Tag: youth ministry

  • Getting Started in Investing, part one

    money_stuff

    I’d like to let my youth ministry friends in on a dirty little secret. While pay has dramatically improved for youth workers in the past two decades the most consistent reason people leave youth ministry once they reach their mid 30s and above is mounting financial pressure. In other words, there are some glass ceilings on the personal income side of things that will eventually cause you to look for higher paying work in the church or not in the church if you don’t plan ahead. Plan ahead and you relieve the pressure bit by bit. Don’t plan ahead and that pressure builds and leads to a catastrophic failure.

    Here is a short list of those pressures:

    – Housing expenses skyrocket: That rental gets old, doesn’t it? Buying a house can be great when you land in the same place for 10 years or more. But buy and sell a house a couple of times when you change jobs and you’ll quickly see that’s a bad strategy for financial security.

    – Retirement savings becomes important: Most churches either don’t offer a retirement plan for their associate staff or it is extremely inadequate. Even if you are in a denomination that pays into a pension fund… getting ordained in order to get vested in that fund can be more costly than the pension you’d earn in the long run! (And with many mainline denominations tanking financially, you really need to wonder if that money will be there in 30 years.)

    – Kids get more expensive as time goes on: When you first have babies you think diapers and formula is a blow to your budget. Just wait! Eventually those kids will need braces, outgrow clothes every two weeks, want to go to camp, need a car of their own, and gulp… want to go to college.

    – Medical insurance won’t cover it all: Again, when you are young and/or first married this doesn’t seem important. But with premiums soaring churches are cutting back on benefits. So as you age into needing good insurance chances are your church is increasing co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

    – Pressure to keep up with your peers: There’s only so long you want to live like college kids. Eventually, you are going to want grown up furniture, go on nice vacations, and have a little extra something here and there. I don’t mean that you’ll get more materialistic as time goes on… but you just get sick of scrounging.

    If you do nothing, eventually these pressures will leave you with no other option but to leave the ministry. You can do everything right in the 9-5 activity of working at your church. But if you don’t have a plan to address these mounting pressures, it will sneak up on you and the pressure will grow so intense that you may have no other option but to leave the job you love for a job that pays better. If the choice is lose your family or lose your ministry you will chose lose your ministry 100% of the time, right?

    My goal for this series is to encourage those in youth ministry– you don’t have to bail out!

    If you want to join along I will help you with a few basic strategies that will lessen these pressures. My hope is to help you stay in youth ministry longer. While things like soul care and youth ministry strategy are super important for staying in it for the long haul… I’m going to help you deal with the dirty little money secret that could eventually knock you out of ministry.

    Part two: Dealing with debt and savings

    Part three: COLA-  and I don’t mean Pepsi or Coke.

    Part four: 401ks, IRAs, 529 and other numbers that are important

    Part five: Outside income opportunities

  • Some advice for a newbie

    This morning I got a Facebook message from a brand new youth pastor. 2.5 weeks on the job, he asks “What advice can you give me?” Here’s my response:

    I just hope you’ve got “My First 2 years in YM.” Seriously, that’ll save your tosh.

    Some advice for the newbie.

    Just focus on what’s most important and try to limit the rest. (Build relationships with kids, avoid meetings) Don’t be an office rat. Buy lots and lots of kids cokes and ice cream.

    Wear a cup when you play paintball. Talk the church into a once per year permission slip. Make friends with the janitor. Tell the pastor you like his sermons.

    Find out what you suck at and find a volunteer to do that for you. Get to know the parents. Order one large pizza for every 5 kids. Only do fundraisers that return 100% profit or more.

    Keep your hobbies. Don’t try to dress like your students. Always say yes when an elder asks you to go to lunch. Use all of your vacation time. You love all types of music.

    Get a Netflix account. Create a 12 month teaching cycle to impress your boss with. Always make eye contact. Make an appointment with the high school principal and repeat after me, “I have 4-5 hours per week to volunteer, how can I serve the school?” Ask kids about their walk with Jesus. Let all your calls after 5 PM go to voice mail.

