Youth Ministry Management Tools 2.0

Mike A. Work, Ginny Olson

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780310516866
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Youth ministry isn't just meeting with students and teaching them God's truth. It also involves a myriad of administrative and operational details. Youth Ministry Management Tools 2.0 provides youth ministers and volunteers with helpful insights, advice, and practical resources to successfully manage a youth ministry. You'll find sample budgets, release forms for trips, and clear direction for screening applicants for volunteer positions. Authors Mike Work and Ginny Olson provide you with quick and accessible answers to all of your management, administrative, and supervisory questions and needs.

Sprinkled throughout the manual are brief personal anecdotes by actual, in-the-trenches youth workers, case studies of church-office debacles, pivotal lessons learned over decades of ministry, nightmare scenarios to avoid, and glorious successes to emulate. No other book provides everything a youth ministry leader needs in one place at such an affordable price.This revised and updated edition of a youth ministry classic includes bonus online content, copy-ready pages and forms, and loads of other highly practical material.

PART 1

STRATEGIC FOUNDATIONS OF YOUTH MINISTRY

1 BUILDING A FOUNDATION

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

• The Four Components of Youth Ministry

• The Three Touchstones of Leadership

One of the very first things we learn about God is God is both creative and administrative. In the beginning of Genesis, God creates the heavens and the earth. God then goes on to separate darkness and light, water, and ground, and categorizes the animals. A calendar of seven days is set, including a day of rest. From the get-go, we see a mix of creativity and organization. We also see God giving pastoral care in interactions with Adam about his loneliness. Early on God institutes policies (e.g., don’t eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden) not for the sake of policy but for the protection of people and the pursuit of God’s purposes.

From the beginning we see that God desires us to be relational, creative, organized, and purposeful. God had a plan and set the desired course for creation. Yet we youth workers spend a lot of time making decisions that we hope are moving us forward on our desired course.

If you ask a group of people in a windowless room to close their eyes and spin around and then point north, when they open their eyes, they will be pointing in every direction. Some will be pointing in the right direction; others, not so much. This is a fairly accurate representation of how some youth workers lead: they’re spinning around, trying to move in a direction they believe to be north, but often they’re without tools to navigate. The result is that they may or may not make it to their destination. By placing one foot in front of the other with no sense of direction, it’s possible to get miles off course. A philosophy of ministry and a philosophy of leadership provide those inner compasses to direct a leader and his or her followers to true north.

DEVELOPING A PHILOSOPHY OF MINISTRY

The most effective youth workers understand why they do what they do. And they can articulate it to others. “What is your philosophy of youth ministry?” is the one interview question that often stumps those who haven’t done the hard work of formulating their philosophies of ministry and leadership.

There’s no formula for developing a ministry philosophy, but there are some areas to consider. Based loosely on the work of educational philosopher William Frankena, the following components can help you clarify what you believe about ministry and how it should be lived out. Understand that there are whole seminary courses about philosophy of youth ministry. This is just a primer to get you started:

HAVING A PHILOSOPHY OF MINISTRY is necessary not only when you’re the leader but also when you’re interviewing for a position. One mistake some new youth pastors make is they take the first position they’re offered. During the interview stage, confirm that your philosophy matches the church’s. This will save you much heartache (and headaches).

COMPONENT ^#1—PRIMARY PURPOSE

If you think of a philosophy of ministry in terms of a building, this is the foundation upon which everything else is built. When the storms of ministry blow away everything else, this is the concrete slab. It’s your ideals, your values, your theology, your beliefs about God and ministry. It answers the questions about why you’re here and why you’re doing what you’re doing—which is helpful when it’s 3 a.m. at the lock-in and the second kid just threw up.

How do you discover the primary purpose? Think about what makes youth ministries different from other organizations that help adolescents, such as the Scouts or the YMCA. Ask yourself, why is youth ministry important to the church or the local community? Or, why do you want to invest in youth ministry at this point in your life? As you formulate ideas to address these questions, keep asking the question “Why?” until you hit the core of your beliefs. For example, “We believe that God wants to rescue adolescents.” Play the curious toddler and repeatedly ask, “Why?” Why do you believe God wants to save adolescents? From what? To what? Why do you think it’s necessary that they’re saved?

