We all know longevity is good, but what's necessary to achieve it?

May 14, 2012 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Brian Berry

I’ve been in youth ministry for eighteen years in a full-time role as a youth pastor—eleven years in my first church and seven where I am now. In those times there have been some over-the-top-great days that I will never forget. And then there are those days (lots more, it seems) when I wanted to quit and plenty of times when I just thought, This is so not making a difference. So when it comes to longevity, at least for me, it has been nothing short of an intentional and grace-filled series of choices.

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.

Lars Rood

I have been in youth ministry approaching twenty years, but I’ve worked in four different churches. Most people probably wouldn’t say I know very much about longevity since I have transitioned a few times. With that said, though, I think the list of those of us who have been doing Youth Ministry in churches for twenty years is pretty small.

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.

Mark Oestreicher

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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How do you address homosexuality in your ministry?

May 07, 2012 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Brooklyn Lindsey

For me, it’s more than addressing homosexuality; it’s participating in the ministry of getting to know teenagers who are quietly struggling with issues of sexual orientation.

There’s a student who loves to dance and sing. He also loves dodgeball and video games. He wonders why his friendships with girls are easier than friendships with guys. He begins to get made fun of at school. He goes to youth group. Once, while on a mission trip, his pastor overhears people calling him names. Queer and gay aren’t foreign words. When the youth pastor talks to the youth group about the power of words, he confesses that it’s not the first time. He’s tired of people trying to change him. The name-calling has been happening for years. No one seems to listen; they just want to fix him. The youth pastor’s heart is broken as she sees the torment he quietly suffers.

It’s not popular to talk about homosexuality, but we rob our students, family members, and ministries when we wait to have conversations. I’ve learned that we can’t ignore the needs of a developing adolescent just because it’s uncomfortable for us.

It’s not about fixing gay or lesbian teenagers. We have to start by getting to know them, caring for them, and loving them with the same unconditional love that Jesus did. I am thankful that someone loved me as I was, in those tumultuous years of uncertainty, when I based my worth on my physical closeness with guys. The love of Christ, as it was offered to me without judgment, revealed another way, where the filling of the Holy Spirit could set me free and give me new hope and purpose.

We are called, as a people once marginalized and forgotten, to hear the cries of the now marginalized and forgotten. We are to reach out with neighborly love. As we offer love, we know that love never leaves us as we are, but it shapes us and molds us into the image of God.

There are some things we can do to help teenagers who struggle, not just with issues of homosexuality but also with any issue that deems them outcast.

We pray. We ask God to give us hearts able to love boldly.

We try to make a youth ministry gathering that is safe and welcoming to any person.

We talk about bullying. We are working on a more intentional plan to respond to it, both inside our youth group and in the places where we live.

We don’t ignore suicidal language (both verbal and nonverbal), and we offer help to students who speak this language.

We consider the moments when teenagers come to us about their struggles to be sacred moments. Our response is telling. We represent Jesus as we respond, and we have to know that it isn’t about us (what we feel, think, or want to do). It is about their hearts, lives, and knowledge of God’s work in their lives. We help them have difficult conversations with their parents and friends. We remind them that they are not alone.

We talk with parents who are concerned. We listen with the same love and compassion that we try to have when we listen to their children.

We have a long way to go, but we aren’t discouraged. God gives us what we need—an ability to love and to see (without judgment) the image of God in each and every person. As we see this image, we can’t help but respond and seek restoration for every human we meet.

Brian Berry

I don’t think homosexuality is more critical an issue than materialism, apathy, family dysfunction, injustice, depression, or any other slew of things we address with students. However, while it is not a larger priority, it is more pressing due to the fact that the question is being asked and publicly addressed on and in all kinds of TV shows, movies, school campuses, and political systems around us today. The very fact that we’re asking this question on this website proves this point. So, to not address this issue or treat it as a taboo subject is to proverbially bury one’s head in the sand and ignore a reality that is part of every teen’s world today. To this end, here’s a list of some things I’ve learned about this issue over the last two decades of youth ministry.

Do the theological homework. Make no assumptions that you understand the texts, have read them clearly in the past, or that you can glaze over this issue by quoting a few commonly cited verses. If you do, you’ll likely do more harm than good. If you’re going to speak with authority and respond with certainty, humility, and wisdom, then you’re going to have to have done your homework. Read the Bible, dig into some books that address the issues in the original language, and even read what those who disagree with you say about this topic. Here’s a quick list of theological questions I encourage you to wrestle with if you have not already:

Why does Jesus never address this in his teaching, or why do the gospel writers not record it? Does this change things? How do you decide what Old Testament codes of conduct are archaic and can be ignored? Should all sin be addressed with equal weight? What scriptural evidence do you have for or against that idea? What is the context of the verse you’re quoting to support your view? What if sexuality is genetic? How does this affect or not affect your answers to how one deals with or lives with this issue?

Don’t joke. If you want your youth ministry to address this issue and for it to be a safe place for students to address it, then avoid all joking about it. Don’t call things gay or use homosexuality as a punch line. “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” is cheap and not funny or helpful to anyone who actually feels attracted to the same gender. Rigorously defend your youth ministry space and community as one where it is safe to confess or wrestle with any issue, regardless of its social consequences elsewhere.

Avoid comparisons. Don’t compare homosexuality to other issues. You’ll either end up minimizing or over-dramatizing this issue. You either can identify with this struggle because you’ve experienced it yourself, or you can’t. Be a good listener and avoid trying to find comparisons that work. They don’t.

Think layers and long term The honest truth is that this issue is never the issue. Work to help students understand that the primary issue is their connection with Jesus, which is also my primary long-term goal. When their identity is in Jesus, we can address other incongruent layers of their lives. We know this, right? Just because students are heterosexual does not make them more connected with Jesus. So be okay with students struggling with all kinds of issues as they strive for Jesus.

Admit failures. We cannot address this issue without admitting that many have actually sinned in how they address this sin. We also must admit that heterosexuality has not produced healthy sexuality by default either. Ignoring sources of doubt won’t help this conversation. When we do, we just look ignorant.

Don’t oversimplify. A student’s sexual identity and struggles are a maze of ideas, feelings, experiences, and pressures. Let it be messy. It is, and it will take a lot of time and patience to get it healthy, especially if it’s already messed up.

Address the father factor. Not necessarily as a cause but as a common thread. Students and sexuality are intimately tied to connection with parents, especially with Dad. Both girls and boys who have no healthy connection or source of love from their dads often go looking for hope in other places sexually. Help students address this, and you’ll by default help them address their sexual desires and needs to feel loved.

Teach students how to think. The end goal is not to address every possible scenario sexually so a student knows how to respond. Our goal is to help students think about why they would or would not choose to do XYZ. Knowing what the Bible says on this issue is almost void if you don’t know why it says it. Failure for students to know how to think about this will always result in short-term solutions, not long-haul faith convictions.

Adam Walker Cleaveland

To be honest, I'm slightly perplexed by this question, and why homosexuality is singled out and the question isn't just about sexuality in general. I'm guessing that for some folks in ministry, they address homosexuality in a different manner because of where they are theologically. For me, homosexuality is not an issue. I know it is for many, and as best as I can, I try to respect that, though I believe the church has royally messed up its relationship with the LGBT community. We have a long way to go in repairing broken relationships and injustices committed by the church and its leaders when it comes to the issue of homosexuality.

So, how do I address homosexuality in my ministry? I don't know. Like everything else, I guess. I talk about it. I read about it. I preach about it. I write about it on my blog. I let people know where I stand on the issue so they'll feel comfortable coming to talk with me.

Now, if the question were how do I address sexuality in my youth ministry, I would have a different response. In all my years of ministry, I think talking openly with students and young adults about sexuality is something that is still a growing edge for me. And it's frustrating because clearly youth are getting this information from friends, from school, from the internet (in some pretty unhealthy ways, I'm sure), and many other sources. But this is something we need to be talking about in the church. And in those conversations with students and their parents at the church, we also need to encourage families to have these conversations at home.

