The true responsibility of a youth pastor is not to the youth.
Now that I’ve made enemies of every youth worker on the planet, let me explain. When we say the word pastor, we mean someone who helps people grow and know God better in a formal way. So when we put the word “youth” in front of the word “pastor”, we think that means someone who helps youth grow and know God better in a formal way.
That definition is not innately wrong, but it does lead to some misconceptions. We see the youth pastor as someone who should be getting to know the teens in a church, working to run the youth meetings, and discipling individual teenagers in-depth. None of those things are bad, but they will not lead to an effective youth ministry. One man can only minister to a limited amount of people in a meaningful way (6 is usually a pretty good number), so for a youth pastor to have the best youth ministry he can, his job is not so much to build up teens themselves as much as it is about building up adults who will then build up the teens. We’re all aware of this principle (I’m sure you’ve read before about the dangers of the “one-man-show mentality” in youth ministry), but I don’t think we take it to its logical conclusion.
What is the real job of a youth pastor or head youth leader? To disciple and minister to leaders and volunteers.
As we build people (leaders in this case), God builds the ministry. If the leaders are growing, the teens and children they minister to will be growing.
I’m not saying that a youth pastor or head youth leader should never disciple teens individually or be involved with running events or meetings, but those things must not become their main time investment. Build the leaders and let them build the ministry.
Youth ministry leaders all over the country see the summer as a time when students are nowhere to be found, but having a clear plan and communicating ahead can make the summer months the most effective time of year for your ministry if we let it.
Summer means less people. That’s just the bottom line for most ministries (youth ministries especially). The students that come are usually not consistent. One week there’s a sports camp, the next it’s a family vacation, then a summer job... the list goes on.
But what if you could make the summer months an incredibly effective time for your ministry? Here are some tips to make that happen.
Note: this post is part of Graduation Theme Week on wol.org (details at the end of the post). While we’re not talking about graduates directly, the summer before college can be a huge opportunity in a student’s life. These tips will help you take advantage of that opportunity and also make summer an effective time for everyone in your ministry (non-graduation students and leaders alike).
Set a specific compelling goal
“Our attendance will be low in the summer... we might as well take a few months off.” The first part of the statement might be true, but the second part is a cop-out. Just because there will be fewer people attending doesn’t mean that nothing valuable can happen.
Start by answering the question, “If we knew we couldn’t fail, what would our team want to accomplish in the lives of our students in the summer?” Your answers might include:
Commitments
Experiences
Specific teaching goals
Specific relationship-building goals
Then ask, “What steps can we take to achieve those goals?”
If your group still wants to take a break for summer months (more on this below), ask, “In what ways does our team want to grow this summer?” Do you want to take a trip together? Read a book together? As soon as we stop believing the fallacy that summer = useless, we can start making important things happen. You might not be able to accomplish certain things (because much of your normal group might be missing), but having a smaller group might free you up to accomplish things that would’ve been impossible normally.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Develop your goal, then build a plan for the summer including events, schedules, and other key details. Then communicate that to the students ahead of time. This is huge. Be clear about what your group wants to accomplish this summer.
“We want to take every one of you out to a sporting event of your choice this summer.” “This summer we’re going to connect with you guys on the phone every week to see how you’re doing.” “Summer time for us is all about taking the next step. We’ll challenge you to stretch and grow in some painful but powerful ways.”
This kind of communication is important if you want to set yourself up for success. It’s also worth noting that you can’t communicate the goal if you haven’t set a goal that is clear and compelling. Once you have your goal, talk about it in the months before summer; text your students about it and mention in on Facebook during the summer; talk about the amazing things that happened during the summer once school starts again in the fall.
Don’t be afraid to shift your focus
I mentioned further up that you might take the summer as a time of growth for your team. Don’t see this as a defeat (“We don’t have enough students for our normal meeting so I guess we’ll just do some team-building stuff.”), see it as an opportunity from God to do something that you normally wouldn’t have time for. Be intentional about challenging your group grow closer to God and to each other, then watch the impact it will have when it’s time to start your ministry again.
Change your thinking, then be creative
The most successful people see problems as opportunities. Determine right now to shed the false belief that the summer is useless for ministry and then put your creativity to work on how to make summer work for you.
