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.

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.

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.

I wait a minute for all that to sink in, and then I continue, “What I mean by ‘I don’t care’ is that none of those things are gonna get you kicked out of this youth group, nor will they stop me or God from loving you, but… Not having a good, healthy, and righteous perspective on dating, sex, and sexuality could cause you to do that to yourself. My goal isn’t to lower the value of sex or sexuality so that you won’t do it. My goal is to raise the value you have for it and for yourself as a divinely created being so that maybe you won’t waste or misuse it like so many people do every day.”

From there we launch into a seven-week interactive series with topics including Levels of Intimacy, Progression of Interaction, Toxic Tendencies, Disposable Relationships, Love vs. Infatuation, and so on. At this psychological & spiritual level of discussion and with the right pacing, the truth of the matter is that there is no difference between how you teach middle schoolers and high schoolers. It’s when we move into group dialogue that I separate them by age because it allows middle schoolers to discuss where they are without pretending to know things they don’t, and it allows high schoolers the opportunity to discuss things without pretending notto know things they actually do. Basing our series on being real means we address what’s real for both groups, but we don’t force either group to function outside of what’s real for their seasons of life.

Throughout the years, I’ve led many youth group discussions on sex and dating. In the beginning, I took the typical just-don’t-do-it approach to promoting abstinence. It wasn’t until I was a touring facilitator with an organization called SHARE that I realized there was a different way to discuss these subjects with kids that really puts it in proper perspective.

See, the church has a way of making sex and sexuality a huge, monumental deal—almost more than the world does. We base kids’ salvation on it. They can be liars, cheaters, truants, unsaved, and though we say that stuff is bad, it’s really okay as long as they aren’t having sex. The truth of the matter is, sexuality is just a part of our human existence. When we discuss sex and sexuality in light of who we are as whole people, then kids can grapple with it from a healthy, holy, and manageable perspective. When we make it this enormous, all-encompassing thing, kids start to think that with one false move, all is lost and they’re going down like the Titanic with no hope of rescue.

Here’s an example of teaching it in perspective. One week of our series was titled The Want to be Wanted, in which we discussed from a biblical and psychological perspective every human’s innate desire to belong to someone. And of course, somewhere in that conversation comes the discussion about sex being the ultimate expression of belonging. In light of how normal being wanted is, it makes sense that we chase after it, but then it also makes sense how important it is not to romanticize it loosely.

Unfortunately, the space I have here won’t allow me to go further into this, but I hope you can see how this approach helps kids learn how wrongly their thoughts have been socialized by media and shifting cultural norms. But more importantly, it helps them also see all that is already right, normal, and common to every human walking the face of the earth. The sooner you approach these general ideas, the better (within reason) because then kids are empowered to manage their own development as opposed to you or their parents chasing them around, trying to prevent unfortunate consequences of youthful curiosity or naïveté.

I’ve had so many young people say to me, “I wish I knew that about myself in the seventh grade. It would’ve given me the power and security to accept some things and the confidence to reject other things as I got older.”

No kid has ever come to me and said, “I wish more church people just told me not to have sex.”

One of my favorite activities to engage adults in, to inform their sharing messages of dating and sexuality, is to get them to think back to their own early dating years. They are asked to think of an early, positive experience of touch in a dating experience—holding hands, a kiss, a slow dance, etc. We carefully dissect the experiences into their own mental photographic images of those moments, then how they would describe the facts of those moments, followed by their own emotions at the time.

That activity is immediately followed by asking parents and adults to write their own newspaper headlines for an article about dating and sexuality. Often, responses include Don’t Do It!, True Love Waits, and Protect Yourself or Protect Your Heart.

It is always fascinating to watch the room engage in a significant mood change. The smiles, laughter, and joy of reminiscing about long-ago loves quickly transforms into anxiety and fear about their young people having similar experiences.

Our challenge as the church, as adults and parents, is to confront young people’s expectations that we will default to NO regarding this topic. We need to surprise them by affirming that yes, we actually think love, dating, and sex are all pretty great…within moderation intended to honor the value and worth of each person involved.

