Decide to weather some storms. Expect ministry to be messy, hard, and even a little hellish some days. It might even be like that for a season if you stay long enough. Know going into any context that the grass is not greener anywhere else, and there is no perfect shelter from ministry storms. Some days, all you can do is bunker down, remind yourself you knew these days would come, and pray for strength. Every—yup, every—long-term youth pastor has done this.
Learn to deal with criticism. Find ways to respond, listen to, and even learn from your critics. Learn to sort through the emotion to find the grain of truth in some of it. Seek it from those you trust. Flat out ignore it from the foolish. It’s an art you must master if you’re going to have longevity.
Be a team player. This means you champion ideas that are not your own. You lead the church from your backseat role, leading up when you can. Humbly serve others and earn the right to be heard. Sure, champion the cause of youth in your church; just don’t make that your only agenda. Longevity is not compatible with a lone-ranger mindset.
Equip, encourage, and empower your volunteers. The quickest way to short-term ministry is to become a one-person show. Conversely, those who want to stay for the long haul find help. They ask for others to join their team. They encourage those who do and empower their volunteers to be the best they can be. If you do this, leadership will feel less lonely, and that voice that says you should quit will not be as loud. It won’t go away, but when it has to go through your team first, it gets muffled.
Pick your battles. Some fires aren’t worth putting out, and some hills aren’t worth dying on. Don’t chase down every source of gossip or feel the need to reconcile everyone’s contrary opinions. Just love God and serve people—in that order. When you humbly have your priorities straight, you don’t quit or get fired over stupid stuff. Sometimes the best gift you can give your ministry is to let some stuff die. Longevity requires you to know what’s worth saving and when to have the funeral.
Check your credibility bank account before making big decisions. What I mean is that everyone has a relational bank account. Some decisions you make add credibility to it, and some will cost you. Canceling the church’s sacred cow midweek meeting will cost you dearly. If you don’t have the bank account for that credibility check, don’t write it, or you’ll become a short-term statistic. The larger the decision and the number of people it will impact, the more you have to consider the cost. Yes, I know you can’t please everyone, but people who stay for the long haul think about the consequences of their decisions and who they’re going to upset or please before they make the call. It might still need to happen, but maybe another, more senior leader should be the one writing the credibility check or co-signing with you. Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to be innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents.
Take time off and take care of you. Have a life outside of ministry. Vacation with your family or friends. Get away and think and pray and play and laugh with people you don’t have to pastor. Just do anything and everything it takes to remain healthy yourself and to keep your ministry from being your God. It is for God. It is not God. Make sure you remind yourself often.
The longest time I have stayed at a church is six years. That was an incredible time of growth for my family and for me. It is also the place where I still have some of the best relationships with students. I have been at my current church just over five years but am soon transitioning again.
But, if I look at my career in youth ministry, I really see God’s hand in it, even though I haven’t been at the same church for twenty years. I’ve never felt like I wasn’t walking the path God had for me, and I honestly believe that my longevity in the ministry has actually come from some of these transitions to different churches.
Figure out your strengths and focus on them while minimizing your weaknesses. I’m really good at a few things. Some other areas I struggle in. If I constantly felt like I needed to be better at those things, or if others consistently told me I had to grow in those areas, it would be hard. I try to make sure people know what I’m good at and do those things a lot. But I don’t neglect my weaknesses; I just find people who are strong in those areas and get their help.
Boundaries. Early on I realized that if I didn’t have solid boundaries, I would be a workaholic and likely burn out. I got my start in youth ministry working at a camp where we were on for the whole summer. That was a tough way to do ministry, but it taught me that I needed to find time to be off and that I couldn’t say yes to everything.
Time away. This is similar to boundaries, I guess. I have to make sure I take care of myself by regularly getting away. My senior pastor likes to say that if we don’t use all our vacation and study leave, we are sinning. I don’t fully agree with that theologically, but on a practical level, I do. I need to leave and recharge so when I’m back, I’m fresh.
