Organic Student Ministry

Trash the Pre-Packaged Programs and Transform Your Youth Group

Stephen L. Ingram Jr.

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780827227590
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Do you find other youth ministry programs promise you can "plug and play, " only to fall short of expectation, forcing you to "adopt and drop"? An organic student ministry allows each student ministry to exist and live in its best possible way, its natural way! In his book Organic Student Ministry, acclaimed youth ministry author Stephen Ingram shows you how to:

Develop practices instead of just programs
Minister to students where they are instead of spending your time pleading with them to "get with the program"
Focus on a way of doing ministry that grows naturally from the distinctively rich and fertile soil of your unique church
"Stephen Ingram is the 'Steve Jobs of the Youth Ministry world.' I'm hard pressed to recall anyone with the inventiveness and informed creativity of this young man."- Mark DeVries, president, Ministry Architects

1

Grafting In

You are 23, fresh out of college and ready to prove who you are and what you can do. You have fresh new ideas and energy, and have not been jaded by the gauntlet of church ministry. You are young and are poised to do amazing things in this church.

You are 52; you are one of the ones who has stuck it out; you have proven yourself and are moving for hopefully the last time. Your experience, maturity, and knowledge let others know that this is not your first rodeo.

You have a full-time job. It is not vocational ministry. It is not even in the church. But you felt a call, saw a need, was coerced into leading a month-long Bible study that is now a part-time job in youth ministry. You have no clue what to do, what to teach, or how to answer a lot of the questions, and are truthfully wondering how you even got to this job (that is not your job) anyway?!?!

That is where the differences end—and each of you step into that office, ready to do good, impact teenagers, and build an amazing ministry.

Then it happens.

You realize either on your own or through a rough brush with ministry reality that you did not inherit a blank slate ministry with which to create your ministry masterpiece on. You did inherit a broken, usually hurting, dysfunctional mess teeming with emotions, agendas, and passions. And if this was not enough of an adventure, this is only a small glimpse of the bigger mess the student ministry is both causing and shouldering from the church, the local community, and the students’ relationships with God.

Any attempt to insert your agenda will likely end in one of two ways:

1. Restlessness from the natives: “This is not how [your predecessor’s name] did it!”

2. Unhealthy dependence on you: your ideas, direction, method, etc. The operative word is YOU, which means YOU are responsible, which means YOU will succeed or fail by your own effort.

Suddenly, your exciting new ministry’s “new car smell” takes on a distinctly sour aroma—a mix of old Doritos and something you are sure was tracked in on the bottom of your shoe.

Lucky you!

After a few more months of uncomfortable run-ins and a couple of angry e-mails, you could be pulling out the old resume, prepping the spouse, and beginning to search the job databases again. Or, if you are a volunteer, you could slowly fade into the background of the church or leave entirely.

But, wait… Pause and rewind.

What if you started with a patient, organic approach?

A Better Way

Some of the worst mistakes a youth minister makes are in the first few months on the job. Why, you might ask? What you do in the first year sets the tone and trajectory for the years to come. You might not hear the grumbling in the first months or even the first year, not because you have necessarily started well, but because people do not want to challenge the new girl or guy. A lot of times we come into a new program and do one of two things: we either completely uproot the current system, install our regime, and work our ministry, or we come in and practice the whole “Do not touch anything for the first year” philosophy. We are either extremely hands on or completely hands off. We are either Machiavellian, where resistance is futile, or we are like my two-year-old with Play-Doh, where the unique shades of ministry that we bring are soon so smashed together with the church that both turn into an indistinguishable blob.

Machiavelli and Play-Doh

You remember Machiavelli, right? He was the guy that wrote The Prince, which was a book about the art of war and ruling with an iron fist. I will never forget the first time I read this book and was thinking to myself, “Wow, I know some pastors who seem to take their cues from Machiavelli more than from Jesus.” There are some approaches to youth ministry that are very similar. While it may not be a conversion-by-sword sort of approach, there are many youth ministers who do adopt the my-way-or-the-highway mentality when it comes to instituting programming, vision, and mission. This approach comes in with an understanding that the youth ministry needs a new vision, mission, and a general overhaul of the program, and we are the ones they hired to do it. So we come in, institute new language, approaches, formats, worship styles, mission focus, etc. The list can go on and on.

