And I don’t mean the long names that are hard to pronounce. I’m talking about simply remembering names of students. Fortunately, the long and difficult names are often the easiest to remember.

I lead a small group of high school guys at the church where I volunteer. We’ve been meeting together every Sunday night for a half hour to discuss the week’s lesson and share our stories of success, failure and grace from the past week. It’s a slow process, getting to know students well. Names are the first and, unfortunately for many, the biggest hurdle in the slow process.

I have to confess, I did not finally get my students’ names down until well into November. From late August through October, I found myself floundering with “dudes” and “man” as I desperately tried to remember a name. On several occasions, I experienced that lingering sense of deja vu coupled with guilt as a student shared with me a story I probably heard last week, but forgot.

I found myself wondering why names were so hard to get down this time around. This past summer, as an intern, I found names to come pretty naturally. Did I just not care as much now that I was a volunteer as opposed to being an intern? Did I have too many other concerns in my own life to merit me putting to memory the names and important stories of my guys?

I was thinking this through a few weeks ago as I was driving back to school after another night of dancing around names. As a youth ministries major and a volunteer who hopes to one day pastor students in a local church, I know full well that names are crucial, because if you don’t remember names, you are essentially communicating that a student’s identity isn’t important enough to you to put to memory. Knowing a student’s name and story is a crucial first step in bridging the gap between us and them, demonstrating a sense of care and presence in students’ lives so often marked by a sense of abandonment and isolation from concerned and caring adults.

As I was working through these thoughts on my drive home, my phone rang. My girlfriend was off work and wanting to talk about her day and ask about mine. On the way, I grabbed a drive-thru dinner in order to make it back to school in time for my weekly Sunday night meeting with the residence life staff, of which I am a part. After which, I proceeded to tackle the leftover homework waiting for me that I had put off over the weekend. It wasn’t until I crawled into bed several hours later that these questions returned to me. And that’s when some of it started to come together for me.

Volunteers are real people living in real circumstances with real life concerns. This past summer, as an intern, my whole life revolved around the students I was working with. Now, finding myself back in a volunteer position, “student ministries volunteer” finds itself in an awkward juggle with my role as student, resident assistant, roommate, etc. And this is me speaking as a single college student whose focus in college is student ministries. I can only imagine what it’s like being a volunteer in student ministries with a completely separate career field, a family with several schedules, and life demands that draw their attention elsewhere. When my volunteers arrive for student ministries, they don’t arrive out of a vacuum. They come having had a quick dinner with family, a tough day at work facing multiple deadlines, and a car that struggled to get to church that night. In light of this, the names and stories of individual students can get lost in the busyness.

So what then is my role as a youth pastor seeking to connect busy volunteers with students who want and need meaningful connections?

As someone who exists within the world of student ministries, I need to be equipping my volunteers to make those meaningful connections. Part of this entails making sure there is adequate time given for volunteers to connect with students at events and regular gatherings, but this involves a balance between providing time and avoiding additional burdens to already over-scheduled families. A few thoughts, then, on what we can do as youth pastors to overcome the “names barrier” for our volunteers, from my own experience and the shared experiences of other youth pastors.

Remember that your volunteers have lives outside of their time with you. This should be rule #1 for the youth pastor’s mindset in empowering volunteers. Volunteers need our time, concern and encouragement almost as much as our students do. They come to our gatherings every week much as our students do – beat up from a hard week, family struggles, the realities of life. Begin to see your role as pastor to student ministry volunteers first. Part of this includes pastoring them through their ministry to our students.

Make name-games a regular part of your activities. Now, name-games can be cheesy and overdone, but it is a quick and easy way for volunteers to grab onto names and be reminded of names from past weeks. It also has the added bonus of connecting new students with the names of everyone, helping everyone feel connected initially.

Learn names yourself, and use names often. We within the world of student ministry have the advantage of going to work every day of the week with these kids in mind. Leverage this fact for the sake of your volunteers. Whenever you interact with students while your volunteers are around, use students’ names. Not only will this demonstrate to your volunteers the importance of knowing names, your volunteers just might overhear and thank you later.