    Just focus on what’s most important and try to limit the rest.

    Adam

  • Are we focusing on the right stuff in youth ministry?

  • How do we get to Youth Ministry 3.0?

    t_9780310668664I’ve been wrestling with the concepts of Marko’s book, Youth Ministry 3.0 for a long time. Actually, before I worked a YS I had been going through a prolonged set of discussions at Romeo saying in a thousand different ways… What I’m doing isn’t working anymore.

    The problem was simple. I was trained and experienced at how to do youth ministry a certain way. The entire ministry was built around a youth group night of games, worship, small groups, and a talk. I had seen it work and do incredible things! Even in Romeo we had seen this ministry model draw 40+ students to a church of 120. Lives were changed, kids were discipled, volunteers loved it, on and on. We ran that thing and worked that model like a well-oiled machine. I was well-versed in all the terminology of all the other well-oiled youth ministry systems and had written tons comparing and contrasting the strength of one model over the other. But in the last few years the model tanked. Kids stopped coming. The whole thing became kind of toxic. Instead of re-arranging their schedule to make in on Wednesday night all of a sudden kids were trying to find things to do on  Wednesday night so they could politely bow out. Frustration mounted and I kept saying, “What I’m doing isn’t working anymore.”

    The crazy thing was my reaction to a YM 2.0 model. My response was always, even to the last day, “I know this works, something is just missing, that’s all.” I would tweak things here, re-emphasize this or that. It was never that the concept was broken. The problem was always either the kids not getting the vision of the model or my model not having the funding/support it needed to succeed. It never really dawned on me that my solution to fixing things was to kill the model and search for a better way to minister to students. My reaction was always to just work harder and to keep trying.

    Pray more, blame the parents. Pray more, blame the money. Pray more, blame myself. Pray more, blame the kids busyness. In the end I was royally frustrated and a little angry at God that He had me in a place where I couldn’t fix things.

    But as Marko’s book shows, there is a massive shift from what he calls “Youth Ministry 2.0” built around programs and models, towards “Youth Ministry 3.0” where the programmatic approach is, probably though not necessarily, foregone for a draw towards ministries built around affinity. (A super over-simplified analysis, right there!)

    My wrestling point right now is pretty simple… how do I help ministries kill what has worked for a generation and open their eyes to a way to reach this generation. My experience in YM 2.0 environments is that they’d be happy running an un-attended YM 2.0 model if that means they don’t have to change things. Youth workers may not like the sacred cows of big church but they have certainly built some sacred cows themselves. (Remember the fury over my articles, “I Kissed Retreats Goodbye?“)

    From a national perspective I’m seeing one trend that is scaring me and I don’t want it to be the solution: Killing youth ministry budgets, staffs, and programs. Please tell me that we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bath water? Simply because a model isn’t working doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t minister to adolescents!

    What is a more productive outcome than that?

  • My new column at YMX

    In December I was looking for some column ideas for a new weekly thing I’m doing for Youth Ministry Exchange. After a ton of discussion, brainstorming, and banging our head against the wall, Patti and I settled on the idea that I would write a weekly column called, Be Strong.

    So far, I’m pretty happy with it. Here are the first three. Let me know what you think.

    – Start Small

    – Roll With the Punches

    – Disappoint Someone

  • Hierarchy of Beards

    Click on the image for the full size version. Important stuff for male youth workers.

    HT to Cory

  • Giving Thanks


    My family isn’t one that will likely go around the table and share what they are thankful for. But that doesn’t mean I am lacking gratitude this Thanksgiving. Here’s a few things I’m especially thankful for.