When I've had conversations about sexuality with youth at the church, I've done my best to treat both homosexuality and heterosexuality as equal expressions of God's gift of sexuality to us. Sometimes, there have been students who were gay or questioning, and some students whose parents were gay. To present homosexuality as a sinful expression of sexuality would have closed the door to any conversations with those students or their parents and not something that would have been helpful for my ministry.

I obviously can't tell you how to address homosexuality in your ministry. That will be determined by your context, the people you're ministering to, and the other staff you work with. If you're a youth minister or volunteer, I highly recommend you figure out where your head of staff is when it comes to the whole issue because you do not want that to be a surprise when they hear about some youth group discussion from an angry parent.

But overall, I don't think you need to separate homosexuality from the overall conversation about sexuality that is crucial to your ministry and work with youth. They need to see the church as a safe place where they can have those important conversations. Especially if you have youth who are questioning their sexuality, you want the church to be that safe place for them, where they can be open and honest about their struggles and questions. We've all heard too many stories about churches who excluded youth from programs because of issues related to sexuality, and many don't return to the church—any church—after a situation like that. As always, it's better to err on the side of love, grace, and inclusion because I have a sense that's what Jesus would do.

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In what practical ways do you partner with your church's children's ministry?

April 09, 2012 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Joshua Hayden

My senior pastor recently preached a great sermon on the importance of being an inclusive church, like our inclusive Jesus who constantly sought out the “least of these,” the often left out, marginalized, and easy-to-hate folks in any community, like tax collectors or prostitutes. And it led to a profound time of questions and conversations with the middle and high school students at our church. They expressed times when they felt left out or ways that they could do more to help others feel included or how to connect more with the adults in our church.

We had a profound moment when we began to realize that more than 75% of the group had already been interacting with the children in our church and community over the last year. Practically speaking, they have helped with our children’s classes that meet during part of our worship service every week, serving in the nursery, leading at camps during the summer, filming and photographing events with children throughout the year, inviting them into their worlds (e.g., a trip to the firehouse to visit one of our high school students who is a volunteer), playing music for special events, participating in dramas together, meals with rising middle schoolers, and serving at community organizations helping the poor.

Ultimately, all of the things listed above, and there are certainly more, speak to the growing movement toward creating a more integrated church, where not only do adults help walk through life with our adolescents, but our adolescents have an opportunity to help children walk through life as well.

When I invite adults to pour their lives into the lives of students, I ask them to imagine how they could help share their experiences, wisdom, and perspectives with students to help them follow God and love others in such a way that the students they mentor and disciple will begin to recognize that they too can one day use the gifts God has poured into them to be fantastic worship leaders, elementary school principals, photographers, teachers, business owners, artists, bakers, friends, pastors, moms, dads, sisters, brothers, and more.

I ask the same things of our students. How can they help the children coming after them to feel included and know they have people in their corner, helping them imagine that one day the gifts and strengths God has poured into them can be poured out into the world? As leaders, we have to help recognize our students’ gifts and connect them into facets of the children’s ministry that allow their contributions to make sense.

Some of our children’s ministry classes or events literally couldn’t have happened without the support of our students. Sometimes they outnumber the adults! And I think it comes back to students’ desire to include others, and they recognize that inclusion has to start from the very beginning.

There are students at my church who are really busy, hardly make it to many youth activities, small groups, etc., but never miss when it is their chance to help with a children’s ministry class. I don’t think it is because they like the snack they get with the kids, but rather, they have recognized the importance of being inclusive and intentional about creating opportunities for relationships to happen. I think they have discovered the beautiful simplicity and joy that is ushered into the kingdom of God from the little ones Jesus so readily welcomed and included.

It can’t be any more practical than simply being as intentional and willing as possible to seek out opportunities where students and children can explore hope, faith, doubt, God, and community together in your context. Don’t feel compelled to do anything new. Just find ways to allow your students to partner with what is already going on, and odds are, they will be a great help and usually some relief to the adults already serving, and it will be life altering for the students as they pour their lives into the lives of the children coming after them.

Brian Berry

About eighteen months ago I was asked to move from student ministries pastor to generation ministries pastor, meaning I went from overseeing a department for junior high through young adult to dropping the bottom end of that age bracket all the way to infants. With this new responsibility, one of my top priorities was to develop camaraderie and partnership across these departments in ways we’d never done before. To that end, it was clear we needed to significantly blur the line between kids’ ministry and teen ministry on several levels.

Here are at least six practical ways we have decided to partner.

Parent training. Years ago we started doing a parenting-teens training day. It usually was a half day on Saturday and broken up into three segments: (1) casting a shared vision for our ministry alongside parents; (2) training for everyone in attendance on a keynote subject; and (3) training in small groups according to an affinity need. Early on, we started to realize that parenting teens and developing a shared mindset with families could not start with middle school parents but actually needed to start much earlier. If we truly wanted to develop a different parenting culture, then we needed to offer parenting-teens classes to those who were five to ten years away from having teens.

As a result, we now have several parent training days that consist of a few hours where we offer a variety of seminars that apply across the board. We offer everything from discipline to understanding social media to raising boys or girls to marriage classes to even parenting when your kids are now adults. It’s become a great training staple in our ministry.

Volunteer celebration and training. Twice a year, once toward the end of the summer and once in January, we gather our whole team of volunteers together. These days are traditionally right after church and last about two hours. We provide lunch, share some laughter, celebrate stories of how God has been using the volunteers to change lives of kids and young adults, and then do a brief interactive training that sets the stage for the next season of ministry ahead of us. This helps us all see how God is using us as a team to accomplish our shared mission: “inviting a generation to understand, own, and live out a life-changing faith in Jesus.”

Shared family data. Initially, we had several databases where information was used exclusively by individual ministries. Some used online systems, some used spreadsheets… It was a mess, really. We now partner with our entire church and use one online system to share information about families, keep phone numbers consistent, and make sure people know the issues at hand. This makes everything from graduation dates to contacting parents and volunteers much more seamless.

Graduation weekend. Every year we pick a date that works and move all of our students up a grade. We plan parties and celebrate new seasons. For some, this is a significant move out of kids’ ministry and into youth ministry. For others, it’s more subtle and just requires a room shift. But regardless, it happens across our campus all at once.

Shared events. We do some shared events too that target the whole family. We do a Sunday afternoon that we call Family Fun Day, and it is a celebration for all ages. It has inflatable games, a video game truck, food, a dunk booth etc. We share the planning and work as a team to make this a great day for everyone. We also do a fundraising day called Help Us, Help You, where we raffle off gifts and services people donate and do yard work in homes to help raise money for our mutual summer camp expenses. We also do a week of camp for kids we call Summer Fun Camp, where K-5 students come to day camp on campus and around town, and we use middle and high school students as counselors, which is a great team effort.

Junior helpers. We also encourage our kids ages ten and up to serve in another area of kids’ ministry as junior helpers. They often co-lead music, do puppets, play with kids, pass out supplies, and even teach—depending on age and readiness factors.

Adam Walker Cleaveland

The assumption behind this question is that youth ministries do partner with children's ministries. I'm guessing that, for many churches, that just isn't the case. For the most part, we go to youth ministry conferences, read youth ministry books, and follow other youth ministers on Twitter. There are exceptions—churches who have fully embraced an idea of family ministry or churches who have a pastor specifically called to children and youth ministry, but by and large, I think these two fields of ministry have remained pretty segregated.

And to be honest, I'm not sure if that's really such a problem. Obviously, children and youth are at vastly different stages in their development, so it makes sense that their activities and programming be separate and different. But I think one of the problems with this segregation is that there may not be any sense of cohesion between the two programs.

When I arrived at the church where I served last, our youth ministry was for youth in grades 6-12. We had a group for 4th and 5th graders, but there wasn't a real sense of consistency to when it met, so those children weren't really prepared for youth group when they entered 6th grade. We also began to notice, more and more, the vast developmental difference even between our 6th and 8th graders. So we decided to make a few changes.

Like many other churches have done, we started a Club 56 youth group, which was exclusively for our 5th and 6th graders. This was meant to be our bridge ministry to help prepare our children for our youth ministry. We had some high school youth who helped lead it and were able to serve as mentors to these younger children. Because we observed the large developmental differences between 6th and 8th graders, our youth ministry then began once a youth entered 7th grade. Coincidentally, this immediately helped with some of the behavioral issues we had with some of the younger students.