Or “We believe adolescents are the church of today and tomorrow.” Why do you believe the church is critical? Why is it important that adolescents are part of it either now or in the future? What does this say about your view of God? Of the church? What do you base that view upon?

We tend to rush to sayings and Bible verses without putting any thought into our choices. What we end up with is a slogan masquerading as theology. Keep pushing into this component until you’re satisfied you’re at the foundation of what you believe.

COMPONENT ^#2—PERCEPTIONS OF PEOPLE

Each of us comes with a perception of adolescents, their families, the church community, and other leaders. These perceptions are what make up component #2. Our perceptions are often formed by our experiences and our theology, both current and past. For example, if we rebelled as adolescents, if we’re drawn to news stories dealing with the dark side of teenage behavior, or if we were raised in churches that strongly emphasized human transgressions and depravity, we may tend to see students as having a sinful nature that’s fully intact. On the other side of the spectrum, if we had relatively chaos-free teenage years with families who thought we could do no wrong, if we focus on how teenagers are changing the world for the better, or if we were raised in churches where the term “sin” was rarely spoken but “grace” was used habitually, we may view students as essentially good at their cores.

Our beliefs about components #2 and #1 are critical in the development of a ministry philosophy. If, as we note earlier, component #1 in a ministry philosophy is the foundation, then component #2 makes up the structural beams. The rest of a ministry philosophy is built on these two components. That’s why it is so important to wrestle with what we think and believe about our primary purposes and what our perceptions are about people. It’s easy to leave these unexamined and just replicate what we’ve experienced or heard about, but we end up developing ministries built on sand rather than bedrock.

The development of component #2 requires that you grapple with the question, “What do I believe about adolescents as well as their surrounding networks?” The way you answer that question will deeply impact your ministry. If you believe people are essentially good, then you’re likely to have a ministry with few, if any, rules and guidelines. Taken to an extreme, there can be an immature naiveté blind toward potentially troubling behaviors. This leader may believe that students innately know on a retreat when it’s time to call it a night and will sleep in their own beds, so having a curfew is unnecessary and distrustful. Or when interviewing volunteers, this leader sees background checks as a waste of time and potentially divisive in the church, so why bother? This leader doesn’t believe anyone would willingly seek to harm an adolescent.

On the other side of the spectrum: If you believe people are basically sinful, then you’re likely to lead ministry marked by many rules and lots of chaperones who have been closely vetted, with strict safety measures at events. (One youth pastor hired a security guard to watch the church during a lock-in, both for those who might come in and those who might sneak out.)

Veteran youth pastors realize that the reality of component #2 is somewhere in the middle, where adolescents are made in God’s image (good) and yet have fallen away from the original design (evil). They are creation, but creation in need of redemption. These youth pastors do the hard work of examining their beliefs and studying theology along with adolescent development, science, and pop culture. They investigate adolescent trends and talk with parents, teachers, and community leaders. Seasoned youth workers live in the tension between being wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16), and their philosophy reflects it.

COMPONENT ^#3—FOCUS

This component doesn’t mean a random emphasis based on the latest youth ministry blog or conference. Rather, the focus of a youth ministry flows out of the primary purpose (#1) as well as the perceptions of people (#2). For example, if a youth pastor believes God is all-powerful and loving and desires a relationship with God’s creation (#1), and believes adolescents are made in God’s image and yet have fallen away from the original design (#2), then perhaps the focus of the ministry is to be a safe and loving place to ask dangerous questions, build strong relationships, and consider a life dedicated to following God.

One way to help develop #3 is to ask, “What do we want the ministry to be known for?” For example, if the ministry targets adolescents who have no home and experience poverty and violence, you may want to be known as a ministry that helps adolescents develop strong, holistic, internal and external support systems and will advocate for them when they cannot advocate for themselves. Still stuck? Suppose the local news is profiling your ministry: What would they concentrate on? Or if you had to write a summary of the ministry in 140 characters, what would it say?

Another example: Say the ministry is predominantly made up of homeschooled kid...