The key is the order. You’ll never come up with good, creative ideas until you can change your negative thinking about the summer. Our minds are either limited or enhanced by our beliefs. This is true in every area of life but especially true in the area of creativity. My friend and creative mentor RayDeck3 has written a great little article about this idea. Check it out.
The bottom line is: God will provide you with exactly what you need to accomplish His will in your ministry this summer. But I guarantee His will is NOT that you and your team sit around and feel bad that no one is showing up. Drop the negativity, get creative, and make something happen for God's glory.
You can look for more posts in Graduation Theme Week at any of the following links:
No one who knows me would call me a financial guru. But after listening through the 14 sessions (about 50 minutes each) of Financial Peace University, I feel like I have a handle on our family’s finances. From planning for our kids to go to college, to choosing the right life insurance plan, to paying off debts and developing a cash-flow plan (otherwise known as a budget), this content covers it all.
Dave is easy to listen to with a healthy mix of humor, sarcasm, and passion. He also does a great job making complicated systems seem simple and easy to grasp. Most importantly, he takes a firm stand on biblical principles as he guides you through his advice on how to be wise with the money that God has entrusted to you.
I recommend the cheaper of the two programs offered at the link below. It comes with digital downloads of all the audio content (excellent for listening on the road or as you exercise), a free book (with much of the same content in written form, which is great to use a quick reference), as well as downloadable versions of forms, spreadsheets, and the workbook for the course. It’ll run you $100 but, trust me, it’s some of the best money you’ll ever spend.
God's greatest desire for us isn't obedience, it is relationship. Below is a sermon that I preached a few months ago about this very topic. Check it out here or download it and listen at your own convenience.
When it comes down to it, relationship with God is what our lives are all about. Obedience is the way we express that relationship. Let's stop hammering people on obedience and start helping them develop a relationship.
We all want people in our ministries to have a passion for God's Word, but the best way to build that passion is to build a habit of reading God's Word. Sound confusing? Check out this 10-minute video by RayDeck3 on "The Law of Desire".
To start the engine of growth, we need to help people add new inputs into their lives. The inputs change their beliefs. Their beliefs change their desires, and then they have a desire for God's Word.
While salvation is the first step of your ministry process, it’s important to make sure you’re ministering to those that you already have before you focus on outreach.
In a previous post I briefly introduced the general process of biblical discipleship:
Salvation
Growth
Fruit
Reproduction
When you set out to build your ministry’s plan for accomplishing those goals, it is tempting to start with number 1. However, unlike almost everything else in life (“Let’s start at the very beginning... a very good place to start...”), your best bet is to ensure that you’ve got number 2 nailed down before working on number 1.
There’s a few reasons for this.
First, outreach is only the entrance to the process of discipleship. It is the on-ramp to the proverbial highway. So if you don’t have a highway yet, you don’t need an on-ramp. You don’t want to go bringing people into your ministry only to have them leave because once they were in the door (figuratively, not literally) there needs weren’t being met.
Second, the biggest piece of reaching unsaved people with the gospel is when a believer that they know and trust builds the bridge. A pastor can call up a visitor and invite them to church but it’s much more effective if the guy’s golfing buddy invites him instead. This kind of organic outreach is crucial but it won’t happen if the people you are already ministering to are not growing.
Of course it goes without saying that if you’re ministry is already helping people grow effectively, you can start working on outreach right away.
In future posts, we’ll examine each of the 4 major phases of discipleship in detail.
If you want to NOT make disciples, just run a bunch of programs in your ministry without real purpose.
But if you DO want to make disciples, every program, event, or activity must be in line with your ministry process. We have to do things intentionally if we're going to accomplish our goal of making disciples.
I read a great article over on the YouthMinistry360 blog that hit this really well. They ask:
If we aren’t leading students to become disciples, what are we leading them to become?
They list some other things our students might become if we're not being intentional about our discipleship.
Teens and children can do everything that adults can if we will only train them and give them opportunities.
I’ve never seen an age recommendation for an usher listed in scripture, but in a former church I attended, the kids who helped with collecting the offering were called the “future ushers of America”. Why aren’t they they “current ushers of America”? It might seem like a small detail, but that title betrays an attitude that young people can’t do anything significant in our churches.