When starting up something like this, it's key to have the children's ministry and youth ministry staff on the same page with the vision and mission of such a group and how they can work together to make the transition from one group to the other easier for our youth.

As I mentioned above, we had some of our high schoolers helping out with Club 56. We also had many of our middle and high school youth serve as volunteers and teachers for the summer VBS program. This helps solidify relationships between the younger children and older youth, and given the right youth, they can develop some wonderful mentoring relationships.

This was all at the former church I served, where I was the minister for youth, and we had a separate staff person for our children's ministry. At the church where I currently serve, I'm the associate pastor, and I have direct responsibility to oversee both the children's and youth ministries. Since we are in a rebuilding phase, I'm still not sure what the collaboration between the two looks like yet.

But I think those who are working toward a cohesive family ministry are on the right track. We have to view our ministry to our children and youth as happening on a continuum, that we are all working together for their spiritual formation from the moment they are born, to their baptism as infants in our churches (for those of you who are down with infant baptism), to their Sunday school classes as 2nd graders, through confirmation, youth ministry, and beyond.

In order to provide the best support possible, we must work together, children's ministries, youth ministries, college and young adult ministries, and beyond. In the words of one of the most famous doctors of our time, "Live together, or die alone." (That, of course, was a LOST reference I hope all of you got.)

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What youth ministry cliche needs to go away?

December 05, 2011 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Michael Novelli

Doesn’t it seem a little cliché to be annoyed by clichés? I am part of Generation X (a cliché in itself?), a breed known for critique and cynicism. We have invented media that critiques the critics. Our primary sources of news are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, framing world events in our own special language: sarcasm. We are the anti-bumper-sticker generation. We have fought so hard against the clichés of a modern, baby-boomer-driven society that we have grown into our own hipster, melancholy, self-effacing monster of a cliché!

For many Gen-Xers like me, no punches are pulled when pointing out what is cheesy and hypocritical in the church. We’ve authored zillions of tweets, posts, articles, and books over the last decade about how the church is irrelevant, suggesting that Christianity has become a cliché in and of itself. Much of this critique is warranted and possibly part of a greater redemptive good. But those who are committed to being part of a Christian community feel a sense of fatigue from this barrage of critique.

There is a certain attitude I slide into, one in which I exhibit a stance of having it figured out. This contributes to divisiveness as it delineates us and them—the sophisticated from the simpletons, the educated from the uneducated, the forward thinking from the stuck in the muds (is that another cliché? Someone stop me).

With these realities in view, I felt conflicted about pointing out youth ministry clichés. I am tired of being the squeaky wheel (cliché?). I don’t want to labeled as the contrarian, the dismissive idealist who tears everything apart rather than helping construct. I want to provide solutions rather than pointing out the problems. You feel me? (Darn, another cliché.)

So how do we offer critique that is redemptive? How can identifying clichés that need to go away move beyond targeting pet peeves? When I critique a cliché, is it just me being tired of its overuse in my circles, or is it a phrase that is truly losing its helpfulness? The danger with clichés is that they are here today and gone tomorrow (got me again). How do we walk the fine line of critique without sliding into arrogance? Is it possible to create better categories of language? I hope so.

The language we use is important because it shapes the way we think. Language is a way that we make meaning and identify ourselves. We must thoughtfully evaluate and refine how we speak, especially about God and the church.
So maybe it is good for us to identify clichés that hold us back from clearer and more substantive descriptions of our realities. Perhaps it is helpful for us to shed words and phrases that have lost their meaning by being overused or spewed carelessly and without context.

Now, I just have to think of a ministry cliché that really gets under my skin… That would really take this post to the next level!

Jeremy Zach

Youth pastors think youth ministry is about only ministering to students. One of the most compelling reasons someone might become a youth pastor is to get paid to only hang out with students and not adults. Hanging out and working with adults in the church context is no fun, and that is not the youth pastor’s primary job.

The mentality I am only ministering to students is problematic for two reasons.

Youth ministry becomes segregated from the church body. It becomes us (students) versus them (adults). Chap Clark calls this the Mickey Mouse Syndrome. Essentially, youth ministry becomes an extension and not a part of the church body. When only focusing on ministering to students, it becomes easy to drift away from the church. The problem is that there is no intersection between other adults and students in the church context.

Youth pastors cannot effectively disciple the masses. One adult can really only have a deep spiritual relationships with five to eight students, max. There is no way a youth pastor can do discipleship well for more than five to eight students at a time. Eventually the youth pastor will need more help from the community and church. This is why the youth pastor must get parents and adults to partner together in order to raise the next generation.

So if youth pastors are not supposed to only hang out with students, then what do they do? Why should a church pay for a professional youth worker? I think there are two primary tasks that define the role of the youth pastor.

The first task of the youth pastor is to mobilize God’s people to do the work of the ministry to young people. The youth pastor has to figure out how to get the church and the family to work as partners in raising students. God’s people are called and compelled to serve. Therefore, youth workers have to persuade adults they need to serve the next generation.

If the youth pastor is not empowering and equipping more adults to care for students, then no one ever will. Youth workers must approach everyone with the opportunity to work with this incredible next generation. Every youth pastor has to be thinking, How can I get more adults to care for students?

The second task is assimilating students into the church body. The goal of youth ministry is to assimilate authentic disciples into full participation in the life of the community of faith and the church. As Jim Burns of Homeword and Mark DeVries of Family-Based Youth Ministry have said, "The degree to which students will stay in the church, get involved, and make significant life decisions for Christ is directly dependent on their sense of belonging to the church community.”

The aim of any youth ministry must be that students see and experience themselves as participants in God's family of faith. One of the best and most practical ways for students to play an active role in the life of the church is by creating avenues for them to serve inside the church. Bottom line: The youth ministry programmatic strategy needs to move students from youth group participants to church body participants.

I must admit that during my first year in youth ministry, I thought youth ministry was awesome because I didn’t have to deal with adults. In fact, church adults annoyed me. I thought my job was to be the cool friend to all the youth. After my first year, I realized there had to be a more robust framework. After some seminary education, contemplation, praying, and reading I was convicted that youth workers are theologically responsible to train all generations to care, love, and serve the next generation. The more committed adults the church has to care for students, the more sustainable the students’ faith will be.

It is really tough to change the mentality I only work with students to I mobilize God’s people to care for students. But trust me; getting more committed adults in the lives of students is such a healthier and sustainable way to do youth ministry. So let us shatter this cliché.

Brian Berry

I have two that bug me. Here’s my slant on them:

The average youth pastor stays X amount of time before leaving. Variations of this statistic are kicked around from time to time in youth ministry contexts. I’ve heard the average is as low as nine months and as high as three years. I’m not even sure if a study was ever really done. I’m equally unsure as to what other factors were considered when gaining the data to verify the findings. Did they check salary and hours versus job expectations? Did they look at the church’s hiring history or the size of church or anything else before just concluding that youth ministry is a short-term gig? Whatever the facts may or may not be, the cliché needs to go away.

I think it only continues to promote the idea that the youth pastor is merely a stepping-stone job to some senior role or is for overzealous twenty-somethings who want to hang out and have an excuse to revisit their high school years. I suppose—on a good day—it could be a caution that the job might be harder than one thinks. But beyond that, I’m not sure it has much merit.

I also think those of us who have accepted a call into youth ministry need to take a hard look at what we signed up to do. I know several youth pastors who have been at three or four churches for three years or fewer each time. I also know plenty who have been in the same spot for more than ten years. But when you move on for a third time after a short stay, I stop believing the church is at fault and start to believe it’s the youth pastor. The truth is plain and simple: Mentoring teens into young adults is no short-term process, and if we are just one more revolving door in their lives, then we should have little reason to believe our impact will be much different from the example we’ve set. If their faith comes and goes, well, so did we.

In addition, if you only stay three years and then leave, depending on the age of students you’re working with, you likely won’t even have any understanding of what it is your ministry is producing. About the time you get a chance to see any real fruit, you’ll be headed for the door, never once serving alongside a student who came fully through your ministry and is back to serve with you. It’s a tragic loss to the kingdom of God and even your own personal story. Let’s stack hands and destroy this cliché once and for all.