    #1 I am thankful for my red hot smokin’ wife, who is a stone cold fox, and two kids, Walker and Texas Ranger. (Oh wait, that’s Ricky Bobby…) I am thankful for Kristen, Megan, and Paul. They bring immense, intense, wild, fight-club-worthy joy to my life.
    #2 I am thankful for all things San Diego. From our neighborhood, to our new church family, to my friends at YS, to the beachy goodness, to all things Mexican food and sushi.
    #3 I am thankful for getting to invest in the lives of so many youth workers around the globe. Marko expressed this much better than I could, check out this video.
    #4 I am thankful for Youtube, who just started offering widescreen video and all the fun I will have with that.
    #5 I am thankful for Steve and all my friends at Apple Computer, I’m glad I finally saw the light.
    #6 I am thankful for Snickers. Dang they are good.
    #7 I am thankful for Facebook and all of the old friends I’ve reconnected with.
    #8 I am thankful for Andy Marin. I praise God that He has raised up a man willing to stand in front of 5,000+ people and proclaim himself, “The gayest straight man in America.” I’m happy to call him a friend and I join him in praying that the church would continue to love the GLBT community.
    #9 I’m thankful for Free Speech, that I don’t have to worry about getting sued if I call someone’s ideas stupid.
    #10 I am thankful the thousands of “mmm’s” I heard at NYWC this fall as speaker’s spoke truth into leaders lives.
    #11 I am thankful for the genius feature on iTunes.
    #12 I am thankful for the Chargers, Irish, Wolverines, Spartans, and any other sports team I care about in 2008 sucking so I could concentrate on other things.
    #13 I am thankful for the dress code at YS.
    #14 I am thankful for horchata.
    #15 I am thankful for pretty things, like Gmail’s new themes, sunsets at Ocean Beach, and odd wildlife in our backyard.
    #16 I am thankful for Wii Fit as there is nothing quite like watching your 5 year old do yoga.
    #17 I am thankful for former students. They encourage me, join my crazy conversations, challenge me, and inspire me to keep going as I watch them stumble towards faith.
    #18 I am thankful for a lot of things, big and small this year.

    How about you, what are you thankful for?

  • Lies of Youth Ministry, part 2

    The second lie of youth ministry is that it is all about discipleship. This is a lie which starts with bad hermeneutics, continues with training built around selective theology, and is encouraged by inward looking church leaders.

    Here’s how this lie plays out. Most youth ministers are wholly focused on building the size of their program. If they work for a church, having a large and busy youth program means that they can justify their salary and spend their time thinking about ways to add more programs to make their programs bigger and busier. If they work for a parachurch it’s even simpler as givers like to see numbers… as in the United States big numbers mean you are significant so “hundreds” sounds so much more significant  than “tens.”

    The thinking of both is backwards because we think that if we disciple a lot of people, we will grow. And, if you are in a church context the busier you keep the church kids the more “discipleship” you are seen as doing from the bosses and parents perspective.

    In fact, as I was trained, discipleship predicates evangelism. To state the lie more clearly, most youth ministries training programs teach that in order to reach more people we have to focus on training those you have. And some of the training I’ve received suggest 2-3 years of discipleship before you try to reach a single person.

    Two quick theological points for this lie.

    #1 Check out the parable of the lost sheep. When you do ministry in a community with “lost sheep” (meaning students who haven’t heard the gospel) do you think you should focus your attention on “the 99?” I think youth ministry should be focused primarily on evangelism and reaching the lost and secondarily mentoring the found. A lot of my fellow youth workers like to mention that Jesus only had a small discipleship group of 12. But let’s not forget that he had 12 disciples while reaching, feeding, and performing miracles to the multitudes.

    #2 In a single sitting, read Acts 2-4. Go ahead. I’ll wait. So what did you see? I saw that the leaders didn’t wait for 2-3 years while new believers were being discipled. They were compelled by the urgency of the gospel! In fact, they discipled while reaching multitudes. The more institutional the church gets the less people they reach. So while many youth workers build programs, they miss thousands of opportunities to be on the front lines at their schools reaching lost kids day-by-day.

