absolutely needed right now, but I really question how much time would be spent on things like that if we had more Youth Pastors trained to be leaders?

We need youth pastors trained to be leaders, trained to cast vision, trained to deal with volunteers.

The sad part, though, is that so often, the really great Youth Pastors that rise up and become great leaders end up taking that skill set and moving on to “Big Church,” and I think a little bit of that comes from the notion that you dont have to be a leader in Youth Ministry.

Why is it that we expect so much from Sr. Pastors as leaders and expect next to nothing from Youth Pastors as leaders? Who’s fault is it that this culture has been created where the “norm” is that Youth Pastors are “lazy goofballs who, sure, they can sometimes be serious, but at the same time, come on, they are the youth pastor.”

We need a generation of Youth Pastors to Raise the bar. We need to change culture, and its up to us to do it. We can’t expect Parents to expect anything different from us until we show them different. We can’t expect Sr. Pastors to take use seriously until we show them differently.

And we can’t really lead a generation of Youth until we prove to them that we are someone they can follow. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about being their best friend, but at the end of the day, thats not what I get paid to do. I get paid to lead them to Christ.

Youth Pastors – Lets Raise the Bar.