Provide plenty of consistent time for volunteers to engage students. Establish small groups of students for each volunteer to call their own, and give them plenty of chances to engage them in a variety of settings. The worst thing that you can do as a student ministries pastor is to eat up time when your volunteers could engage students with more of us talking about whatever clever lesson we’ve put together for that week. Volunteers need consistency and time in order to begin to see the benefits of their investment in students.

Teach your volunteers the power of nicknames. This might be worthy of an entire post in and of itself, but nicknames can be powerful ways to develop a sense of identity with the community and a memorable way to remember students. Beyond the easy “dude” and “man,” unique nicknames can help students begin to see the value of their own unique identity in the community. And nicknames are often easier to remember than the generic Johns, Jakes and Justins.

What other ideas have you found to be effective in helping your volunteers connect with students?

The very first week the wing was open, we moved the whole operation into the basement. One of the immediate benefits of our newfound space was the dedicated area for the ga-ga ball court. I don’t know why, but our students are obsessed with ga-ga ball. It’s not uncommon to have 25 people starting off each game. And with the energy that our new space brought to the night, these games were especially intense.

In the middle of one of these games, one of our junior high guys came up to me to tell me his bottle of rootbeer had “exploded.” He pointed out a growing puddle of rootbeer underneath the foosball table where he had just been playing. I told him I’d take care of it, and immediately went to look for Josh, the youth pastor.

I found him five minutes later upstairs engaged in conversation with some students. I stood off to the side, waiting politely but wondering what the state of the rootbeer on the ground was now, especially with all those feet wandering around the foosball table. He noticed me, ended the conversation, and asked me what was up. When I explained the rootbeer spill, he asked me a simple question.

“Did you get paper towels?”

It was one of those “duh” moments we all need every once in a while to keep us humble. In my mind, with a new building and everything, I was sure there was some sort of process or cleaning solution that was in place that I didn’t know about. And as I reflected on this later, I began to see a side of volunteer youth ministry I hadn’t experienced.

I grew up in student ministry. I was a student leader and regular attender from middle school on, and now I serve as a volunteer leader and teacher while I’m taking classes and getting a degree in it. But for those who can’t say this, who don’t have these experiences, the youth pastor is the “expert,” the one who knows the process and the solution to clean up the spills that keep happening in students’ lives. So volunteers become crippled in their ministry to their students, assuming they don’t have the right answers for the problems at hand.

My role, then, as youth pastor can take on one of two roles: I can play the expert, connect with students everywhere and carry the bulk of their burdens. DeVries likes to call this guy the “superstar youth pastor.” Or, I can see my role less as a pastor to students and more as a pastor to volunteers, empowering and equipping them to do a far greater work than I ever could on my own.

Over the next few posts, I will be working through my own experiences as a volunteer in student ministry now, as someone who wants to lead and pastor a youth ministry of my own in the near future. It’s a strange place to be in – having worked as a full-time pastor of students this summer, and now finding myself back to a volunteer with a whole separate life of college and work. But my hope is that these reflections will solidify a volunteer-centered mindset in my own perspective on student ministry, and maybe in yours as well.

I want to wrap up this series on thinking more creatively with student ministry by focusing on the more practical aspects of how to actually go about doing this. Because I doubt too many would say they are against being more creative in ministry. It’s just a matter of having the time or the energy to try new things, and dealing with those who would hold a tight line on “how things have always been.” So being creative in student ministry is great. But how do we do this?

The trouble with addressing the how question is that, in order to be creative with ministry in the sense that I’ve been addressing, only you as a student ministries pastor, volunteer or parent can answer that question. If I give an answer or a five step approach to creatively thinking about your ministry, it is no longer creative. So the following are some thoughts and principles I’ve seen work in ministry, as well as a few principles I have read along the way.