Your youth ministry is full of cliques. Really, please tell me, what group of people in the world is actually clique free? It seems that every sports team is one or has many. I’m guessing every small group ever formed is one. Workplaces have them. Schools have them. Churches have them. We could build a solid argument that Jesus and his disciples were an exclusive clique. Maybe Peter, James, and John were yet another.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to admit in the last eighteen years of youth ministry that someone’s child won’t come to my high school ministry because it’s too clique-ish. Nine times out of ten it’s just an excuse from a student who sits in the back, is uninterested, won’t talk to anyone, and is looking for someone to blame.

The truth is that we do have cliques, and we do all kinds of things to try to both build and destroy them. We build them all the time by trying to help students form small groups, serve in community, and build deeper relationships with a select few. Once your youth ministry has more than ten students in it, they’re going to form friendship circles, and not everyone is going to hang out with everyone else. The student claiming our youth ministry is full of cliques is almost never the one trying hard to make new friends or risking saying hi to someone they don’t know. They are actually not really even upset that we have cliques; they’re just upset that they’re not in one yet.

We also work against cliques in our main gathering especially, working hard to pay attention to those who are new and introducing them into existing friendship and small group circles where they would be a good fit. Instead of falsely fighting cliques, we strive to keep them open and use the bonds of friendship and connection to help students gain ownership of their faith and our ministry.

Perhaps some cliques need to go, but so do the clichés that people use as excuses for lack of risk and investment.

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How do you find safe friendships at church when you live in a fishbowl?

November 07, 2011 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Brian Berry

When I saw the list of topics for Slant 33 this year, I saw this one and thought, I know a thing or two about that. But then, when I sat down to write out my thoughts, I realized I had, in fact, stepped into a much larger internet fishbowl to talk about it. Then I closed the doors, shut the windows, and hid in the closet under the stairs in fear like Will Smith in I Am Legend. Okay, I’m kidding—a little; I didn’t close all the shades, just the ones in the front of the house.

Do you get the picture? I’ve been burned a time or two in this category and, because this fishbowl I’m writing in is actually a public aquarium, I’ll be as honest as I can and totally vague about specifics. Let me just start by affirming two things: 1) We all need safe friendships at church. All of us. 2) When you’re the youth pastor or youth leader, they are hard to find.

Part of this is because you spend a lot of time with teens, and teens are not safe or healthy for accountability for you. So, the group you work with—unlike an adult ministry—is not a possible option for a safe friendship. Another reason is that, unless you’re at a really big church, if you’re the youth pastor, the pastors on your team are often people you answer to. Try as you may, it’s really hard to have a safe friendship with your boss who signs your checks or, when you confess your sins, doesn’t also muddy it with your leadership responsibilities. Which leads us to another reason we both need and find it hard to have safe friendships. Everyone around us is looking to us for leadership and guidance, and a safe friendship is one where you can be the uninhibited you. In a safe friendship, you share joys without creating jealousy and failures without creating judgment. So it’s hard. Understanding all of that, here are a few thoughts about how:

Avoid plastic people, curious people, and over-sharing people. Plastic people are fake. They poop potpourri. Their world never stinks, and they never fail. Their marriages are perfect, their lives always look put together, and they are not real or safe. Curious people always want to know “How are you, really?” way before they have earned the right to the full answer. They want to know about your marriage, your life, and your kids, and they are just too curious. My experience says they are not really interested in you; they just take pride in being in the know. Beware. Over-sharing people tell everyone everything. If you tell them everything, expect them to tell everyone. Avoid them.

Be safe. Be authentic. Be wise. You can’t expect to create safe friendships with others if you’re not safe. So don’t be plastic, don’t go searching out details in people’s lives for fun, and don’t gossip. Be a friend who is there. Be humble and share honestly your successes and failures to the degree that others can hear them. Don’t pretend you have it all together. Don’t hang all your laundry in the front yard either.

Start with a few. Start Slow. Pray for God to lead you and then invest in someone whose life you respect. Start slow. Grab weekly java. Open your heart and see where it leads. Then if it’s safe, share your hopes, dreams, and fears. If the passion for friendship is mutual, then invest. Ask God to protect it. Your safe friendship is also a chief battlefield for ministry. Know that the devil is not fond of it and will work hard to destroy it. Guard your friendships in prayer. Choose them carefully.

Join a network or create one. Sometimes the safest friendships can be found inside the church but outside your local body. This isn’t an excuse for being an outsider in your local church or for lacking vulnerability there, but there is some truth in someone who totally gets your calling yet is not looking to you for approval or leadership. The right network of pastors from a couple of churches can, if comparison is declared off limits, be a very safe place. I actually meet with a youth pastor network monthly, a group of three pastors quarterly, and annually with a group of five long-haul pastoral friends from all over the state for a week of accountability and friendship. All have proven invaluably safe places for me.

Jeremy Zach

Healthy and vulnerable friendships for youth pastors are so essential. I spend a lot of my days talking and connecting with youth pastors around the country, and there is one common theme youth workers struggle with: They are extremely lonely. We don’t have a lot of friends. All youth workers dream about having a small group of trusted friends who love and care for them for who they are and not what they do for the church.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle makes it clear that the number of people with whom one can sustain the kind of relationship he calls a perfect friendship is quite small. The role of youth pastor is relationally driven, which means the capacity to maintain a large group of friends is not sustainable. There is no need to have a large pool of surface-level friendships but rather having two to three really great friends outside the church. So the question remains: Should youth pastors find friends inside or outside the church?

I strongly argue that the best solution to finding safe friendships is simply outsourcing your friendships outside the church. First, youth workers need more community outside their church communities. Getting sucked into the church fishbowl is dangerous because your life, perspective, and experience are only rooted in your church community. You won’t be able to see life outside your church community lens. It is important to have non-church friends to help you objectively think and process about your life, marriage, and ministry.

Second, youth workers need outlets that force them to get out of the fishbowl. You need legitimate reasons to jump out. If church life is the only thing you have going, it will literally suck the life out of you. Find ways to enjoy life outside your church life.

Third, friends at church can only see you as a church employee. You need friends who see you as you. Ministry is your job, so don’t feel obligated to have best friends at your church. You cannot get on a vulnerable level with friends inside the church without changing their perspective of who you are as a leader in the church.

Fourth, having friends at church is too risky. You need safe and trusted relationships were you can freely vent without having to filter your thoughts and words. It is problematic when you are worrying if your venting sessions will backfire. Church people love to gossip about other church people, especially if it is about the church leadership.

Youth pastors have to figure out how to build relationships where you can be honest. My only solution is to jump out of the fishbowl and start intentionally carving time to cultivate friendships outside the church. Here are two ways to cultivate safe, fun, and trusted friendships outside the church:

Be committed to developing long-term friendship. In order to build great relationships, you have to value friendships. The best friends for youth pastors are other youth pastors. Youth pastors share interests and passions with other youth pastors. Join a local youth pastor network so you can befriend other like-minded youth pastors with whom you can talk life, marriage, and ministry.

Find hobbies outside the church. In other words, get a life. I was just recently at the National Youth Workers Convention in San Diego, and I stopped the youth ministry guru/veteran Les Christie to ask: “What has kept you sane in youth ministry tenure?” Without any hesitation, he passionately said, “I found hobbies outside the church. I found other things to do than just youth ministry.” I smiled and gave him a hug and said, “I completely agree.” The hobbies I have pursued outside of church have kept me sane and given me other friends.

So how can one guarantee safe and life-giving friendships? Shatter the fishbowl, be committed to cultivating friends outside the church, and find hobbies that pull you away from church work.

Michelle Lang

I had a hard time with this topic, which is weird because I love my friends. I have great friends. I have significant and sincere bonds with people in my inner circle. I don’t see them every day. Don’t even talk to them every day, but the friendships I have are meaningful, solid, healthy, inspiring, fun, and reliable. In the rickety and topsy-turvy world of ministry, it’s those real and true friendships that keep me sane and grounded. They make being in a fishbowl not so bad.