Middle school years are challenging for parents. The young people in their lives are transforming before their very eyes from the sweet, innocent things they happily used to be. In the middle school years, we should be resourcing parents regarding:

How to have “the talk.” Most likely, parents have already checked this one off on their parenting task lists. We need to encourage them to pursue ongoing conversations about sexuality, especially related to basic theological concepts, like what it means to be “created in the image and likeness of God.” Recognize that your efforts in assisting parents in their formational role will also constitute formation for many of the adults as well.

How to discuss and monitor relationships/friendships. Offer parents tips and cues to engage their young people in conversations.

How to debrief sexual content from movies, television, and music. Again, assist parents in conducting conversations related to these areas rather than lectures.

In the high school years, young people are moving away from a theoretical understanding of dating and sexuality and getting closer to having more practical needs. Therefore, we should be resourcing parents in:

Being able to assist young people in determining appropriate boundaries for their young people. If parents find themselves being able even just to talk with one another, they can usually assist one another in determining a community standard about curfews and expectations regarding appropriate ages to group date, car date, etc. Youth ministers can be helpful in placing their conversations in the context of a covenant agreement that includes both discussion and prayer.

Being able to be an effective listener. Ask their adolescents to work toward determining what constitutes an appropriate relationship.

Modeling appropriate and respectful behaviors. Young people learn from the attitudes of their fathers, mothers, and other key adults regarding what is right and acceptable in relationships with the opposite sex. We need to watch ourselves because our young people are certainly watching us and the values we communicate with our actions and words.

For me as a senior in high school, my parents gave me a very special gift and a lesson. They took me and my steady girlfriend at the time on a double date. In a delightful and charming evening, I learned significant lessons in respect and chivalry as well as maintaining good conversation with the opposite sex. Instead of the images of adult relationships from television and movies influencing me in my formative years, I was blessed to have the memory of a special night to remind me of how dating adults can and should relate to one another.

It’s not that I’ve avoided the subject with high schoolers. I just don’t have many teaching opportunities with high schoolers (aside from speaking to them at large events, where sex and dating are never the topic). That’s because I have been hanging out in middle school ministry for thirty years.

But that disparity has given me plenty of opportunity to consider this particular Slant 33 question, especially since most advice and resources on sexuality in the youth ministry world are targeted to high schoolers. So I’ve spent a youth ministry lifetime modifying and filtering, adjusting and considering my audience.

Let’s start with what’s the same:

Sex (and dating) is a subject that cannot and should not be avoided. No matter how comfortable you are or aren’t, it’s pure irresponsibility as a youth worker to avoid this subject.

Wise and self-monitoring honesty is the best approach. Honesty is critical on this subject with so much misinformation, a subject that few adults are willing to be honest about with teenagers. But our honesty has to be tempered with wisdom (of what not to say) and self-monitoring.

Thanks to the dual, interconnected forces of the internet and a sex-obsessed culture, there’s not as much difference in how we should address this subject with middle schoolers as there was, say, twenty years ago. The primary differences could be summarized in two generalities:

Middle schoolers have less experience and less knowledge when it comes to sex. Even dating, to most middle schoolers, is a very different practice—for those who would say they have dated—than it is for their older brothers and sisters. As is true of so many factors in the teenage years, experience and understanding of sex and sexuality are a sliding scale (same with abstract thinking, worldview, independence, and a host of other issues). But, in general, most middle schoolers need conversations about what sex will be more than they need conversations about what it already is.

Middle schoolers are all over the board in their own sexual development. Sure, you could accurately say this about high schoolers too. But the plain fact is that 99% of high schoolers are post pubescent. When the subject of wet dreams comes up in my sixth-grade guys’ group, the majority of guys only have an idea (usually wrong, like “it’s when you pee in your sleep!”), and not actual experience. Of course, that personal experience, even for those eighth graders who have no interpersonal sexual experience, shifts dramatically as their sexuality awakens.

When I, as a middle school youth worker, combine the truths of the first two similarities with the second two differences, I’m left with this: When talking about sex with young teens, I am compelled by my calling to dive into—not avoid—honest conversations and teaching times but to do so with extreme sensitivity to age-appropriate developmental and experiential realities.

The best advice I ever received on the topic of teaching about sex and dating with teenagers came from Jim Hancock, co-author (with Kara Powell) of the exceptional youth ministry resource Good Sex 2.0. Jim says that, in his observation, youth workers often err in their approach to teaching about sex to teenagers in one of two extremes. Either they talk about sex as if it’s everything, or they talk about sex as if it’s nothing.