Here are two stories that highlight the dangers of this approach. One involves very aggressive behavior, and one is much more subtle, but both lead to catastrophic results. Story number one. New youth minister hired. Everyone was very excited, they had just come off a very rough situation where they previous leader had been involved in some scandal and they were ready for a new start. So the first night, literally after the youth minister had been there less than 48 hours, he stood up and proclaimed the new vision for the youth ministry, complete with new mission statement and of course new logo. The guy had been there for 48 hours!!! Needless to say they freaked out. He had not even shared a meal with the kids yet and he was already telling them who they were and what their focus should be. They almost ran him out of the church that night.

Story number two. She was a successful youth minister and had done really good ministry at her previous two churches. It was a good transition in, and she was learning families’ names and was planning a lot of relational time with students and parents. Everything was going great until the pink sofa incident. The pink sofa was ugly. Seriously, it was hideous. Anyone in their right mind would immediately burn this thing because, every time you looked at it, it burned your retinas. She thought, “It is probably some whim purchase that then turned into a “I bet the youth group would take this as a tax write-off donation.” So she moved it. She found out where the storage closet was for those sorts of items, and she moved it in one Saturday morning. Then the “pink sofa apocalypse” happened. “Where did it go?” “Who moved the pink sofa?” “This is serious; I am mad.” At first, she thought they were playing with her, a sort of “let’s break in the new girl” treatment. Nope. They became more and more irate and refused to start Sunday school until someone answered for their crimes. So after about 20 minutes she gave up. “I just thought it was ugly and did not match the rest of the youth room—which is impeccably decorated, by the way—so I thought I would move it.” They almost ran her out of that church as well.

It turns out that, in both instances, one intentional and the other unintentional, these two youth ministers dramatically disturbed the homeostasis of the ministries they came to help. Both, with the best intentions at heart, made the fatal flaw of approaching their respective ministries with a Machiavelli-like lens and subsequently started off their ministries with these churches on very shaky ground.

The other side of the coin is the Play-Doh approach. The Play-Doh approach is much less aggressive, but just as damaging. Here’s another story. Michelle, a gifted young woman started her first youth ministry job. Although it was her first job in youth ministry, it was certainly not her first professional experience. She had spent the past six years as a professional systems crisis counselor. Her job was to go into and work with businesses that were having personnel problems and help them resolve the problems in an amicable manner while at the same time creating better systems that, if followed, would help alleviate and prevent crises in the future.

Crazy enough, she felt a calling into youth ministry and jumped into it, leading youth part time while keeping her other job. The church she began to work with was one she had been worshiping with and she was very excited about the opportunity. This church, like many others, had had it’s fair share of crises over the past ten years, some of which Michelle had been made aware of before she took the job. While the turmoil was not overwhelming, it was definitely affecting the ministries. When Michelle was hired, she tried to fly low. Although she knew that she had skills and experience that could be very useful with the turmoil and confusion, she continued to not insert herself into the unhealthy systems that were eating at her church. She simply melded herself into the church, kept a low profile, and watched the systems continue to produce very unhealthy fruit. Her unique gifts went unnoticed, unused, and were consequently unhelpful. She became indistinguishable. Her unique abilities never showed through, and she began to feel like Play-Doh in a child’s hands.

Let me pause here and distinguish between becoming Play-Doh and becoming part of a community. In community, you do adopt similar practices and traits. It does not mean that you become indistinguishable. When you become a part of a community, you do not lose the things that make you you. You add things that keep you identifiable, unique, and wholly distinct. Think of a salad: tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, etc. If you just throw these in a bowl, they are a lot of individual parts. But together, with or without dressing, they become a salad. You do not put everything into a blender so that all the items are turned into an indistinguishable puree; that would be gross and not a salad. Each part is still distinguishable, but together they make a salad..