    You see, if youth ministry is all about discipleship, it never would have gotten started in the first place! The reason parachurch youth ministry got rolling in the 40s-60s was because the “church” thought Jesus’s salvation was for the church kids.

    Youth workers (paid, volunteer, expert, rookies) don’t get caught in the lie of reaching the found and being satisfied with the lost finding you. Coddling the apathetic, baysitting the saved, and entertaining the church’s youth is not why we do youth ministry. We do youth ministry to reach the lost!

    And we disciple our church kids best by being Christ-like in our walk with Jesus. Read Acts 2-4 again... it’s a two-fold plan for discipleship, isn’t it?

    Church leaders: Wanna see your church grow? Try reaching people without a program. Get out of the office and start serving IN your community instead of serving OUTSIDE of your community.

    Part one: The 10% Rule

    Part two: It’s about discipleship

    Part three: You have to have a youth pastor

  • Lies of Youth Ministry, Part One

    Boys and girls in youth ministry we’ve got some problems. We in youth ministry, as a tribe, believe some lies about who we are, what we’re about, and how we should be reaching students. Let’s address these and move forward to fix them, OK?

    #1 Your ministry is “successful” if you have 10% of Sunday morning attendance. My entire youth ministry career has been wrapped up in the local church so I can state this from experience. But let’s bear in mind historical perspective to understand this lie before we can look at a solution. The current version of Youth Ministry is really a reaction to the success of early parachurch ministries. Back in the late 1940s modern youth ministry was born when Youth for Christ hired Billy Graham to lead crusades to reach teenagers… and boy did that work! YFC’s crusades scratched a cultural itch since teens had been left out of the local church with the emergence of adolescence. (Adolescence is only about 120 years old!) As a strong middle class was born out of post-WWII days adolescent teen culture blossomed and the church was seen as irrelevant to teens. Gradually, in the early 1960s the American church responded in a big way to numerical victories of parachurch ministries. Churches were tired of seeing all of the students go to YoungLife and Youth for Christ… so they started hiring those organization’s staff to run programs in local churches.

    It was a great concept, but from the very beginning youth ministry was seen by church leadership as a way to hold onto church kids and maybe, just maybe, reach new families. This fixed a problem parachurches had without truly addressing the church issue that created the parachurch need in the first place… no place for non-believers to be ministered to.

    The truth is that local churches royally ruined what the parachurches were doing. To even call what most churches do “youth ministry” is demeaning to its evangelistic heritage. Instead of youth pastors being hired to reach a high school they were hired to grow/maintain a local church. (In fact, I’ve talked to countless youth pastors who were fired for trying to reach lost students!) The lie is that a good youth ministry is about growing a church. In most cases, a youth pastor’s job is so limited and focused on the church that it’s really not about reaching lost kids at all. (Appropriate lip service is always about evangelism!) I’ve actually sat in youth ministry networks and listened to youth pastors sound satisfied that they are reaching 50-60 students with their ministry. The target isn’t a percentage of butts in seats on Sunday morning! Reaching 50 students while 1950 have never heard the gospel is a gross failure.

    True success comes when you reach and disciple brand new people for Jesus Christ! The first lie points to the fact that church-based youth ministry largely lies to itself and calls itself a success when it reaches less than 1% of students in a community. Is it the individual youth pastor’s fault? Absolutely not. It’s a design flaw worth addressing. The truly successful youth ministries in this country focus on the lost in their schools and could care less what percentage of saved church kids come to their programs.

    Questions for youth workers: Do you agree with my use of the term “lie?” If so, what are some ideas for fixing this in your context? If you don’t agree, I still love you. But I’d like to hear your push back.

    Lie #2 It’s about discipleship

    Lie #3 You have to have a youth pastor

  • Why do you do it?


    This is associated with something we’re doing called “Youth Worker Appreciation Day.”

    If you’ve got a youth worker in your life, make sure you take a second to thank them on September 6th. This applies to both paid and volunteer youth workers!