Sex is a big deal! It’s definitely not nothing. But it’s not everything. I’m committed—as awkward and uncomfortable as it might be at times—to teaching (and having conversations) in that tension.

That isn't to say we've forgotten what we did. We hosted some sharing, singing, and communion; simple. So simple, in fact, that we thought we could get the same results if we just did the same thing. Wrong. The sum of what we've learned is that the Spirit is always moving, but we can't make it do so. That's the way the Holy Spirit shows up in our ministry. Whenever it wants to.

Fortunately for us, it wants to a lot. Theologically, the Spirit is with us all the time. Any sort of healing, any sort of spiritual discovery, any sort of trust in Jesus is all the work of the Spirit. That means that so much of what is expected of us as pastors—so much of our job descriptions—is actually out of our control.

The desire to see students find life in Jesus is a healthy one, and it's essential in ministry. Unfortunately it can easily mutate into an unhealthy drive toward spiritual alchemy. Alchemists of yesteryear tried to take ordinary materials and convert them into gold. As pastors, we can tend toward the same thing. If only we can get the candles and songs and meditative videos just right, maybe, just maybe, the cloud that filled the temple will descend on our youth center. But that's not how it works.

A powerful visitation by the Spirit is not a dish for which we can just follow the recipe. God's Spirit shows up when we least expect it. A girl accepts Christ and leads her parents to do the same. Down the street, a couple decides not to divorce. A boy decides to give up speaking for Lent, to learn when to speak and when to listen. Real stories.

We can't make the Spirit move, and to focus on that is to focus on the wrong thing. Pagans both ancient and modern believe in divine beings that were largely sedentary and had to be wooed into action. Praise God, it's not that way for us. We have a Spirit in motion. And if the Spirit in motion is our point of departure, our task is no longer to conjure it but rather to clear the way.

We do this by training our leaders and students to understand the basics of pneumatology: What is the Holy Spirit, what is its role, what does it do? We teach spiritual disciplines like fasting, silence, meditation, lectio divina, and listening prayer. We create a leadership culture that allows us to check our plans and voice contrary opinions, lest our program leave no margin for the Spirit to work. After all, God will always pursue us but will not force his way onto us.

The overall metaphor is the second of the three seed parables in Mark 4. At the end of the day, the sower doesn't know how his seed will sprout and grow. She or he must leave it up to the sun and rain and soil. The kingdom of God is the same way. There is some seed scattering and soil tilling we can do, like preparing spaces and hearts for divine encounter, but we then must move out of the way and let God be in charge of growth and fruition. We can trust that when we allow God space to work, he does.

After scoring a lot of points on the basketball court (for the other team), I sank my heart into a Victoria’s Secret catalog and dreamed that I’d be on those pages someday. For all the wrong reasons, I truly wanted that.

If it weren’t for the Spirit’s gentle and convincing work in my life, chances are I wouldn’t have ditched this empty dream for a full one that has led me here, to the most fulfilling life I could live—modeling to a different crowd, and for different reasons.

The Holy Spirit helped me see how my life could be transformed through a conduit of trust. The Spirit knew what I needed when I needed it—and gave those things to me. The Holy Spirit led me into youth ministry. So, this part of God—the part that walks beside me and lives in me—is the same part that fuels the vision, mission, values, and practices of a ministry for and with teenagers.

The Holy Spirit is my counselor. Jesus said he would give us “another counselor” (John 14:6), and he has done that for me. As I serve the church, my Counselor helps me with everything from the smallest decision to the really big ones. My Counselor helps me live my life in his life. I need a clean heart to be able to see where there is jealousy, anger, and unloving attitudes. There is a rigorous replacement happening, my will for his. And when I’m stubborn and stall, I’m comforted to know that I’m still not alone or abandoned in the process.

We need the presence of the Holy Spirit to help us ditch plans sometimes and go with God, in our plans, in our relationships, in how we carry out youth ministry in our communities.

