Tag: small church

  • An expert

    Paul has a book called, “How to be the Best at Everything.”

    That book’s title is perfect for a life in church ministry. You feel like you need to be pretty good at everything just to survive.

    When people would ask me what my job at the church was I would kind of laugh. “We all kind of do a little bit of everything.”

    There were many days when I’d lead a Bible study for high school students before school, drop them off at school, then shovel the entryway to the church before going inside. Then I’d help with our building project by painting or something like that to start the day, I’d be interrupted by phone calls where I was negotiating our health insurance plan or with another vendor, then dash to a creative planning meeting for Sunday’s service, then lunch with a deacon, oh and another interruption by a parent who was crying and desperate for some counsel about the porn she found on her son’s computer. After the meeting I’d pick up students from school who were helping with our kids ministry and get them started on set design, then I’d work some Photoshop magic and design the week’s bulletin while I waited for the paint to dry for another coat downstairs. After that I’d get started on the lighting set-up for Sunday while brainstorming an idea for a video intro to the message before moving chairs in the sanctuary to set up for a marriage event on Friday evening. Then at 5:00 PM I’d go home for a quick bite of dinner and spend an hour with the kids before our adult small group came over from 6:30-8:30.

    No seriously– that was 2 days per week. And that’s not even a Wednesday when I had youth group.

    I was a generalist who wore the youth ministry hat just a little bit more than the senior pastor, who wore the preaching hat, or the worship leader who wore that hat. That’s just life in a small church. Everyone wears a lot of hats and does a lot of different things.

    I’ll never forget one of my first phone calls with someone about coming to work at Youth Specialties. We were talking and the person said, “Hey, I hear a bit of an echo. Where are you?” I laughed, “Well I’m in our sanctuary. Actually, I’m about 40 feet in the air in some scaffolding. I’m changing the bulb on the projector.”

    That’s why I laugh, sometimes audibly, when people refer to me as an expert at something.

    Sure, I’m pretty good at some things. But in my heart I’ll always be a generalist trying to figure out how to be the best at everything.

  • 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.

  • Level of Difficulty

    Does your skill level match the level of difficulty in your ministry?

    I’ll admit it. I’m a recovering video game junky. Up until Madden 2005 I used to incessantly play anything football EA Sports produced.

    One of the fun things about the Madden games is that you can adjust the level of difficulty to match your skill level in the game. So, if you were new, you could set it to easy and still have a good time. Then, theoretically, as your skills improved you could turn the game up so that it remained challenging.

    One of the great injustices in the ministry world is that there is often a disconnect between the skill level of a staff member and the level of difficulty in a ministry setting.

    In general, those who have a low skill level (new to ministry) are only able to get jobs in ministry locations labeled difficult or expert. Meanwhile, veteran church workers tend to flow towards jobs on larger teams in healthier ministries where the level of difficulty is significantly better matched to their skill level. (Not easy, per se. But ministries which match their skill level.)

    In the past few years I’ve had countless conversations with pastors in way, way over their head. They’ve been in ministry a short amount of time and are in situations with no support, politics leaning hard against them, and socially isolated from people who think like them. They slump their shoulders as we sit down for breakfast, “Adam, am I crazy? Why does serving Jesus hurt this bad?”

    Why are these people hurting?

    Because they are in ministry settings where the level of difficulty is a miss-match.

    The Way it Works

    We have a Darwinian approach to ministry jobs. Our church culture dictates that the newest, greenest, and least capable among us serve at the gnarliest of ministry sites. A youth pastor takes her first time job, replacing a youth pastor fired for sleeping with a student. A worship pastor hired from a larger church to lead a ministry from traditional worship to contemporary. A senior pastor right out of seminary replaces a long-tenured wise owl who retired after 40 years of successful ministry. A children’s worker will accept a calling to a church plant where they have to go out and raise their support while somehow trying to create a children’s program from scratch.

    All expert level ministry jobs performed by newbie staff members. They don’t stand a chance.

    A large majority of these newbies will get washed out of their first jobs in the first 2-3 years. Battered and bruised, about half will lick their wounds and find non-ministry vocations before they’ve even paid off their seminary loans.

    Yet, a small minority will learn their lessons from these impossible ministry situations and move to more healthy levels of difficulty. Eventually, through survival of the fittest, a small minority manage to work their way into roles that are matched with their skill level… or maybe a little mismatched so that they are in jobs significantly easy compared to their skill level. (You know who you are.)

    In other words, those of us with high levels of expertise gravitate to the easier jobs while our success in roles made to look easy encourages countless others into the flames of despair at the hard jobs.

    The Way it Ought to Work

    Ministry experts should flow to the expert level jobs. Jobs in healthy ministries should hire more newbies for shorter periods of time in order to increase their skill level and help match them with jobs that best suit their long-term skill level and interest.

    This would perpetrate a mantra of healthy churches helping unhealthy ones instead of visa versa.

    But that would be too much like right.