Over the past several days I’ve started to put words to what I’ve been observing: The tribe of youth ministry is anxious.
2009 has been a ridiculously hard year. Last October when Tony Campolo spoke in Sacramento he said something like… “Church, as we know it today, will collapse with the economy. And we will shake ourselves off and ask, ‘what do we do now?”
Prophetic words.
A year later we have to step back and acknowledge that in many ways Tony was right.
A down economy has forced tens of thousands of churches to re-evaluate how they spend money. Not a bad thing, but has caused stress at all levels of church staffing.
A shifting culture, and the owning of the reality that traditional youth ministry programs are fading in their effectiveness… more stress for youth workers.
Time to think, causes that stress to bubble to the surface.
The length of time things have been stressful (for some, 2-3 years now) causes this stress to manifest itself.
And the manifestation of what we are all feeling is this anxious elephant in the room at the National Youth Workers Convention. It’s the tears shed as we go to worship. It’s the hunger in conversation. It’s the sleep in the hallways. It’s the lack of eye contact. It’s the nervous laughter.
We are an anxious tribe. We fidget. We wring our hands. We bang our heads against the wall. We wonder what to do with ourselves. We wonder what the future of youth ministry is. We hypothesize. We position ourselves. We take our stress out on others. We blame ourselves. We blame our leaders. We blame our calling. We blame God.
For me… recognizing this tribal anxiety and the disorder that goes with it is 90% of the battle. All of those symptoms in our tribe, I don’t know what to do with them. But anxiety, I know what to do with that.
I absolutely loved what Francis Chan said in LA a couple weeks ago. (about :43 into this video) He reminded us- me- youth workers… to stop taking ourselves so seriously, find a way to laugh again, remind yourself that you’re just a stupid kid, mistakes aren’t that big of a deal, we all went into ministry because it was fun. It was the pep talk a lot of us needed to hear among the stress of our lives.
Let’s get back to just being children of God.
That’s a good reminder for this weekend, isn’t it?
Closing in on a year as “just a family in the pews” I have learned a ton about myself, my walk with Jesus, and what it’s like to be on the other end of church life. Having spent my entire adult life on the church leadership end of things I would often say, “I don’t remember what its like to just go to church.” This last year has been an amazing vantage point.
When we first came to Harbor we knew right away that we wanted to be a part of it. We went to a service on Sunday and shared coffee with the pastor and his wife later that week. They told us their story and their vision for Harbor… Kristen and I were sold and let them know right away we were committed to staying on board.
As the months went by we felt like we were getting sucked in and were powerless against it. What I mean by that is that churches have a tendency to get their tentacles on you and slowly wrap their eight arms around you so that you find yourself fully enveloped by its grasp until you wake up drowning in holy activity. One moment you are helping in the nursery and then you wake up to realize that you are serving at the church 7 days per week and 3 times on Sunday.
Since I was new in my job and had just come out of serving at a church, I was determined that Kristen and I would stay out of the vortex. It may sound weird but people in our lives were firmly encouraging us… in order to reconnect with Jesus you need to do less church work and work more on your relationships outside of church. While I felt like it was a counter-intuitive approach to spiritual growth, I trust the people God has put in my life to tell me the truth… to tell me the truth!
And yet we started getting sucked in. A weakness I am working on is that I have no ability to say no to something I have the ability/skills/talent to do. Someone from the church would pitch me an idea and my “no thank you” must have come out like a “yes, no problem.” Next thing I knew I was sucked in. It turned out the people in my life were right… and the breath of fresh air I was enjoying so much was quickly snuffed out and replaced with bitterness, anger, and temporary depression. We were right back where we started. In fact, we were probably worse off then ever.
Flash-forward to January and early February. I was fully freaking out about our involvement with the church on Sunday mornings. In fact, for some reason I was literally freaking out at church. I would be fine right up until we left. Then we’d pile in the car and I could feel my blood pressure getting higher. I’d get to church and be ready to explode. A little dizzy, on edge, and feeling the strong desire to flee. All my mind would be saying is, “Leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.” And the more people were nice to me the more intense the feeling. It was really one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. Mr. “I’ve got it all under control” was completely not in control. I’d tell Kristen, “I think I’m losing my mind.” I was being completely honest. I was really scared that I was actually losing my mind.