The Holy Spirit is the power (Acts 1:8, Luke 24:29). When the Spirit is given space to purify my heart, to perfect love in me, I have power in ministry. I’m able to lead and speak with confidence, even in my weakness because his power is made perfect in those moments. There is always the temptation to be all about me, to worry only for my own comfort, goals, and ideas. But the Holy Spirit guides me to surrender selfishness for a genuine awareness of others. I can’t do it on my own. I don’t have enough light in me to be what I need to be, but the Holy Spirit is able to do this.

The Holy Spirit is the presence of God in me (1 John 3:24). It’s what happens at the altar at camp. It’s what happens in our conversation at Chick-Fil-A. The presence of God fills our smiles, our high fives, and our hugs for those with tears. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God in my sermon writing, the check in my gut that says, Now is the time to talk about… or, Maybe you should go in another direction.

We try to look for the Holy Spirit at work in our students as well. We can overlook sometimes the fact that God dwells in them, just as he dwells in us. The Holy Spirit worked in one of my students’ lives to raise more than $26,000 in one year for clean water in Africa. This is the echo of the Kingdom as we collectively listen.

We make it known to our students and leaders that the Holy Spirit is given a free pass to roam the halls and rooms of our ministries and our hearts. My prayer is that the kingdom of God would be larger for our willingness to be filled, that youth ministries would receive power as their leaders receive it, and that we would live in grateful and prayerful response for the gift of the Spirit.

My last year at Youth Specialties and the pressure I felt to perform were particularly soul deadening for me. By the time I got laid off, I was close to burnout—both professionally and spiritually. But in the two or three months that followed, I experienced a gorgeous re-awakening of my soul. I felt God’s presence for the first time in a long time. My prayer life rekindled, and I started to hear God speaking, nudging, consoling. I knew this was the Holy Spirit, who had never left, of course. Instead, my spiritual eyes were merely opening to the Spirit’s presence.

This ramped up when I launched the Youth Ministry Coaching Program. When my cohorts were in times of personal sharing, I started sensing the Holy Spirit giving me insight that was beyond me, and I even started receiving what could only be called words of truth to be offered to others. I entered into the exercise of this with open hands—not grasping it or claiming it or arrogantly confident about whatever I might think I should say. But I was amazed, over and over again (as I have continued to be over the last eighteen months) that what I was hearing—from the Holy Spirit—was usually accurate. One of the most powerful of these was a time when I had a strong sense that another person in the sharing circle had a word from God for the person talking. Sure enough, when I called that out, the words spoken had a profoundly holy and truthy beauty to them, and we all knew we were on holy ground.

This has changed both my regular, everyday experience of God as well as my youth ministry practice. When I’m leading my middle-school-guys small group, for example, I’m trying to choose (and it is a choice, by the way) to simultaneously listen to my guys and to the Holy Spirit. One of the surprise benefits to me, in a youth ministry setting, is that I feel unburdened and free. That’s because I’m not carrying the absurd responsibility of being smart or insightful enough to know what to say.

This personal awakening and shift in my practice has also shaped my thinking about youth ministry and church leadership. If you ever hear me talk about Youth Ministry 3.0 stuff these days, I hope you hear the difference from what I wrote about in that book. When I wrote that book, about four years ago now, I was not operating with this mindset or experience, and most of my suggestions only tip a hat to the role of the Holy Spirit. But these days, I’m convinced that great youth workers (and great church leaders) need to recover the art of collaborative discernment. Great youth ministry takes all different forms because it has to be contextual. But the path to a wonderfully contextualized youth ministry is not merely an effort of assessment and study. In fact, it is first and foremost an exercise of listening (and I believe that listening needs to be practiced in community, which is why I am passionate about collaborative discernment).

Yes, we need to do assessments and learn about the community we do ministry in; yes, we need to read and study and observe. But more important than all of that is the intentional act of gathering a small group of spiritually minded people to actively listen to the Holy Spirit. Ask, What teenagers have you placed in our midst? (No, just observing them is not enough.) Listen. Ask, What teenagers are you calling us to in our community? Listen. Ask, What would a culturally and contextually appropriate approach be to reach those teenagers? Listen.

Bottom line #1: Without a sense of the Holy Spirit’s role in your life, you will always be limited in your own spiritual growth and practice and, therefore, in your youth ministry efforts. Bottom line #2: A youth ministry that’s not informed by active and intentional listening to the Holy Spirit will miss out on who God is calling it to be.