Tag: missiology

  • The cup is 95% empty

    “Adam, why are you always assuming that the cup is half empty?” 

    Youth workers say this to me over coffee. Their lives are run wild with activities, planning, teaching, and meetings. Their ministries are full and something I’ve said has called that busyness into question.

    My response, not trying to be trite, is “Oh no, I’m not saying the cup is half empty, I’m saying the cup is 95% empty.”

    Again and again I’ve challenged folks to do the math for themselves. Most people can do it in their head. You don’t need a scientist to measure impact if you know basic facts about your community.

    • How many students are in middle & high school in your community? How many students attend a youth ministry in your community? Divide. Probably less than 10% of the eligible population. (If you factor in students who attend youth group by choice… this number dramatically falls, doesn’t it?) 
    • How many years has the current model of youth ministry been impacting your community? 20, 30, 40 years? How much have churches grown as a result? At best, church attendance has flatlined over the past 20 years, likely declined compared to 30 or 40 years ago. 
    • You might be able to point to a couple of exceptional examples. (Communities of great impact or individuals greatly impacted) But for the amount of effort, amount of investment, in most communities the impact is pretty small.

    My point is not to tear youth ministry down down. It’s to rebuild. We can’t think about the future until we can make a sober assessment of what our tribe has accomplished.

    It’s not that the wrong people are in youth ministry, it’s not that they are uneducated, don’t care, are lazy, or even under-resourced. I actually think the frustration, the quitting, angst, and the burnout we see in youth ministry is because we have the RIGHT people working 24/7 [largely] on WRONG strategies. [More fairly, their current strategy is OK, just limited in impact.]

    That’s not tearing down at all, is it?

    My point is that the strategies we’ve used to date have a finite impact. We can look at 40 years of history and say “youth group” will impact less than 10% of any given student population. (How much more evidence do you need to see that this is true? 50 years? 100 years?)

    The challenge to anyone who will listen is to think about the 95% of un-impacted adolescents in their community and ask themselves, “What are other strategies that might impact these students lives for the sake of the Gospel prevailing?”

    That’s not being negative. It’s missiology 101.

    Photo credit: Mykl Roventine via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Sometimes You Have to Cheat the Church to do Ministry

    Let’s start with this reality. If you think ministering to teenagers is easy, simple, turnkey, low commitment, or something you can package into a program you are sunk. 

    That’s why I’d rather teach youth workers transferable principles than give them prescriptive solutions to the things that I talk about.

    Question: Adam, I just read your Immerse Journal article about re-embracing the priesthood of all believers and I don’t know where to start. Can you give me five action steps?

    Adam: No. Because if I give you what those 5 things are for your ministry that’s all you’ll hear and you will ignore what the article was challenging you to do… reject the preisthood of the staff and embrace the high trust, low control environment the New Testament teaches.

    I’m OK with ideas. And I’m OK with exploring case study. But giving you 3 quick things to try to get your students excited about their relationship with Jesus? It’s just not that easy.

    Entertainment vs. Transformational Ministry

    At this year’s National Youth Workers Convention I made an intentional, strategic decision about my time. As I hung out with my fellow youth workers between my seminars, at meet-ups, and so on I knew I wanted to get past the “nice to meet you and connect a face to a name” spot and talk about this concept of looking for philosophical, missiological solutions to the problems our ministry is facing. Maybe you don’t need a new small group curriculum? Maybe you don’t need a new worship display device or a new way to design t-shirts? I tried to guide these conversations to one of philosophy of ministry– maybe what you need isn’t a round of encouragement but and encouragement to stop working so hard on a strategy that makes you tired?

    At the same time I’m always careful to point this out. We know it’s not the church that is the problem. We know it’s not that the program is bad.

    It just isn’t enough. Jesus didn’t give his life so we could create religious organizations and programs to serve people interested in attending an institutionalized church and it’s programs.

    Jesus died for something so much bigger and better, didn’t he?

    Sometimes You Have to Cheat the Church to do Ministry

    A few years ago Andy Stanley shared a message at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit with the main point being about family. He said, “Sometimes you need to cheat the church for your family.”

    Agreed. We all need to embrace the reality that our job is just a job and it can’t take over our life.

    Yet, as I meet more and more frustrated youth workers stuck in the reality that their employment is tied to running a program only 2%-5% of the general population is interested in, my encouragement becomes… “Maybe you need to cheat the church to do ministry?”

    In other words: Maybe the solution to your frustration with your role running the program is to give it less of your time so you can redirect your time to reaching the lost in a missiologically appropriate way for your context?

  • Two positive trends in youth ministry

    I’m on the tail end of a one week tour of the East Coast. (Catching up with youth workers; talking about PlanetWisdom, YS Palooza, and all things youth ministry.)

    One of the things I like to do when I meet with youth workers around the country, whether individually or in a group setting, is ask the same two questions. I frame the question differently depending on the group. But these are the two questions I’m asking and comparing answers to others to see if I can sniff a trend.

    1. What is a new problem you are facing in your own youth group in the past 12 months?
    2. What are you doing that is making a difference?

    For question #2 I am continuing to hear the same things all over. While I heard these in 2009 and 2010– it wasn’t emerging quite as strongly as a trend until this trip.

    For me, it’s very exciting because the two trends that I’m seeing are actually quite healthy and sustainable.

    First trend: Bigger churches (Congregations of 1000+) are continuing to see their youth ministries grow numerically. They are reaching more and more students. (Largely unchurched) And their ministry is asking hard questions which shape how they minister to students, parents, and train their teams. The lead youth worker at these churches are typically highly experienced, highly trained, and exceptional at both leading staff teams and replicating themselves to maximize impact & set-up long-term impact.