Each time someone at church asked Kristen or I to do something it got worse. I kept saying to myself, “The kids hate coming to church, I hate coming to church, and I can tell Kristen is upset that we’re all upset.” While the calm rational side of me knew that we needed to worship on Sunday mornings the irrational, emotionally-charged side of me started to think that the best way to make these symptoms go away was simply to stop going to church altogether.
[Enter wise council from stage left] Perhaps the solution wasn’t either of those choices? “Stay and be miserable or leave and do nothing are both crappy solutions.” That is when it hit me. What I really needed to do was meet with the leadership and push back.
Gracious. That’s all I can say about my meeting with the staff. My experience with church leadership and AS church leadership has always been to tie someone’s involvement with church stuff to their spiritual growth. When people met with me to bail on things I always took it personally. I would always be polite and thank them for their service… but they’d leave and I would be annoyed. To look across a table and say… “I can’t explain the why, but I know that I need to say no-to-all for a while to find freedom and connect with Jesus” was so freeing. And to have those words embraced was incredible. While I’m certain the two men I met with were discouraged by the outcome of that meeting as they drove away… I was amazed at their maturity. They gained 10,000 points with our family simply by agreeing that our family needed to do nothing. (Not less, nothing.)
So here we are three months later. Other than our uber-active community group my family is a regular family who fills the pew on Sunday morning, hosts a few friends on Monday nights… and that is it. I don’t know how long we will practice this new displine of “no-to-all” but I have to tell you that it is working. The more we push back from being super-involved the better things get for our family. More family time, more family growth, less busyness, less tension… these are all good things.
I don’t know how long this needs to last. My feeling is that I need to guard our family like this until the desire to serve comes back. It hasn’t happened yet. And for once in our lives we aren’t in a rush to make something happen. But for now, we are embracing this new period of our lives. We are embracing a lifestyle of a new normality. It’s a renessaince of the soul that I am enjoying. Maybe a little too much?
Here are a few categories of responses to job stress. I think I’ve exhibited them all in the past 3 months.
- The ostrich: This person looks at the stress at work and just sticks their head into their own work, trying to ignore anything else that goes on. This can be good because at times of high stress there is a need for some people to keep plugging away at work. But it can be bad in that this response can lead to that person working on old priorities and foregoing new priorities.
- The jackal: This person is the cynic. Generally makes fun of the stressful situation. I think of this as a nervous response to stress. This person tends to have a “sky is falling” type of attitude and veils negativity with humor. But this person will also have every intention of being the person to turn out the lights on the last day. Keep working, keep scavenging, it’ll pay off in the end.
- The parrot: This person repeats everything. Not so much a gossip, but a person who likes to communicate what the problem and solution is as presented. Both helpful and annoying at the same time, this response seems to be a self-motivating one. But the parrot likes to think it is helping those around it.
- The bear: This person is all black cloud. They think that today is as good as its going to get. Tomorrow is just another day closer to destruction. This stress response is toxic to a stressful situation because its pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Their Eeyore belief system is not cautious, it is reckless. This person secretly likes stress. Above I said I’ve expressed all of these in the past three months, that’s not true. I refuse to be the bear.
- The bull: This person sees an opportunity in everything. Relentlessly over-optimistic. This stress response is helpful in times like this because they don’t care about forecasts and the nightmares MSNBC predicts.
- The honey bee: Similar to the ostrich, this person just shows up and gets the job done. The swarm of activity around doesn’t seem to matter as this person merely concentrates on building the hive and following the orders of the queen bee. Collect pollen, make honey, repeat. If anything the stressful situation makes this person more urgent.
- The sloth: This person responds to a stressful situation by retreating. They burn up sick and vacation days. They find excuses to avoid dealing with the cause of the stress. Really, this is just a lazy response to stress. This person hopes that while they are checked out the problem will get resolved.
- The viper: This person just gets mean. Like a snake, they strike out of fear. They feel like if they are mean they can just scare their problems away. Of course, fear is a short term motivator… but this person doesn’t seem to care about that.
Closing in on a year as “just a family in the pews” I have learned a ton about myself, my walk with Jesus, and what it’s like to be on the other end of church life. Having spent my entire adult life on the church leadership end of things I would often say, “I don’t remember what its like to just go to church.” This last year has been an amazing vantage point.