Choose family/life/friends over ministry. Not everyone will agree with me here, but it works for me. As much as I possibly can, I choose to honor my commitment to my family and friends while maintaining a separation between work and life. I’ve just found that I need to build into the most important relationships I have, which are with my wife and kids and the people who build into me, which are my friends.
Have fun. A few years back I realized I wasn’t enjoying my job very much. I analyzed it and saw that I was doing so much of the administrative and mundane tasks of ministry that I was missing out on being with students. So I made sure that summer to get to as many of our summer camps and missions trips as I could.
Be strategic. You may be like me and hate all-nighters. Hopefully when you get older, you have younger staff who can run them. But make sure you are there for a good chunk. Maximize your opportunities to see and be with students. I like to say there is no value added to my job to ever be at the second half of a football game. I see everyone in the first half. I watch the band, dance team, and cheerleaders at halftime, and then I bail to go on a date with my wife.
Accountability. It’s too easy to be lazy, do something wrong, or get yourself in trouble if people trust you because of your longevity. Have people who ask you tough questions and grill you. It’ll help you grow too.
Love Jesus. So often in the midst of doing ministry, we forget about the reason we are involved in the first place. Just recently someone asked me how much time I was spending with the Lord. I was totally convicted and changed some patterns in my life so I can be more focused on my Bible and on prayer.
Keep relationships with students. It used to be that when they graduated you couldn’t stay as connected to them, but social media and cell phones have changed all that. This helps me see how my time with students fits into the context of their whole lives.
Learn to Fail. I think this is something I’ve gotten better at with age. I can best equate it to a pro skateboarder. Those guys take a lot of falls, but they have figured out how to fall in the right way. They land as safely as they can and are able to get back up and keep going. Early in ministry I didn’t know how to fall well. I’ve since learned a few tricks.
A youth worker preparing a seminar on this topic asked me this exact question late last year. I gave him this list:
Embrace humility. Ask people to hold you accountable to this.
Have intentional conversations with youth workers who have stayed in one church for ten years or more. Seek their input.
Make a list of the reasons longevity is valuable. Pull it out and read it from time to time.
Get over yourself. You are not God’s secret weapon or only option.
Ruthlessly develop intimacy with Jesus. Only when you are deeply connected with Jesus will you be able to set aside your ego and weather the temptations to move on.
Remind yourself regularly that your calling does not come from people but from God.
Decide how you will measure your success. Bad measures of success are big programs, lots of ego strokes, buzz, impressive numbers. Good measures of success are the faith examples of former teenagers when they’re in their twenties or thirties—and only longevity allows you to really see that.
Consider the cost to your church, the teenagers you serve, your family, and your own soul of constantly looking over the fence for something better.
Eschew power. Power corrupts your calling and falsely inflates your sense of importance.
Value faithfulness over influence.
Cultivate a life outside of youth ministry.
Be ruthless about establishing and honoring a sustainable rhythm of silence and solitude.
That list is a big mouthful to swallow. There’s some good stuff there, and I believe every single one of them to be true. But let me narrow it down a bit. And I’ll do so by making a potential overstatement (because I always do that!): I’ve never met a full-time paid youth worker who’s stayed in the same church for more than a dozen years who wasn’t humble.
Arrogance is the greatest enemy of longevity. It’s not that every youth worker who changes jobs is arrogant, but I sure have met my share of youth workers who move because they think they’re too good for their churches (or that their churches aren’t good enough for them).
Frankly, if you’re arrogant, you probably won’t even be able to conceive the value of longevity, and you probably didn’t make it this far in the post. But those humble, grounded, steadfast youth workers—ah, they might not be flashy; but, then, that’s a good thing.
Consider this, from Psalm 25:9: He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way.
Or, from the MYWV (Marko’s Youth Worker Version, that is): He guides the humble youth worker, and teaches them to stay.
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