1. Know your students. Whether or not you are trying to be “creative” with your ministry, this is the single most important dimension of your ministry to students. From everything to programming to counseling, if you don’t know your students, you will fail. When it comes to creatively approaching your ministry, you must know your students’ own talents, passions and desires if you want to expand the creative scope of your ministry. Otherwise, you will be imposing activities and approaches to ministry that have no context with where your students are
2. Affirm and encourage the unique skills of your students in person, in programming and on stage. It’s one thing to know that a student loves photography; it’s another thing to express interest in their latest project, or to incorporate a picture they took into your talk or Powerpoint. If your student loves painting, or math, or writing, don’t just nod – ask them about it! Their passions and creative outlets are part of who they are and how God has created them. Affirm this whenever you can. If you have several students who love photography, or painting, or DJing, consider what kind of programming (small group, discipleship group, tech team, etc) you can develop to put these creative desires to use. Embracing rather than ignoring the creativity of your students communicates that you care about them as a whole person, not just for the sake of their soul’s eternal destination.
3. Think multi-sensory. As mentioned in the first post of this series, we often only display two skill-sets in our worship: communication through spoken word and music. But people learn in a multitude of ways – through listening, or seeing, or experiencing or acting. Personally, I am a very visual and kinesthetic learner. I learn best when I can see something and do it. Embrace a perspective on teaching that acknowledges the variety of learners in your midst. Get your graphic design students to design a logo for your ministry or teaching series. Have a student paint a picture of a Bible story as you retell it. Also, consider the space that you do ministry in. What kind of atmosphere are you presenting for students as they come to your meeting times? For some of your more visual/artistic students, a dull meeting space can be a turn off. So embrace their artistic vision and get them on board to design a space that reflects the spiritual nature of your ministry.
4. Help students develop a creative spiritual imagination. This goes a bit deeper than programming, to how we help our students think about God and their own spiritual lives. We have to help our students get over their own dualistic ways of thinking about their lives – spiritual life happens in church or when reading the Bible and praying, and secular life happens every other time. Part of this includes expanding the typical “read your Bible and pray” view of spiritual activities, and embracing some other spiritual disciplines in our own practice and teaching our students to do the same.

We have a very head-heavy evangelical faith. In my own experience, the spiritual practices encouraged in student ministry usually consists of daily “devotions” and prayer, both of which involve individual students and only within the confines of their own thought life. If we want students to embrace a faith that acts, a faith that moves, we can do so by helping students see the totality of their lives as a “spiritual act of worship,” to quote Romans 12.

In many ways, our programming in student ministry has programmed the spiritual lives of students – we teach to their heads and hearts, and so their faith stays within and is never acted upon. But God is not interested in our spirits alone – He wants the sum total of who we are, our physical bodies included. By embracing the creative gifts of our students, we can help them develop a view of their spirituality that involves the whole of who they are – body and soul.

Continuing the discussion on finding more creative means of student ministry (specifically as it relates to our “big group” meetings), I discussed the role of embracing the creativity of students and volunteers as a means of empowering them to take up the ministry as their own, rather than being passive spectators to our ministry as youth pastors and ministers. In this post I will address the role of creative approaches to student ministry in helping our students become integrated into the larger church body, and in the following post I hope to address a few of the more practical aspects of a creative model.

Undeniably, the most important issue facing student ministries today is the question of how we bridge the gap for our students between the energy and involvement of our ministries into the often (perceived) less-engaging church body as a whole. Numerous news articles and studies released even within the past year are revealing what a lot of us in student ministry have known for a while: even the most engaged students in high school church ministry will more likely than not drop out of involvement in the church at some point during or after college. Whether it’s that their faith is destroyed by secularist, pagan professors in college or that we just never had their attention in the first place, we are not doing an effective job at walking with our students as they “leave the nest” for the first time.

I want to suggest that, in part, our “mini-church” model of youth ministry is to blame.

We want our students to graduate from high school and from our ministries and be able to integrate into the church body as a whole, and yet we have trained them to not need the church body as a whole throughout the 4, 6, or 12 years we have had them in our ministries.

• We want our students to participate in worship through song with the whole church congregation, and yet we have provided them with our own worship times where we sing songs that they like in a style they’re used to.
• We want our students to get involved in community groups in the church, and to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them, yet we have sequestered them in a ministry where everyone is relatively the same as they are. We have not trained our students to appreciate the wisdom and experience of different people because we have never provided them the opportunities to do so.
• We want our students to appreciate and learn from a sermon, yet we’ve trained them on ten minute “talks” that are directly written for their level and their experience. They have not needed to actively engage with a sermon written for a whole church because they’ve received biblical truth written directly to their experience.