On Facebook, I have almost five thousand friends. That might sound impressive, but allow me to put it in perspective. Whereas most people meet one person at a time, my work sometimes affords me the great and humbling opportunity to be in front of lots of people on a regular basis. In addition to youth ministry, I’m in a band; I do some theater work; I produce and speak at events pretty regularly; stuff like that. Some days nobody requests my friendship, and other days, dozens do.

In real life, I know a fraction of the people who befriend me, but it doesn’t stop them from approaching me in public, stepping into my bubble, and exuberantly declaring, “Hey! We’re friends…” I’m pretty quick to assume they’re talking about Facebook so as not to let an involuntary facial scowl tell my real thought of, No, we ain’t! I can usually catch myself. Usually. In brief conversation, they might recall one of my statuses, a posted picture, or inquire about some upcoming event I’m promoting. Then without fail, that awkward moment of how we wrap this up is upon us.

And no matter how kind, pleasant, or amusing the person was, I invariably leave that conversation not feeling known but rather feeling watched and reminded how many people on any given day are doing just that. Watching. Some with good intent, some not, and I don’t always have a way of knowing which is which. It’s certainly a vulnerable position to be in. It makes one long for safety. Truth is, as fulfilling and purposeful as ministry can be, it often is like being in a fishbowl set on top of a really tall pedestal with lots of people bumping the stem. Even with lots of people around, it can be a lonely place and terribly silent in the midst of constant noise.

Recently at a community event to honor one of my friends, I was given the opportunity to publicly applaud his many accomplishments, talents, and endeavors. I chose instead to applaud his friendship. My speech was this: “My friend, you are anointed. To anoint means to make sacred. Sacred means to esteem, secure, or protect from violation. Your friendship has been that in my life. It has been anointed. It has protected me not only from outside opposition but even from the oppositions I sometimes put on myself. I would trade you for nothing.” After the ceremony was over, we went to dinner, complained about the food, laughed about all the things we found funny, and then wished each other well before heading back to our respective fishbowls. So, here’s my slant.

There’s nothing you can do about the fishbowl. Get used to it. It’s part of the call.

Recognize that there are people anointed to be your friend. Spend less time trying to find friendships. Rather, take time to discover the ones you already have. Hone in on the people who consistently and quietly support and inspire you; the ones who can challenge you while simultaneously making your life light—and don’t sneakily hand you an emotional bill for it.

Don’t let friendships become stale. Find ways to keep ’em fresh. Take trips. Have regular and spontaneous appointments. Go out of your way to hang out, even if it’s just for twenty minutes. Give each other passes on being perfect. Call or text each other and laugh about something dumb then just hang up.

Don’t make the mistake of not investing in your friendships until you need to. Purposely cultivate, protect, and grow them. To not do so is cheating and cheap, and the results will show it. Conversely, don’t make the mistake of expending energy on people who drain and deplete you. They might be anointed—just not for you.

In short, I’m saying, if you gotta be the fish in the bowl, let your friendships be the water.

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What are the benefits and dangers of traditions in youth ministry?

October 17, 2011 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Michelle Lang

I’m an African American woman who was raised being sent to an African American Methodist church with my cousins. As a teenager, I was taken to a Missionary Baptist church. As a young adult I joined a Pentecostal but non-denominational church. Upon entering into full-time ministry, I worked with a Covenant church, a para-church organization, and an international Christian charity. In the last five years, I’ve been on staff at a mega-Presbyterian church and a midsize, multi-cultural Fellowship of Christian Assemblies church.

I am a church mutt—or, for those needing a more dignified description, I am what you might call well rehearsed in navigating through different church cultures and traditions. While that might seem like a negative, for the most part, I believe I’m better for it. For the minor part, I’ve learned that many of the traditions we hold sacred are attributable to nothing more than personal or communal style, preference, or mere adaptations. Conversely, there are things we hold sacred in youth ministry that I’ve found to be not much more than an oftentimes feeble attempt at being trendy.

The kids in my youth group are by most accounts normal, but even so, they are an interesting bunch indeed. They regularly shoot bullets into many textbook youth ministry traditions. While they may like and appreciate the pizzas, games, and fun outings, they consistently remind me that those are not the reasons they come to youth group.

A few years ago, I decided to surprise the kids by converting one of our regular youth group gatherings to a game and movie night. My team and I worked hard to turn the youth room into a movie theater, complete with fresh popcorn, a candy bar, dim lighting, surround sound, and a larger-than-life projection. The night went well. Kids had fun. But as they left with an abundance of treats, one student turned to me and said, “This was cool, but I come to church for church.” I might have brushed that off as just one kid’s little opinion until a good number of them chimed in with agreement. It was agreement dripping from melting popsicles but agreement nonetheless.

Likewise was the time I skipped prayer in order to give a visiting artist more time to perform. The reminder was a smarmy yet again a clear, “Liked it, but…” I learned that while people appreciate keeping things interesting and current and relevant, they (even youth) “go to church for church;” to worship, pray, receive instruction, and be reminded of and connected to the one thing that is and forever will be bigger than themselves. Those traditions are sacred. But, as always, there’s another side.

Boys aren’t supposed to wear hats in church. That’s a big deal, particularly in the African American church because, to some degree, the act of wearing a hat represents clout and stature. To wear it in the “house of de Lawd” is an absolute offense because it makes your stature of greater importance than his. But see, for a millennial teenage boy, the hat is nothing more than a fashion accessory. To him, it means nothing and has no direct bearing whatsoever on his focus. Nor is it an indication of his lack of reverence for the Almighty. Removing of the hat is a tradition I’ve seen many a deacon and teenager squabble over, and while the Deacon usually wins it comes at the expense of the boy being so confused that he ends up completely checking out for the entire service over something that didn’t really matter.

But you know what modern accessory is clearly a threat to a young man’s reverence and focus? The cell phone; be it an iPhone or an Android. To the worship service, the smartphone is a handheld distraction just waiting to draw your attention and reverence away from the communal worship experience. Yeah, no matter how powerful and inspiring the worship service might be, it seems the urge to be connected to the outside world, even at the expense of being connected to God, is so alluring that we lose thousands of teens (and adults) to its intoxicating grips Sunday after Sunday. It matters, and every teenage boy and girl knows it.

So, rather than focus on the dated, ineffectual tradition of removing the hat, I’ve elected to zoom in on what the tradition is really intended to achieve: respect, reverence, and focus on God. So go ahead and wear your hat, Mr. Millennial Teenage Boy, but texting, Tweeting, and status updating on your cell phone are a no-no because it steals from you the whole reason you come to church. And while we're at it, please stand for the reading of God's Word. But don’t worry, in a few years it won’t be your cell phone. It’ll probably be your hat.

There’s a story about why people cut off the end of the holiday ham. Lots of people speculate about the meaning and reason for such a long-held tradition. Many thought and accepted that it was because it cooked better by giving the ham juices room to flow. So one day, after many years of going to Grandma’s house, it became time for the daughter to prepare the big dinner. Over at the daughter’s house, Grandma conspicuously watched as the meal was prepared, and sure enough, the time came to prepare the holiday ham. The daughter, per the tradition, cut off the end, put it in the pan, and then put the pan in the oven. She turned around to catch Grandma’s gaze. Trying not to be critical, Grandma squirmed before asking, “Why did you cut off the end of that ham?” The daughter quickly and proudly responded, “Because that’s what you taught me to do. It’s the tradition!” Grandma chuckled, shook her head, and sweetly said, “I cut the end of the ham off because my pan was too small.”

Don’t neglect traditions for the sake of fleeting trends. But neither uphold them just to exercise ineffectual customs. Let the reason be the reason.

Brian Berry

Am I the only one hearing the Fiddler on the Roof guy singing “Tradition” in my head right now? Regardless of what song plays in your head with the word “TRAADIIIITIONN!”, I have found that after doing youth ministry for eleven years in one church and now six in another, there are indeed two sides to the tradition coin.

