• For being 39 and loving to hang with teenagers.
• For giving a student a hug, it might be the only hug they get all day.
• For pursing a career in something your parents think is a stepping stone.
• For giving up another career for something most adults don’t get.
• For loving a job that your boss might look down on.
• For being bored during the diving part of a swim meet.
• For going to a soccer game simply to say hi and show your support for someone who isn’t your kid.
• For liking how bad a freshmen jazz band sounds.
• For texting info about tomorrows Bible study during staff meeting.
• For being more comfortable driving a church van than your minivan.
• For asking for more budget to cover the rental of sumo costumes
• Or for losing the receipt for the sumo costumes.
• For knowing exactly how much cash and time it takes to get 15 pizzas delivered.
• For knowing that one large pizza feeds about 5 teenagers.
• For practicing games on the XBox during office hours.
• For bringing your kids on the camping trip for free.
• For reusing a killer illustration over and over and over again.
• For feeling weird when the senior pastor rips off your killer illustration in his sermon.
• For being there when all hell breaks loose.
• For being a little thankful that hell has broken loose because you know God will use it.
• For asking hard questions to discover harder truths.
• For challenging boys to become men.
• For challenging moms and dads to let go of their dreams for their kids so their kids can have dreams of their own.
• For representing Christ in places no one wants him represented.
• For challenging other leaders to think differently about teenagers.
• For challenging teenagers to think differently about themselves.
• For asking students to skip band camp for Bible camp.
• For keeping the door open when a member of the opposite sex is in your office.
• For asking the secretary to skip her lunch so you aren’t in the church alone with a student.
• For trying things that are new.
• For giving up on things that don’t work.
• For always believing that people can change.
• For reaching the wrong kids.
• For reaching kids like me.

Never apologize for being a youth worker. We need you too much. 

You don’t hear it enough. Thanks for serving today’s students. Thanks for investing your life in people the church all-too-often misses. Thanks for reaching kids like me. And thanks for putting up with the stuff you put up with just to keep going.

A few weeks ago I spoke at the BOOST Conference. BOOST is a resource for out-of-school time workers. (After schol programs, assemblies, stuff like that.) In other words, these are people who work with children and teenagers.

If you think about it, youth ministry people are out-of-school time workers, too. The major difference is that we work for religious organizations which are typically privately funded and folks at BOOST work for publicly funded organizations. But we love the same people, just work on opposites sides of the wall separating church and state.

The first thing to come up in my presentation was a question about the separation of church and state. I was ready for it. 

“Separation Schmeparation”

No. Seriously. 

Issues of separation of church / state are legitimate. But it often feels like a real, physical wall of separation when in fact it is a cultural barrier based more on fear than anything else.

We spent 10 minutes listing out some of the fears….

• There’s fear of litigation if a public entity and private religious group work  together.
• There’s fear of what the board might say.
• There’s fear that a parent might get all funky and go to the board or threaten to sue.
• There’s fear that bringing a religious group on campus or a private group using religious space might lead to cross-pollination, even by inference. Christians worry about “watering things down” and public groups worry about “proselytizing.”

The list of fears actually never ends.

When both sides are afraid of one another there are typically at least two factors present.

1. They don’t know one another.
2. They don’t have the same language.

And that’s precisely the case when it comes to youth workers and out-of-school workers. We have common goals, common love for the same students, and here’s the kicker… ARE LITERALLY OFTEN THE SAME PEOPLE! At one point in my seminar we went around the room and introduced ourselves. Nearly half of the people attending my seminar were either part-time church staff or their spouse worked at a church.

Huh. 

So what’s the point? 

At the end of the day we can build relationships on shared goals. Every youth worker and every out-of-school worker wants to help build a better community.

And that’s a building block towards working together.

Let’s stop building walls around what we disagree on and instead build bonds on things we can agree on.