Tag: church planting

  • Youth Workers: Don’t Punk Out

    Youth Workers: Don’t Punk Out

    Youth ministry seems to be facing asymmetrical challenges right now.

    Two of them on the forefront of my mind are longevity and transference of wisdom.

    With a tough job market and a climate of deconstruction/re-thinking/shifting in the profession… it really pains me to see a lot of very gifted youth workers move on.

    Some of them are my friends. And I put on a happy face to try to be happy for you when you send me an email telling me of your bright new idea. But I’m really sad when I see our dreams for one another give way to something else. For a myriad of reasons our sophmoric desire to be in youth ministry for a lifetime has given way to leaving ministry altogether or becoming a church planter or taking a “higher” staff position at a church as executive/lead/teaching pastor.

    If I read those reasons right, most of them seem to imply– more stable, more money, more powerful positions.

    Let our 20-year old self talk to our 34-year old self for a second… “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!??!!”

    Those are all things we swore we wouldn’t give our dreams to. But, if I can use passive/politically correct language for a minute, life seems to be forcing some of us to sell out.

    I just want to toss this out there. Maybe there are others who are sitting on the fence and looking at greener pastures.

    • Don’t punk out.
    • Working with teenagers is as important now as ever.
    • Fight the temptation to take an easier way out of your problems.
    • You’ve always said youth ministry wasn’t a stepping stone.
    • The grass won’t be greener as a church planter or a lead pastor, you know it and I know it.

    We know this to be true: As cultural spins faster and faster the brightest minds and the greatest innovations are now will continue to flow from youth workers just trying to figure out how to best minister to kids in their neighborhoods. The best ministry innovations are not now nor have ever flowed from the top down. It’s always the other way around. The best innovators typically don’t have the biggest platforms nor do they typically have agents.

    Why?

    Intrinsic hunger forces innovation. The best ideas come when you have no other choice but to innovate.

    Sure– I know someone is going to light me up for saying it. After all, who am I to question decisions that aren’t mine? And all the other voices in my friends heads telling them they need to go plant a church, be a teaching pastor, or chase another vocation must be right and I must be wrong.

    But I’m allowing myself to be sad. And I’m allowing myself to put it in writing that you don’t have to punk out. Adversity, frustration, questioning, tension, getting fired, having to adapt, making less money, and being discouraged aren’t now and never have been “God closing doors.”

    Sometimes those things are merely a testing of calling and God rewards you for passing the test.

    Sure, the world needs more senior pastors. Sure the world needs more church planters. Sure the world needs more whatever-it-is-that-is-taking-you-from-youth-ministry.

    But those kids. (The kid that was you. That kid was me.) That kid will always need a youth worker there at just the right moment to say just the right thing.

  • When did ministry become an office job?

    Photo by t. magnum via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Somewhere along the way ministry became a desk jockey job.

    When I read the book of Acts and even the pastoral epistles I get the idea that being a pastor was action packed.

    • John didn’t kick it in staff meeting for 2-3 hours per week.
    • Peter didn’t make edits to the bulletin.
    • Matthew didn’t work late to attend the facilities team meeting.
    • Phillip didn’t put on a collared shirt and sit in a swivel chair from 8-4.

    Even if you go back 50 years the pastoral staff wasn’t all about programs and project managing. They were out in the commnity visiting elderly, the sick, and doing house calls. If the staff had an office it was for study. If the staff met it was for prayer. There was an administrative staff that did admin work and project management. Not pastors. Pastors were out doing, not sitting behind a desk.

    But somewhere between there and here all ministry jobs became something else. If we’re honest the ministry job became 75% administrative and 25% ministry on a good day. New people in a church always say the same thing... this isn’t what I thought it would be.

    At least once per week someone will ask me if I miss working in the local church. The truth of the matter is that I have the same level of contact with high school students today as I had in nearly a decade of full-time church ministry as a youth pastor. I’m not in a rush to go from actually doing ministry to riding a desk in the office and talking about ministry. If I ever accepted a call to a church again, the role would be radically different… or else I’d go insane.

    Life in ministry isn’t meant to be boring

    But for many people the jobs that pay are boring.

    Too many meetings and not enough ministry. Office hours and office gossip and office meetings and trying to look busy.

    The goal is all jacked up. Where does the desk jockey model lead too? More desk jockeys running more complicated programs. We need to rebel against it because we know where this leads. With less than 10% of the population actively engaged in a local church… seriously, we know the current way of doing things doesn’t work!

    Stop it.

    Radical change is required in the way church staff operates to reverse the trend.

    We don’t need a revival. We need full-time ministers to do full-time ministry.

    Exceptions: No doubt, there are objectors to my generalization. That’s the nature of hyperbole, isn’t it? But at the same time compare the hours per week that your own church spends in the office vs. the amount of time the New Testament church did. They didn’t even have an office! So it was 0%. The biblical model is 0%. God’s Word is true, right? God is unchanging and unchangeable? Did I miss the memo in my Bible? How can we justify 50%, 75%, or 90% of our hours doing office work?

    Church, we have an office problem. (Misappropriation of funds if you ask me.) And if we want to reach more than the 10% we currently reach, we need to change or watch that 10% shrink to 5%. We know where this leads.

    Stop what you are doing and think about a new way.

    What’s the solution?

    Follow the church planters. That’s where the growth happens, right?

    Close the church office. Morph your ministry staff into field agents. Tell your team to go out and visit the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, teach the Bible “out there,” and minister to the widows and orphans. The pastoral epistles give us a pretty good vision for what to do. The reality is that we don’t want to do the job laid out there.

    Remove the office temptation and lease the office space. Pastors who are lazy will just set up offices in coffee shops or their homes. Fire them. If the church is to change, we will need agents of change and not desk jockeys.

    Church planters do it every day. It’s funny that they come up with all sorts of fancy statistics as to why they think their new plants stop growing after 12-18 months. Maybe it’s not the movement that slows, missiologically. Maybe it’s the staff that stops trying and starts with office hours?