    Second trend: Smaller churches (Congregations of  >500) are ditching models altogether and approaching their ministry from a more missiological perspective. They are saying things like, “We still meet on Wednesday night, of course, but I have a small group of guys who get together every week to visit a homeless shelter. My students won’t bring a friend to Wednesday night– but they are bringing 2-3 to that.” Even if they aren’t articulating it in words quite yet, they are saying that the traditional ministry model they grew up on is fading in effectiveness. As such, they are adapting by maintaing status quo while finding new ways to reach students while meeting a real need in the community. I’d label this a shift from meeting felt needs to meeting obvious needs. Meeting actual needs is leading to growth and they are forming their ministry around those areas of growth… which look very different in every community.

    The hallmark of both big & small of these are the same— their spending, dollar per student, is quite low. Bigger churches have staff spread over large numbers; smaller churches lost their paid staff due to the economy and are adapting their ministry to a much cheaper model.

    The uncomfortable middle

    The pain seems to be in the middle. What I label “medium-sized churches” of 500ish-1000ish are all over the place. Some are fine while some are in crisis mode. I can imagine that their dollar per student ratio is high enough where they are feeling a big pinch. They seem to be feeling a lot of pressure as their midweek program isn’t doing as well, (a hallmark of a smaller church) they are too large to invest their time finding a pocket of mission that would likely lead to new students coming into the fold, and they don’t have the money to go to a staff-size that might take them into that big church team model which would likely put them into growth, as well. This is the size church where I’m seeing lots of people lose their paid staff jobs. This is also the size church I’m hearing that the leaders (church wide) are shifting to a model like their favorite megachurch.

    Quick disclaimer: I’m not a sociologist. (But I did stay at a Comfort Inn last night.) And I don’t have hard data for things I’m writing here. [This is my blog…] These are notable things I’m learning by talking to youth workers around the United States. Feel free to engage with them, but don’t assume that I’ve got data to back this up or that this is some sort of scientific process. I’m labeling a trend as something that just keeps coming up without my prompting.

  • My Kids Aren’t Your Target Audience

    Imagine the freedom of hearing this one phrase.

    A parent affirming a youth pastor by saying, “My kids aren’t your target audience. Reach the lost.”

    What would happen if parents stepped into their role and discipled their teenage children, and at the same time affirmed the church’s youth pastor by saying, “My kids aren’t your target audience. Reach the lost.”

    Game changer.

    G-A-M-E-C-H-A-N-G-E-R

    The reason so many youth workers feel like babysitters or cruise directors is that they are regarded as such by many people in the pews. (And sadly, by their bosses and governing boards who see them as a way to attract or keep parents of teenagers.) The attitude is… “Well, we give money to the church which funds this persons salary and the program they run so we should allow the expert to pour into my kid and I’ll just step back, get the most for my money.”

    This makes some logical sense because its visible. But it is missing the point, missiologically and ecclesiologically.

    Modern church youth ministry, as a movement, sprung out of parachurch ministries like Young Life and Youth for Christ in the 1950s-1960s who stepped up to answer the call the church would not… reach lost teenagers. It was primarily a method of evangelism. And it operated well outside of the walls of a church because the methods often used to get students interested in the Gospel freaked churchgoing adults out.

    In the 1960s and 1970s churches woke up a bit and started hiring youth workers of their own. (Lots were former YFC and Young Life staff) And all of a sudden the vocation of youth pastor started to shift from something that looked like a missionary to something that looked like a pastor.

    As things have morphed over the years many youth ministries focus has shifted from non-church teenagers to almost entirely church kids. Youth ministry has gone from being mostly about evangelism to mostly being about discipling church kids with an evangelism strategy which boils down to, “Bring a friend.”

    That’s a bad thing! And as I’ve said over and over again… we’re reaching a decreasing amount of the population with this strategy. Some try to dismiss me by claiming I’m just deconstructing. I’m not deconstructing, I’m calling the church to recognize her strategic failure and change!

    Personal Example

    I’ve always known this to be true. (That my churches job wasn’t to reach my kids, but to reach the lost.) But I suppose economic realities and race make it obvious enough for my dense mind to notice now that we go to a mission-styled church.

    I don’t want my church reaching my kids. If I sit in on my churches kids ministry program and it is targeted at my kids I know something is wrong. Why? We’re a mission church in a neighborhood where 75% of the people don’t speak English in their home and even more are not from the U.S.A..

    My kids aren’t the reason my staff raises support! I know this and I celebrate it. I’m pleased that my tithe doesn’t help create a ministry paradigm designed to disciple my kids. Why? That’s my job!

    Their job is to reach the neighborhood!

    Why is acknowledging this important?

    1. It changes my attitude from entitlement to supporting the mission of the church.
    2. It clarifies expectations.

    Your Role as Parents

    If you are like me, a Christian parent, your role is vital. Deuteronomy 6 is abundantly clear. A life with Jesus isn’t reserved for the temple. You’re to talk about God in all that you do, everywhere you go, and in your own home. You are to impress on your children that your faith is real. If you want your kids to believe in God it is up to you. If you leave it to your church to do you have failed as a parent. (If your church is telling you it is their job tell them they are wrong, they need to hear it.)

    Your tithe is an offering to God not a ticket to entitlement to church programs. While it is our role to oversee and make sure that the church is not misappropriating funds– It is hardly an offering to God if it has strings attached to it which stipulate that the church will create programs to entertain and disciple your children.

    Imagine

    Imagine the freedom it would create to your church staff if you uttered this simple phrase, “My kids aren’t your target audience. Reach the lost.”

    Go ahead, try it.