A Third Way: The Way of St. Patrick

There is another way. There is an alternative to either “conquering and assimilating” or “becoming an indistinguishable gelatinous blob” in ministry. It is the way of St. Patrick. St. Patrick lived around 1600 years ago and, believe it or not, provided a pretty incredible model for how to peacefully move into a church community and at the same time maintain your gifts, personality, and integrity.

In order to understand this technique, you first have to understand Patrick’s backstory. According to The Confession of St. Patrick, Patrick, as a 16-year-old, was abducted from his homeland of Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland. He was there for six years, until he escaped and fled back to Great Britain. He followed a call into the ministry and spent the following years studying theology and becoming ordained as a priest.

Upon the completion of his training, he was sent back to Ireland. Patrick had a couple of options at this point. He could have gone in with dogged determination to eradicate anything that did not fit into his belief structure and practice, or he could go in and adhere to the already established norms of Christianity.

He chose neither.

Neither made sense.

He was not going to go in and completely destroy their way of life and demand that they convert to his understanding of the faith. At the same time, he knew that they needed something else, something more than what they were currently experiencing.

So he chose a third way.

One of the things that makes Patrick unique is he chose to help the people of Ireland, both pagan and Christian, understand the faith in their own terms, using their own symbols and practices, and even their own holy days. The predominant religious group, the druids, had beliefs, practices, and holy days that were not only central to their way of life but also reflected the way of life of the people of Ireland. Patrick had experienced the way of life, customs, and rituals of the druids as a prisoner for six years, so he knew them well. They were not just a group of pagans who, as it would have seemed to an outsider, worshiped the sun and burned sacrificial piles of wood. He knew that these were devoted people, people who believed in what they did and were children of the living God.

Patrick did not look at them as people below himself or as people whom he would “set straight,” saving them from their religious folly. He first sought to understand them, to know them, and live among them. Patrick lived in a tension that is not foreign to many youth ministers. He knew if he completely assimilated into the culture then he would never be able to make a difference in it. At the same time, he also knew there would be a time when the principles of his faith and the practices of the druids would collide. He knew when that time came he would have to be ready, he would have to be trusted, and he would have to make a strong yet calibrated move to show that the God he served was different from the deities of the druids.

So, what’s a saint to do?

In life and ministry, there are some things you’ll recognize and feel at home with, and others that seem blatant contradictions to the way you believe God is calling both you and the church.

So what do you do?

Do you uproot everything to plant something new? Or do you do nothing and hope it works out for the best? Either one could have you looking for another new job in 9–12 months.

Listening and Responding

First, listen and observe. You are not a deity. You do not have all of the answers and you are not the savior of the world or even this church. While you do have a lot to bring to this church, the church also has a lot to teach you. Seriously, even the most messed up churches have something to teach each of us. Sometimes they teach us by helping us learn what not to do, but no matter what we can still learn from them.

Listening requires less talking. For many of us this can be one of the hardest parts of this job. Listen for their fears. They are fearful, at least in some part. They want to be better, they want to do something more, but at best are fearful of their own inefficiencies, failures, and their own pasts. Also, listen for their dreams. I will guarantee you that they have dreams; you might have to mine them out, but they are there. If it seems like there are a lack of dreams, it might even be that you have to help them remember that they are allowed to dream. I experience this with a lot of churches. They have not only forgotten their dreams but many have forgotten how to dream.

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, Stephen, why don’t you ask them about who they are, their programs, their current leadership, what has been working well, etc.?” You could do that, but usually you are going to get some stylized, sanitized understanding of self that reflects more of who they think they should be or, even worse, more r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Crisis of Fast-Food Ministry
• 1 Grafting In
• 2 Distinguishing the Wildflowers from the Weeds
• 3 “Locavore” Student Ministry
• 4 Miracle Grow Is Not So Miraculous
• 5 A Time to Plant and a Time to Harvest
• 6 Cage-Free Mission
• 7 Harvest Feasts, Christmas, and Constantine
• 8 Ebb and Flow
• 9 Digging Deep without Burying Yourself
• 10 Organic Relationships
• 11 Eliminating Preservatives
• 12 Self-Care for Ministers