The bottom line is this: as long as we provide the more relevant and “cooler” substitute for what the larger church already provides, we will be training our students that the larger church is “out of touch” and “not for them.”

We need to adopt a model of youth ministry that acknowledges the role of the larger church in the lives of our students now, not just when they graduate. Rather than providing the cooler substitute, we should be pointing our students to engage with the church presently while providing them the additional resource of our ministry to them as youth pastors and leaders.

When we do this – when we are free from feeling like we have to provide students with worship experiences and “talks” because they are already getting this with the church as a whole – we have much more freedom in our ministries to pursue creative means to help our students engage with what they are receiving in the local church on their level. 

So we no longer take 30 minutes for a lengthy talk where we exegete Scripture for them, instead using that time to allow students to engage in activities of worship (not merely through singing) where they put action to the truths they are learning. We can move outside of our youth rooms and stages where we teach from, getting on the ground in service opportunities in the community or placing our students in contexts where they are confronted with the realities of their faith in life. A youth pastor friend of mine, for example, took his junior high boys out to a graveyard during one of their service times, exposing them to the reality of death and engaging them in conversation on what it means to really live. Talking about death from the stage is one thing; talking about death while standing in the midst of gravestones is another. For students, who already engage and learn experientially, creative approaches like this have the potential to make real to them the truths learned through the larger church.

If we want our students to engage in the activities of the church, we can’t expect them to do so on their own. We must begin to train them during our ministry to them, because we can’t expect them to automatically adapt to something they’ve never had to practice. Our “student ministries” in the church then becomes a ministry of relationship and experience. Discipling them intentionally, and providing experiences that challenge and reinforce the truths they are learning through their involvement in the church.

If we allow ourselves to think outside our “mini-church” mindset of youth ministry, we are free to engage students with more than just words, while pointing them to whole-church integration for the source of worship and teaching in their spiritual lives. So when they leave home and leave our ministries, met with the challenge of engaging the local church on their own, it won’t be the first time, and thus not the last time either.

Creativity and Empowerment in Student Ministry

In the discussion on the importance and role of creativity in student ministry, I laid out three key reasons why we need a more creative approach to student ministry. In the typical model, where our youth services look like more energetic copies of church services, students and volunteers are not encouraged to tap into their creative abilities and desires (unless, of course, those creative abilities involve either musical ability or speaking ability).

When we resign ourselves to this typical model, we are missing out on one of the most important roles of the youth pastor in any given ministry: empowering people to do the work of the ministry.

In the mini-church model, everything about the service revolves around the direction and role of the youth pastor or head leader in the flow of events. Everything is either leading to or coming from his or her direction and word to the group. When our ministry model stems from a primarily words-centered approach, the natural tendency is going to be to look to the one carrying the words – the pastor – to give direction and purpose to the time. The gifts of speaking and words possessed and honed by the pastor are at the center of this model. Granted, there may be other volunteers who feel confident and capable enough to present a lesson or speak in front of the group, but it still centers largely on the words given, and less on the life-integration of the message into the lives of students and volunteers. The gifts of the speaker are at the center, and students and volunteers are left to respond to those gifts.

Now, what would happen if instead, we shaped our ministries around the passions and gifts of our individual students and volunteers, and allowed the uniqueness of their gifts to play a shaping role in how we do our ministry? The “how” of this will be unique to each ministry, but the “why” is universal – in allowing our volunteers and students to play a shaping role in the ministry and the services, we are setting them up to be stakeholders and active leaders in the ministry, rather than passive recipients of a message prepared over the week in the life of the pastor or leader.

Imagine if students came to our gatherings with the not only the expectation of getting involved, but the desire to be involved. Knowing that the direction of the ministry was shaped by their abilities, and that their abilities would be embraced and enhanced through their experience there, would empower them to take ownership of the ministry as their own. The times that I as a student in youth ministry felt the greatest desire to be involved in the ministry were when I felt that I had a say in what went on – when I was able to teach, or able to lead a small group or worship. In doing so, my unique gifts were allowed to flourish and strengthen, giving me the experience that would eventually shape my desire and heart for student ministry.