Again, there’s nothing in scripture that talks about the age of someone serving in the church. We in the church have let the World’sview of the teenage years poison our thinking so much that we’ve come to almost ignore young people except as future potential. We need to wake up and get back to challenging our young people and training them for service even while they are young. After all, there’s no such thing as “the church of tomorrow”.
While it’s true that our ministries won’t grow without the work of God’s Spirit, we can never blame a lack of success in ministry on God.
Ministry leaders often use this phrase to communicate that although a certain ministry is stagnant or dead, it’s nobody’s fault, God just needs to give more increase. On the surface this sounds like a biblical statement proclaiming the sovereignty of God in ministry, but let’s look closer.
The verbiage comes from 1 Corinthians 3:6. Let me first say that the passage is not about God’s sovereignty in ministry as much as it’s about giving God the credit for ministry. With that out of the way, is it true that a ministry can fail or be ineffective because of a lack of God’s blessing or power?
I think the answer is no. If we follow God’s plan for ministry, observable success will always follow. People will either be embracing God or rejecting Him but there will not be stagnation, apathy, or lack of movement.
The bottom line is, God’s always going to be doing His part. He never takes a break from blessing His Word or working in people’s lives. So if our ministry is floundering, we can’t go blaming God and excusing ourselves. We need to suck it up and make changes to be more effective.
There's a difference between doing things for God and loving God. Here's a question I received from one ministry leader I work with. It's a great question that I wish more people were concerned with.
"Every year I have at least one girl in my group that does QT [daily devotions] 7 days a week. I challenge them to do more by reading and studying other verses on the same subject. They never do. TIME is the issue and when they have time they want down time (their time). I don't want QT [daily devotions] to be routine or something just expected and since they are good kids they do it. I'd rather it be something they can learn from.
The same with teens that [memorize scripture and are actively serving]. They do things to the expected limit then use school as a reason to not read more books because they have enough reading in school."
Here is my response to her:
"This is a great question. Many leaders don’t think about the fact that just doing Quiet Time or memorizing verses doesn’t mean that someone is close to God. You definitely have the right goal in mind for your group.
Practically speaking, it might be good to challenge your students with a specific goal that is a small step. For example, if they say they don’t have time to read more, try challenging them to spend 5 extra minutes on top of what they would normally do. That’s enough time to read a Proverb every day or a chapter of a book in the new testament. Then after a while you can challenge them to increase their time by 5 more minutes with a different reading idea (like a Psalm per day). Sometimes it’s easier to do things when we have a really clear plan laid out for us.
The other thing that’s really important (as you pointed out) is that they see their Quiet Times as more than just something they do. It is time for them to spend with God. Someone who is passionate about God will want to spend time with Him. That doesn’t mean that they will spend 3 hours with Him every day necessarily, but it does mean that time with God is something that is looked forward to.
For example, when my wife and I were engaged, we didn’t spend all of our time together. But we always wanted to be together: we looked forward to it and when we were together we wished we had more time. Our love for God should be no different. No one is perfect, so we won’t always be as passionate about God as we should be, but it needs to be our goal.
There’s a few different ways you can help your girls to have that kind of passion. First is to make sure that you are modeling that passion for them. You will never convince your students to be passionate about God if they don't see the same passion in your life first. Second is to purposefully teach them to think about their relationship with God as they would a relationship with a guy that they were in love with. They should have the same passion for God as they would for their boy-friend or fiancé, or husband eventually.
Lastly, you may need to approach some of them one-on-one and ask them about their relationship with God directly. If you feel that they are lacking passion for God, you can lovingly confront them about it. Start by asking some probing questions to determine where they are at (we have to be careful not to assume we know how things are). Then be honest with them about your observations. Lovingly tell them that you feel they are lacking passion as motivation for their Quiet Time and other spiritual disciplines. Then, depending on how they react, you can help them change that."
Don't teach doctrine.
Ever hear someone say that doctrine is boring or impractical? Dead wrong. That's like saying that God is boring and impractical. The key to change is the mind and doctrine is the key that opens the door to Biblical thoughts.
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No one who knows me would call me a financial guru. But after listening through the 14 sessions (about 50 minutes each) of Financial Peace University, I feel like I have a handle on our family’s finances. From planning for our kids to go to college, to choosing the right life insurance plan, to paying off debts and developing a cash-flow plan (otherwise known as a budget), this content covers it all.