Four benefits to tradition:
Shared stories. If you do an event or have a ritual or keep a tradition over the long haul, then your ministry has a consistent shared journey. Students and staff can say, “Remember that time at summer camp…” and they all have an instant shared story. Sure, each year was different, but there’s camaraderie and unity and ownership in shared language and experience, all of which are like gold in youth ministry.

Calendaring and family planning are easy. If you always do a Christmas party the first weekend in December, or every year you go to summer camp the second week in July, you become a staple in a family’s planning. They know what to expect and when to expect it. They know how to budget and what you generally tend to do. You make it easy for a family to plan with you.

We can learn and improve based on experience. If you constantly are changing stuff, then you will constantly be trying to reinvent the wheel or guess about variables you can’t predict. In traditions, you’ve done it before and figured out what works and doesn’t work. Therefore, you know the best road to get there and where to stop for dinner, the best place to do small groups, the best format for a rite of passage, the best way to run your weekend service, the best way to do all kinds of things because you’ve also done them wrong and fixed them. Tradition lets you learn from your mistakes and improve.

The logistics can be done in your sleep. You already know the family that does the food. You know who plays the music and who your leaders will be. You just call them, confirm a couple of things, and move on because they already know what to do, what to expect, and how to help. The logistics are virtually done before you even start. Tweak the flyer, fix two things you learned last year, make some phone calls, put it up on Facebook. Done.

Four dangers of tradition:
We can get in a rut. I once had a mentor tell me that a “rut is nothing but a grave with the ends kicked out.” Ruts are dangerous and should be avoided. Instead of thinking about what is best or what could and should be, we just do what we’ve always done and hope it’s better this year. We start worshiping sacred cows instead of Jesus, and before we know it, the nonnegotiable thing in ministry is not following the leading of the Holy Spirit to advance the spiritual lives of students; now it’s, “Do whatever you want, as long as you do this thing, this way.”

We get predictable. Tradition can also lead to predictability in a bad way. Instead of keeping your students on the edge of their seats, wondering what will happen next, they start to ditch stuff because they’ve already done it. Even if it was amazing the first time, the second time was okay, and the third time was, um…predictable. When we do and say what everyone thinks we’ll do and say, we lose our leadership edge in the lives of students.

We start to tell a boring story. Tradition has a way of leading us into boredom. No one wants to be boring. No one wants to tell a boring story. But when tradition trumps risk and new adventures and uncharted ministry territory, we start to tell a boring story. That’s a danger worth avoiding.

We become modern-day Pharisees. There’s a fine line between respect for tradition and legalism. Whenever we create new or hold onto old traditions, we risk becoming the very people Jesus so sternly rebuked. We are called to honor the sacred. We are not called to worship the traditional.

Adam Walker Cleaveland

Creating rituals and traditions in a youth ministry program is a great way to build cohesion and a sense of community. When I started at my current church, I was told about the Pig of Truth and immediately thought it was a bit ridiculous. At the end of each youth group, we get out a little wax pig candle holder and light a votive candle on the inside. Then we pass it around, and only the person holding the pig can talk. Kids have a chance to share what's going on in their lives and answer a question: Where have I seen God this week?

Before I started doing it weekly, it seemed a little cheesy to me. I think I actually considered how many months would be appropriate before I started to move away from this inherited tradition. But then I started to hear the things the students shared and was pretty amazed. We can have the most ridiculous, goofy games, but for those ten minutes, youth open up their lives and look for where God has been active in their lives. This is a great tradition our youth group has; one that existed before I arrived and one I'm sure will continue after I leave.

I know of some youth ministry programs that have very specific ways that they welcome new students into their programs (for many it involves kidnapping the kids—with parental approval, of course—and having activities that get them acquainted with the youth ministry). These can be exciting traditions that youth will look forward to, creating more interest for the youth program.

Traditions can also help bring about a shared history with youth and the leaders. To have significant and repeated touchstones to look back on seems healthy to me and makes me want to stop and think about those important traditions I had while growing up in the church.

So, traditions can be a great benefit to your ministry. But they can also be dangerous.

When traditions have theological and relational depth, they can be healthy and life giving to a youth ministry. However, when traditions are rooted in the We've always done things this way mentality or simply in a specific individual's personal preferences, they have a tendency to become an unhealthy rut.

Churches aren't often seen as the most forward-thinking organizations, and sometimes we can get too focused on the past, on the way things have been, instead of being open to the new ways in which the Spirit wants to move. As I mentioned above, it's a good thing to have traditions in your programs but not if the only reason you're doing it is because it's just something you've always done. When traditions are seen as sacred cows by some individuals, that's a pretty good warning sign that there may be something unhealthy going on.

Figuring out how to break those unhealthy traditions (without losing your job, if they are truly sacred cows for the entire congregation) is probably another topic for another series. But I think it's important to find out what folks value about the tradition. If, through that process, you come to realize there isn't anything truly beneficial about the tradition, hopefully others will as well, and you'll be able to find some new avenues for your ministry. But hopefully you'll find out why one particular tradition is so important, and perhaps there might be other ways that these important needs for the youth could be met. But it's crucial to realize that these types of changes won't happen overnight and that a lot of conversation and attempts at understanding all parties will be involved.

Traditions and rituals can be an incredibly important part of your youth ministry. However, if they are unhealthy traditions without strong theological foundations, they can become dangerous, time-consuming distractions from your ministry.

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How do you honor your marriage while in youth ministry? In what practical ways do you prioritize your marriage over ministry?

October 3, 2011 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Brian Berry

By way of clarity, I’ve been a full-time youth pastor for more than seventeen years, serving in two churches. I started in April of 1994 and got married in June of that same year, so all but three months of it have been as a married man too. My wife, Shannon, and I have now been in San Diego for six and a half years and have five kids ranging in age from 8 to 14. So keeping my marriage a priority is constantly in tension with the pull of work, family, and life.

We could probably make a long list of reasons for this tension, discussing the demands of the church, the difficulty of separating work and home life when your calling as a pastor is a 24/7 reality, the needs of people, etc. But, regardless of the reason, if you want to stay in ministry and stay married to your spouse, then my observation and experience tell me it will require intentionality.

Here are five things we’ve tried to do as a married couple that I think have been strategically helpful. Sometimes we’re better at these than others.

Remember, God called me to marriage. Bear with me here. This one is more philosophical than practical at first. The idea that God called me to be a pastor is both true and needed to keep my butt in my pastoral seat. Honestly, without a call, I would have left a long time ago. But it is equally true that God has called me to be married. Maybe that call is what keeps my butt there too in the tough times. The two callings are inseparable. So it is logistically impossible for me to say “God has called me to” anymore. It is always, “God is calling us.” I don’t mean that your spouse must work with you in your youth ministry. I just mean that the idea that God can move me without any kind of effect on my bride is simply false. So, if you’re married, calling has we implications and must be fleshed out in the community of your marriage first. This is a mental shift that says, I’ll wait for God to confirm a call in us I’ll think we before me, and I’ll make my spouse a priority in my decision-making process. The next point is a practical way to flesh this out.

Give first right of refusal to your spouse. If you want to honor your spouse, then run your calendar and commitments by him or her first. Don’t assume that he or she “understands” or will be supportive of your ridiculous work schedule. Sometimes it means agreeing together that a season is going to be abnormally busy right before a camp or something, and you can prepare together accordingly. Maybe it means deciding that we’re booking too many nights out or deciding that a specific weekend needs to be spent with family instead of with the church. Yes, it’s a two-way conversation, but clear communication saves a world of hurt in marriage, especially when it comes to scheduling. If my wife feels like she’s part of the process of making the decisions, she’s much more supportive when the strain of them is felt. As a side note, sharing a calendar that we can both access on our computers and phones has done two things. [1] It’s made our schedules visible to each other at all times. [2] It’s produced a myth that, since we can see it, we’ve talked about it. In some ways, the fact that we can both see each other’s calendars has increased the need to communicate verbally so no false assumptions are made.

Get away. Just the two of you. Perhaps the single greatest investment we’ve made in our marriage has been twice-a-year retreats. We get away for three days and two nights twice a year, without the kids. A getaway weekend is worth its weight in gold for marriage longevity. Get cost creative if you need to. Just get away.

