I just came across the Youth Ministry 360 blog. I can’t believe I am just now discovering these guys. And they love the Xbox 360 just like me!

Anyway, they have a great article about how we see ourselves as youth workers and the roles that we get caught up in. They even have a fairly solid view from Paul the apostles role in ministry. Check it out.

Link

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I just read a great article  over at REyouthpastor. Basically, he asks youth pastors what one (and only one) thing they would tell other youth pastors. His answer:

“… network and be exposed to other youth ministries and youth pastors…”

It’s good advice. How often do we get entrenched in what we do and become bored and stagnant? It happens so often with my own ministry.

On the flip side of that, I would also love to see people trying something new. A few months ago I saw a video of the formulaic worship that happens across America. It was funny and a bit convicting. And it doesn’t just happen in worship.

How many youth ministries start their time together with an ice breaker/ game/ worship, and then settle into a sermon/ discussion? How many support a culture that only makes sense to itself and not to people outside of it? I had a similar experience recently when I took a group to a very popular youth camp. We walked in and all of my kids were looking around wondering what everybody was doing and, more importantly, why.

While I agree that there is a big danger of isolation, in my mind, there is an even bigger tendency to become isolated by doing what everybody else is doing. I don’t mean isolated in a segregationist model, but in separating youth ministry from the rest of the world.

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I have been reading Drive by Dan Pink for about four months now. It is a book that I have casually read, picking it up occasionally when I wasn’t reading something else. I was reading it from a perspective of how do I motivate and encourage the teens that show up in my ministry, but I was thinking about it today as a youth worker.

Here is a ten-ish minute video about the book.

Basically, what he finds is that when doing cognitive tasks, extrinsic incentives actually reduce creativity and production. I layman’s terms, rewards outside of the field of work, make people less motivated and excited about what they do.

So what drives a youth worker? I can think of several things right off the top of my head. There are all the unhealthy motivators such as the guy who was a nerd in school and has now become a youth worker to fulfill his need for acceptance. Also there is the very common youth worker that needs to feel needed and is mostly practicing co-dependance. But all these aside, what really motivates the person who wants to put themselves into working with youth?

Mostly, from what I see, it is people who want to help teens, usually from the mistakes and situations they themselves experienced. Of the many people I have worked with and known, most people just honestly want to help teens not screw up the way they did.

Given that, it is a wonder that any youth ministry actually happens. I see it as a testimony to how much youth workers want to help, that they continue to try despite the de-motivators they face in churches across the nation. The prototypical youth ministry situation involves a limited budget, limited resources and time, limited or nonexistent support from church leadership coupled with unrealistic, unhelpful expectations. Often, all of these de-motivators are present at once.

So according to Dan Pink, youth ministry is the perfect situation for drive. Because it is a situation limited by sparse compensation and seldom used praise, the extrinsic motivators that often demotivate aren’t present. On the other hand, there is constant challenge and the need to be creative in problem solving.

Here is my list of situations that promote drive in youth leaders:

Freedom to try new things and fail
Self-direction is better
Short term success in the beginning
Long term success after the first year or two (depending on the pastor’s support)

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I saw on Marko’s blog that he had a list of questions from a friend that was a really good list. People have often said that the questions are often more important than the answers. These were good questions. Several I really liked were:

“3. What is the effect of facebook, social networking, and computer screens on a faith and community?

4. Why do so many of our students date people who don’t share a common faith system with them?”

And especially:

“9. What am I doing as a norm in ministry that I will genuinely have to apologize to the next generation of youth pastors for?”

These are good questions, but mine is different. I only really have one and it is the biggest, most often problematic source of what I do in youth ministry. It is what I spend most of my time trying to change (and would spend the rest of my life trying to change).

Why does Christianity create a culture of happiness as an end goal?

I don’t have anything against happiness, mind you. But it is like an idol in many Christian’s lives and for teens it is their goal in life. All this sounds great until you try to help someone start living like what they were created for. It’s not a comfortable place. It means change and awkwardness. It often means seeing friends go another way. New habits, new patterns for the new creation.

So said teen often comes back to me after trying this and understandably is confused. Their not as happy as they were. They are pursuing something that isn’t for their own comfort. Granted their life is way better in almost every sense, but they don’t feel as happy as they were, and then they look at people in the Christian culture and wonder what they missed. And it must be them, because everyone else seems like they are having a good time.

There are people out there who don’t get into this, but I just want to know why we feel like we should always present the happy side of life.

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I just read a great post by Seth Godin about how he treated his boss as if he worked for him. His idea was like this:

“My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way.”

I was wondering why this isn’t a more prevalent idea especially in the church. Anyone who has been around youth pastors for very long has heard stories of how they are mistreated by the church and especially by the Sr. Pastor. I think there are some major problems in this system on both sides.