Youth ministry has been great at doing this for those who possess those gifts we hold  highest – teaching and singing, for example. But what would it look like to do this for other creative gifts? What about the girl who has a passion and ability for photography and painting? How could we incorporate her artistic expression into our services? As a practical example from my experience, over this summer on occasion we would practice lectio divina, during which time we provided art supplies for student to draw or write a response to the story being told. The image to the right came about as a result of this practice, opening up a discussion about what it means for God to experience emotion, a topic that might have otherwise been passed over in the larger discussion of the Flood narrative.

At the heart of this approach is a desire to give students and volunteers a stake in the ministry, to give them the legs to stand on their own rather than looking constantly to us for direction. For volunteers, this means acknowledging that they are not all the same, that some of them are gifted at some things and not others, and providing opportunities for them to take part in the ministry where they are gifted and have a felt strength. Not only does this develop confidence in them, but it gives them a real active role in the outcome of the ministry. This takes a working knowledge and relationship with our volunteers in order to do this, which perhaps is another reason why we are not more creative with our ministries - it’s hard work. But in the long run, unless we want to run the show and be the focus of the ministry, we must empower volunteers and students to take an active part in the ministry, to cease being passive observers and to take an active role. This means taking the risk to try new things. As one professor I had emphasized: “the only wrong method in teaching is the method you use all the time.”

In the five or so years I’ve been pursuing student ministries as vocational ministry, I’ve had some great experiences to be a part of a number of church-based and para-church youth ministries. And through these experiences, I’ve begun noticing patterns in these ministries that have caused me to wrestle with one question over the past few months:

If teenagers, being so full of energy, passion and creativity, are the heart of our ministries, why is that our ministries to them are not marked by a similar passion and creativity? Or, to put it in a simpler, more focused way: Why is it that youth ministry is often just a form of “mini-church”?

Here’s what I mean. Let’s consider the typical order of service for your average Sunday morning service in your average American church, compared to the typical big-group youth ministry service at that same church:

Now, I’m sure there are exceptions to this paradigm, but none that I have encountered yet in my experiences and reading on student ministries. So I return to my question: Why do our youth ministries just look like “mini-church,” or “church-made-cooler because we play games and the youth pastor isn’t as boring as the senior pastor”?

Perhaps we just lack the time and desire to come up with a different paradigm for our services. After all, they’ve worked for the past ten years of youth ministry. Or maybe it’s the risk of the new, the risk of trying something different and failing. It’s easier to maintain the status quo than to launch out into new territory. Or maybe, we’ve bought into the idea that this is the “right way” to do youth ministry. All that creative, passion stuff is for the artsy, wishy-washy types anyways, right?

My concern with this reality is that in merely duplicating the typical approach to ministry that is modeled in our church services, we are failing our students and failing Christ as we seek to demonstrate to our students what a life in pursuit of Him looks like. The current model suggests that the extent of our spiritual lives together is to sing and listen to a guy talk for a few minutes, focusing on these “spiritual aspects” of our lives while indirectly communicating that anything that doesn’t fit into this model isn’t as important. So those students who have a passion and skill for art or poetry or parkour or beatboxing or writing are left to pursue those passions at home or school. But what would happen if we opened ourselves up to these creative gifts, if we encouraged and fostered and embraced the creative spirit that is within our students rather than ignoring it? This approach necessitates a different way of thinking about how we structure our ministries.

In the next few posts, I want to address three reasons why this current model is failing, and in the process suggest a few ways that we can begin to shift our paradigm on what “youth ministry services” should look like:

• We are not empowering students and volunteers to have a stake in shaping the ministry.
• We are crippling our students in their integration into the church as a whole.
• We are neglecting the creativity and passion of our students.

In the meantime, here’s a question: Have you seen/experienced/led a youth ministry that differed significantly from the model described above? How was it different? What did it look like in action?

Let me know what you think:

One thing we talk a lot about as Lawlor RAs is the concept of becoming a godly man. What does it mean to be a man who pursues Christ wholeheartedly? And how do we create an community environment that fosters godly manhood rather than perpetual guyhood?