Stop multi-tasking and unplug. When we’re at our marriage best is when we turn off our cell phones, shut down our computers, and give each other our undivided attention. The idea that we can do marriage well with the digital world constantly interrupting us has become increasingly difficult for us. Our best shot at a healthy marriage is giving our marriage all of ourselves intentionally.

Be best friends, not ministry problem solvers. I trust your spouse is someone you’d call a best friend. The temptation is to then bring your best friend into the loop on your ministry problems. If this becomes your norm, don’t be surprised to find that your marriage has become consumed with ministry tasks. Instead of talking about your heart or planning a vacation, your marriage conversations become mini church-staff meetings. Be very careful. This has destroyed many a marriage. I recommend you have a longer church-staff meeting before turning your dinner table into another one.

Brooklyn Lindsey

After a busy summer month, I received a call to go on an expenses-paid study trip to Africa, giving me the opportunity to see firsthand the fruits of efforts raising money during the 30-Hour Famine. What a great opportunity.

One problem: The trip was only a few weeks away. I had been gone from my family for more than three weeks. And I’d be missing a major milestone in our family—the launch of a project my husband had been working on for months.

So I said no, even though everything in me wanted to say yes. It wasn’t easy, but I knew I needed to make this decision with my husband in mind.

By nature, I’m a juggler, and I feel like I can throw everything into the air and catch it too. In fact, I can’t imagine my life any other way. But I’d have nothing if I lost my most important relationship on earth while trying to catch a few inconsequential items as they compare to the most important things.

And because of this juggling nature, (which I believe is not uncommon for ministry leaders, many who are bi-vocational) I’ve got to follow some rules that lead me to honor my marriage, even when I’m tempted to neglect it.

I’m still discovering new ways of honoring my spouse while working in ministry. New contexts and changes we face give plenty of space for this. Even so, there are a few fail-safe ways to honor my spouse.

Give space. I give space by not volunteering my spouse out. For example, have you ever uttered the words in a staff meeting where they are looking for someone to help in an area where your spouse has obvious gifts, “Oh yeah, my spouse can do that!” Always have a conversation (in private—even if that means sending a text or making a quick call) before you volunteer your most valuable person.

Gather advisors on major ministry and professional decisions. Even if I know the answer to a question, if it’s major, I take it to my T.E.A.M. (Trusted leader, Elder, Always faithful (a close friend), and My spouse). The Africa trip is a great example of this. I was conflicted. I knew the right answer was no, but I wanted to say yes. My TEAM affirmed what was happening in my spirit and supported me in making the honoring choice.

Say no—for the right reasons. Develop healthy boundaries with those you work with. Set expectations that are clear and have been explained. For example, I don’t answer my cell phone during dinner time. I have roughly three hours with my children before they go to bed. I dishonor my spouse if I don’t invest in those hours with my full attention. Sometimes things come up, but they are the exception, not the rule. I try not to overcommit. We are human. If we hyper-schedule ourselves, we’ll find our lives to be frantic, frenzied, and full of confusion. Honor your spouse by saying no. It’s okay.

Get help. One of the biggest blessings has been having the support of a professional design company. The owner of the company attends our church. When asked, she was more than willing to give her time and help. Not only has her company graciously supported us, they have taken visual communication to another level. We have a teenager in our church who started a nonprofit to raise money for clean water. The design company was the first to offer help and support their marketing pieces. For an entire year, they’ve given their creative services to help Birds of Hope raise more than $25,000. I would have jeopardized time with my family if I tried to do this on my own—and the products wouldn’t be half as good. I ask for help with things like this because my marriage is better when I’m not trying to be good at everything. Try asking for something. Make your need public and watch to see how God provides.

Unplug. No church talk at dinnertime or in bed. Enough said. These are the rules, fools. Follow them and thank me later.

Notice. God has given people in ministry an acute awareness of the needs of others around me and an ability to respond to them. I have to remember that my husband is just as deserving of this awareness.

I could have said yes to Africa and then yes to Thailand, an event that came up a week after the Africa offer. Everything would have been okay, but I would have been saying to my husband (and to my kids) that my plan is more important than our purpose together as a family. I’ll have other opportunities to serve and to give around the world, but I may not have another opportunity to honor my family.

Cheers to honoring our spouses, seeing their needs like we see everyone else’s, unplugging to connect with them, getting help and counsel to help us make honoring decisions, saying no to be able to say yes, and giving space to allow our spouses to be the people they were created to be. Sounds like a plan to me.

Lars Rood

First thing I should say is that I am a bit terrified to write this post because my wife will be reading it. You should ask her to write the rebuttal.

My perspective for answering this question is shaped by the fact that I’ve never done full-time youth ministry without being married. Although I started doing youth ministry at a camp when I first started working part time in the church, I came into it with my girlfriend who then became my fiancée. It wasn’t until we got married that I became a full-time youth pastor. So I’ve never really known youth ministry without Danielle.

That doesn’t always mean I have it figured out, but I think I do have a few things that work.

Never choose between the two. Always plan life before ministry. For example, I plan out my family’s summer before the ministry calendar. That helps my family and my wife know that they will always be the first priority.

Don’t be out every night of the week—or even half of them. Maintain boundaries and recognize that your family is the most important thing you have going. There will be times you have to be out, but be strategic.

Bring your wife and kids with you on trips. Doug Fields talks about this too, and he’s smart. In every situation that I can, I involve my family, and I never feel guilty about it. It’s actually a better model for students to see me with my wife and kids than alone.

Go on vacation. Don’t feel guilty about leaving the ministry behind. I like my wife and family a whole lot. I also like my youth ministry. But, when I go on vacation, I turn off the ministry and try to be fully present with my family. I don’t always do this well because I sometimes go on vacation during busy seasons, but I never feel guilty.

Have date nights. If you are a youth pastor and don’t have regular date nights, you have a problem. You should have a ton of babysitters available. I try to make sure my wife knows she is a priority and that I want to do special things for her.

Turn off your phone and don’t answer work calls when with family. I have a rule that I don’t answer my phone when I’m with my family unless it is really urgent. I don’t do as well with text and Twitter, so this is sometimes tough, but I try not to bring work to wherever my family is.

Be known as a couple, not just as the youth minister. My wife isn’t super involved in the ministry. She thinks (and I agree) that she’d rather be with our kids than the youth ministry now. But we invite students and leaders into our home so they get to know us as a couple.

Be careful what you share about your marriage or wife with others. This should be a no-brainer, but I hear so many people divulge info they shouldn’t in talks or in conversations with others. Keep your marriage sacred and honor your spouse in all venues.

Learn to say no to people who are not your spouse. I learned this early and have always held onto it. My wife knows that I am good at saying no. She appreciates this about me and is aware that I do it because I value our marriage and family.

Learn to say yes to your spouse. Listen, think, listen, think. I always want my wife to know that I will do whatever I possibly can to make sure that her needs are met. If that means a sacrifice, it will likely be the ministry.

I want to end with this. I don’t have it all figured out, and I will never be the person who tries to pretend that he does. Marriage is hard, and being a married youth minister has difficulties too. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love the opportunities I have to minister in different ways to students and families that come from being married and having kids. God is using it and constantly teaching and growing me to be better at it. And Danielle, if you read this, I love you.

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How far out do you plan your calendar? Why? What's your process?

August 22, 2011 Posted by Mark Oestreicher

Brian Berry

I believe in planning, so I try to plan my basic teaching and event calendar 9-12 months out. I’ll give you three reasons why.

1. It makes recruiting volunteers easier. I can wing it with the best of them and run a meeting or an outreach on the fly. But, while that might be a necessary skill on a mission trip when your bus breaks down or the teacher gets sick, my experience says it’s a lousy way to run a day-to-day ministry and a great way to burn out volunteers. When I wing it in my everyday ministry life, it usually becomes all about me. My volunteers quickly start feeling used instead of utilized. When I fail to plan ahead, I don’t know what I need and can’t effectively ask others to help, or when I do ask, I have to apologize for the last-minute emergency.