Youth pastors are often young and needed to prove them selves, but also needed to be recognized as brilliant for doing something new.

Pastors have often done specialized work like youth ministry and probably have done actual youth ministry, but they think everything they did will work for their youth pastor.

When these two work together, it is a beautiful thing. The Sr. supports the ideas of the youth guy and realizes that he has hired an expert in youth culture. The youth guy understands the expectations and experience of the Sr. and goes to him for help when he needs it (which means actually admitting he needs help).

When these two work poorly, it is disastrous. The Sr. often thinks the youth guy is untrained and a loose cannon and doesn’t allow the freedom to try anything different. It is a very common situation that Sr.s actually do hire people who are not qualified or even interested in a career in youth ministry, but that is another article. The youth guy thinks the Sr. is an idiot, has-been and can’t admit when he needs something only from the Sr.

I think Seth has a point. What would happen if the Sr. came to the youth guy and told him, “I work for you. What can I do to help you succeed?” What would happen if the youth guy went to the Sr. and said, “I have a problem that I need some help with?”

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I just watched the new Student Life this generation video. Wow, there were some great insights in there that clarified what I have thought. Two quotes that stood out:

“Who do I trust? Myself.”

“My parents don’t know what I do… and maybe they don’t care.”

Sad statements but I think they are very true from the teens I have worked with.

Video here.

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I don’t repost a lot of things from other blogs (maybe I should more often), but this was too good to let pass. Tim Schmoyer has posted this great thought on how we enable consumerism by our programming pressures and how we can move from that to making servant minded people in our ministries.

Check it out here.

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In the business world, if someone claims to have control over something unrelated to their product or even something that is just beyond control they are laughed out of the industry. For example, if I said I can make one million people buy the iPad or make the same number of people hate Mark Oestreicher, then most people would conclude that I was playing with the facts.

So I wonder in the world of church growth people think it is possible to control anything more than attendance. I’m not saying churches can’t make an experience better and attract more people, but what will they be attracted to? A friend used to tell me often “what you save them with, is what you save them to.” If the reason someone comes is because of your awesome coffee bar, then that is all they will care about.

Similarly, in discipleship, there are things we can do to make people stick around. We can do things for them, be entertaining, whatever. But there really isn’t anything we can do about those things that ministry is really about. We can’t change people (guilt and legalism have been tried to utter failure), we can’t make them believe anything, we can’t really even change their mind. We certainly can’t give them peace or joy of life.

That’s why discipleship is usually much better when it focuses on a process. My part of that process is to be faithful in bringing thoughts to the relationship that are challenging and relevant, pray, get to know the person I am with and help them see themselves how God sees them. Instead of focusing on behavior, I tend to focus on how they feel about their lives and how they can realize the person they were created to be.

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I wonder how it became standard that small groups in churches decided to study a book together. It’s not that I think there is anything wrong with reading a book together, but with the decline in books on paper and the trend in younger people to only read what they have to and mostly (that means facebook), I have started wondering if there might be some more obvious foci of groups.

If you find the advantages of reading a book; sharing thoughts, personal thoughts on the text, perspective, sharing an experience, and the relationships that form out of reading a book together, then it should be easy to find some alternatives that might be much better than reading a book.

How about:

Restoring a car
Wine tasting
Discussing movies and their messages
Taking a class together
Learning to ski

The list could go on forever really. All of those experiences could be the thing that drives the common ground to build a relationship that goes beyond the common weather/sports/politics driven conversational relationships.

Check out what Seth Godin had to say about friendship.

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I’ve spoken about discipleship for a while, and I usually begin most of those talks with two questions that qualify discipleship as the type of relationship that invests the kingdom in someone else through a close relationship. In other words, what Jesus did with his disciples.

The first question: “How many of you have been discipled like that?”

Often two thirds to one half of the room will raise their hands. Many have had that type of relationship with others and been led into a deeper relationship with Jesus. Most of the time it looks like a Bible study or a small group that meets once a week. It might be a breakfast or after dinner group, but usually the focus is a book or the Bible.

The second question: “How many of you are discipling someone else like that right now?”

This question never receives more than a ten percent response. I have spoken to lay people and pastors alike and it is never higher than ten percent. Less than ten percent of the people who come to a talk about discipleship are out there practicing what is called the Great Commission.

It’s time for something different, and that is what I have been trying for the past 15 years. There are four things that I have seen that have become hallmarks of the way I do discipleship. These four things are what I have come to rely upon to know that I am doing the right things in discipleship.

Process over Outcomes
Intrinsic over Extrinsic Value
Dynamic over Static Relationships
Heuristic over Algorithmic  Structure

In the next few posts, I want to expand these markers of discipleship and make clear what I mean about each of these ideas.

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