In his book “The Wild Man’s Journey,” Richard Rohr lays out 5 realities that a boy must come to accept before he can complete his initiation into manhood. The final reality, “Your life is not about you,” is the calling, the cause to which the newly initiated man finds his purpose. For some, this is a team or a flag. Others find this cause at the first sight of an ultrasound image or at the exchanging of rings and vows. Whatever the cause to be taken up, it is the final stage of male initiation. Without such a cause, perpetual guys will “almost always abuse or avoid [their role], both of which are a loss to the community.”

What men need is to be called up into something bigger than themselves, to be given a cause that compels courage and demands self-sacrifice. Today, our culture demands nothing of its men – except to be perpetual stay-at-home gamers living for the next LAN party, or perpetual partiers living for the next lay.

To this, Jesus replies: Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. Take up that which is your weakness, your shame and find the bigger glory in it. Follow me in giving everything to a cause greater than you.

May our response be like the writer of Hebrews, compelling us to find a cause greater than ourselves and the preservation of our tiny worlds, instead giving ourselves to the far greater cause of His Kingdom.

“Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” 

Hebrews 13:13-14

I had my first experience leading a small group of fifth grade guys last night. I’ve led lots of small groups in the past in a variety of ages, but fifth grade is definitely one of the youngest I’ve had to deal with so far, and definitely the most hilarious yet frustrating. As a teacher, it was hard for me to try to get through the material that we had to cover in our small group, especially when I mentioned Abraham and the three guys I was with immediately started talking about Abraham Lincoln. But thankfully I’ve been reading a few books at the same time as I’ve been here on this internship that I could see coming into play as I watched these fifth grade boys make fart noises and talk about aliens when our lesson dealt with the call of Abraham.

I’ve been reading Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy, and in the last chapter I read he tackled the image Jesus evokes in “throwing pearls before swine.” Rather than interpreting this in light of people being swine who are not worthy of the pearls of the Gospel, Willard says the point is that we are giving people truths that are of no use to them at this point. Just as pearls serve no purpose for pigs, so the truths of the Gospel message and the kingdom are not understood by certain people at certain times, and thus to communicate those truths to them when they don’t understand is to cause confusion and possibly anger.

So as I looked at these fifth graders, sitting upside down on the couch as another student read Genesis, I found myself questioning what my role as pastor and small group leader is to these boys. Do I force them to sit up, stay quiet, and take in biblical truth when they have no comprehension of what we’re talking about? Or maybe they do and they’re just misbehaving and I need to “lay down the law” a bit with the group? But in doing so, do I risk coming across as bitter, legalistic, and lacking in the grace and love that so characterized Jesus?

To this, I found myself recalling what I’d read previously this week in Contemplative Youth Ministry, as well as several conversations I’ve had this past week. Ultimately, their spiritual formation and their relationship with Christ is not my responsibility, in that I am not the one that causes spiritual growth to occur. Only God through the Holy Spirit causes spiritual growth. My role then is not to compel listening nor to force attentiveness, but rather to love these students and to be present in their hilarity and joy while still extending the truth of what we are teaching in how I communicate and interact with them. As fifth graders, they certainly can comprehend the story of Abraham and God calling him to leave Ur. But do they get the point of it, how it applies to their lives? I’m not sure they can. So my role then is to communicate the story to them, to present to their imaginations and hearts the reality of a God who would call Abraham friend, and to show them truth and grace in how I interact with them every week.

Seeing immediate life change as a result of a 30 minute small group time every week is not going to happen most of the time. But these students are just entering student ministries, and if they stick around, they have eight more years in student ministries here, during which their identities and spiritual lives will be formed. It takes much more patience than I think most people are willing to invest, especially if I consider what it must feel like as a youth volunteer to watch your fifth grade small group stare at you with glazed over eyes or, even worse, to be more interested in farting than in the truth of Scripture. I must be present and patient with my students, looking for long term spiritual formation rather than immedate spiritual highs. And I must instill this same patience in my youth volunteers, helping them to see the long presence that is required as we bear witness to the reality of God in the spiritual formation of our students.