2. It saves money. We do a lot of ministry purchasing and ordering online. So if we need an earth ball or a bunch of water balloons or books for a small-group teaching series and I don’t want to run around town to fifty places to get the quantity I need, I simply order them and have them sent. But a huge budget killer is paying to have everything rush shipped. When I plan ahead, I can have someone search for the best deal, find it on sale, and pay for the minimum shipping or accept the free shipping without having to stress that it won’t be here on time. And if you’ve ever tried to book a speaker, artist, band, retreat center, airline ticket, or hotel last minute, then you know it’s not only more stressful and difficult to do, it often costs more too.

3. It increases creativity and ownership. My experience says that both of those things take time. If I want creativity to be a team task and I want to pool the best ideas from my team, then I have to gather people together far enough out to give input. When I do this, they also feel like it’s their thing, not just my thing. When we talk about outreach or basic ideas for a teaching series, planning gives a lot more time for input and increases the creativity of what we can do because we now have the time to plan the skit, create the design, gather the people, or prepare something to be really well done with a wide level of involvement.

Annually, in the early summer, I have my student and adult leaders gather for a couple of days of basic skeleton calendaring for the next school year. We spend some time in prayer, and we talk about our mission and why we do what we do. We eat and laugh and share visions. Before they arrive I take a huge whiteboard calendar and mark when school is out, when holidays are, and large, nonnegotiable things, like the annual summer camp we go to or church-wide functions. Then we look at the space that is left and start talking about our dreams. We talk about details like when small groups should start, what other retreats or events we want to do, and some main topics, themes, Bible texts, and teaching ideas we want to cover in the next year. Since we teach in series form, I then begin to then lay out a rough sketch of teaching series, and we start putting them down on our weekends.

Quarterly, I gather some key people to talk about what is coming up. We gather several months before major seasons like the fall kick-off for school, Christmas, spring break, and summer. These meetings are less about overall vision and begin to move into the nuts and bolts of design. We start making lists of things that need to be done, thinking of people we could ask to help, and dreaming about what we’re planning and what it really looks like.

Monthly, I meet with my student leadership, and we plan out the next month’s youth group meetings. We meet after church and over lunch, and we brainstorm the next month based on our previous nine-month plan and any changes we now have to make. We talk themes, pop-culture references, relevant songs or movie clips, brainstorm games and discussion questions, and evaluate and identify anything we learned from the previous month of doing ministry together too.

Josh Griffin

I love Google Maps. When you load the homepage, the default view is zoomed way out, showing you the whole United States. Type in an address and it zooms in quickly to show you a specific region. Click “street view” and BAM! you’re looking at things as if you were literally walking through the neighborhood on foot. Kinda creepy, since this means Google is stalking us, but kinda awesome at the same time. And a great example of how we typically plan our youth ministry calendar.

We first take a look at the big picture of our ministry then zoom in on the season ahead and finally get a street view all the way down to the current teaching series and events.

It is a wise idea to get away for the day and get a big picture of your ministry. Take a break from the pace of ministry and the distractions of email, voicemail, and the persistent nagging of Google Plus and wrestle with an overview of your youth group. August is the perfect time for this!

For some, this is a simple task because they live in the world of ideas and vision. For others, it will be challenging to stick your head up over it all and get a glimpse of the whole.

Key questions to ask yourself at this big-picture stage:

Where do you think God wants to take students in the next year?
What worked well last year, and will it work again?
What annual events would be effective again this year?
What needs to get the ax?
Have you blocked out your week of vacation?
Where are we strong, and where are we weak?
Is there a good balance of God’s eternal purposes for our ministry (evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, worship)?

Paint in broad strokes what your youth ministry year will look like at this point. Spend lots of time in prayer. Ask God for discernment. Use pencil.

Once you’ve got an idea of the big picture, it is time to specially plan the next season. There are lots of ways you can do this. I like to divide the year into three unequal parts: fall, winter-spring, and summer. This is the time to start to really firm up specific teaching topics, series, and events. You probably already locked up some bigger things like summer camp, trips, and retreat locations, but now is the time to make final decisions.

Key questions to ask yourself at this stage:

What needs to be cut?
Am I keeping this program to satisfy a parent or some vocal students or because it is what is best for our ministry?
Where do I have momentum naturally, and where is it lacking?
What are the teaching topics for this season?
Who is the best person to teach?
Has my spouse seen this before I go public?

What looked good in the big-picture view might be too much now that you’re zoomed in a bit closer. You are still flexible enough to use the eraser if needed but definitely not on your vacation time.

The closest we zoom in for planning is the current month. You’ve planned everything from a year out, you firmed up much of those plans in your season overview, now it is time to lock everything down and walk into what you’ve planned.

Key questions to ask yourself at this stage:

What adjustments do I need to make based on circumstances that have come up since we planned the year/season?
Am I balanced and healthy with this calendar?
What can we do to make our youth ministry even better next year?

I’m in the thick of planning our spring right now! May God bless you as you serve students and plan your youth ministry calendar too.

Some tools to consider helping you plan your youth ministry calendar: o www.rememberthemilk.com o www.30boxes.com o www.whomi.com o www.franklincovey.com/tc/software-and-applications

Also, please consider these related posts on my blog:

5 Steps to Calendar on Purpose

4 Guiding Principles for Planning Your Youth Ministry Calendar

Lars Rood

I’m a big planner and enjoy strategizing just how to maximize our time and ensure that the most students, families, volunteers, and leaders will be impacted. In general, we try to plan all of our big events, retreats, missions, and activities at least one year out. This is especially true about our summer calendar.

I try to involve as many people as possible in our planning process, so it’s helpful for me to roll out preliminary ideas early so I can run them by parents, volunteers, students, and other staff to see what we are missing.

In this particular community we’ve found that moms are a huge resource in picking out possible conflicts.

When we get this many people involved in our planning process, the calendar stops being my calendar and instead becomes their calendar.

I also try to out-plan parents. If I can get the dates for our events on their radar a minimum of one year out, then they can plan around our schedule. This is particularly important because, in my current community, people tend to disappear for the entire summer months. But, if we let them know the dates for our mission trips and camps, they more often than not adjust their calendars so their students can go.

Long-range preplanning actually helps us be more flexible. When we publish dates a year in advance, occasionally something comes up that we need to change. People in general are much happier when we make changes six months out rather than the week of. Last summer, we planned a houseboat trip with our high school students. Ten months out, I started asking parents what they thought and got a little pushback on the safety of the proposed location. We immediately made a switch, and the trip was a huge success. Because we planned so far out, we weren’t locked into locations and contracts and could be flexible to make changes.

My process of thinking involves a lot of people and dialogue. It’s way more than just grabbing clip art and making copies of a calendar. In the beginning, I spend a lot of time evaluating what we did in the past. We talk about impact, timing, dates, and cost. We try to make sure we always have a good sense of how something met our philosophy of ministry.

At that point, if everything lined up, we start talking about whether we want to do the same trip, activity, or event again. I’m a huge proponent of repetition because it is often our best advertising. I also like change, but in general, we first look to see what has worked before we start talking about what we want to change. This is also the stage where we pray a ton, asking God to lead.

Then we then start having dialogue about all the possibilities, followed by a process in which I write it all out and start looking for conflicts. I think about presence and impact when I do this. Specifically, I look to see how everyone will be impacted by our calendar. I look at the frequency and number of events. I evaluate the downtime between events as well as the prep time needed to pull something off well. It’s a system aimed at making sure all we do has huge impact but doesn’t burn anyone out.

The next step is when we finally talk budgets and money. We purposely wait ’til near the end because talking about budgets and money too early can be a killer to the dreaming process. I want us to dream big first without thinking there will hindrances.

Then it’s time to bring everyone into the loop. This often takes the most amount of time and can be frustrating because I have to explain the reasons behind everything we are doing. After everyone has weighed in and we’ve gotten most people to consent to the calendar, we try to get our communications ministry to get all of our packages for the events done as soon as possible. We have found that planning way out and then promoting way out produces the most success.

I’ve had a bunch of bombs over the years and have had many things not go well. But I’ve learned that spending a lot of time thinking, dreaming, and praying is most beneficial because it gets more people involved. If I could stress one thing above everything else here, I would say that more people involved will only benefit your calendar.

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