Learning to Love Junior High

Five-second montage of the past month: graduated college, got a job in youth ministry, started that job, and too busy to post anything substantive here.

I’ve taken a position as Discipleship Director for 5th-8th grade at Riverwood Community Chapel in Kent, Ohio. I was familiar with the church before, having grown up in the area, attending Kent State, and having a few personal connections there, so when the position opened up and was offered to me, there wasn’t too much question about it. I love the focus and desire of the staff and community among three simple goals:

Worship God. Love People. Reflect Christ.

I’ll be honest, when I was working through my degree and searching for jobs, exclusively junior high ministry was not really on my radar. Junior high ministry tends to be the tag-along to any youth ministry job, but in the case of Riverwood, I’m working exclusively with the junior high age group, and a little younger. It’s come with a few unexpected challenges.

I’m only just realizing that, at least in my own mindset, I’d always treated junior high as secondary to senior high ministry, as if junior high ministry is about babysitting until they’re old enough to make big decisions and actually do something with their faith. I guess in that respect, I’m guilty of the very thing we tend to decry the church for when it comes to youth ministry as a whole.

Unconscious assumptions like these I have toward junior high youth ministry are surfacing as I’m getting acclimated to the new position, and I’m grateful for it. The exclusively-junior high focus of the position gives me the chance to work out the skills and habits that I’ve been most lacking in: connecting with parents, empowering volunteers, and simplifying my teaching. Not to mention the fact that junior highers will appreciate my at-times ridiculous side with a bit more humor than senior highers have in the past.

I’m just about finished reading through Wayne Rice’s Junior High Ministry. At the suggestion of a mentor, I read it as a quick crash-course in junior high world to prep for the position. In it, he suggests that anyone working in junior high do their very best to recall in detail who they were in junior high. Thankfully, my junior high years came before the explosion of social media to document everything in photos and comments. But I’m working out a few posts about what I can recall from junior high, maybe with a few old pictures. Stay tuned!

Question: What do you remember most vividly about your experience in junior high?

Theology in a Wikipedia World: Part II

The Challenge of a Collaborative Generation

I’m currently working through David Kinnaman’s book You Lost Me, in which he presents his research on why the younger generation of Christians disappear from the church. He sees three key challenges that are contributing to the loss of this generation: unprecedented access to information, alienation from meaningful relationships, and suspicion of traditional authority structures. His research on the impact of unprecedented access to information translates into this observation made by Kinnaman:

“Young people expect to participate as well as consume.”

If I think back hard enough, I can remember the first time I voted in an American Idol competition. For students younger than me, they can’t remember a time when they didn’t have some participation in the media they consume. Now, advertising companies tap into the appeal of this participatory model with competitions for making their next ad, giveaways for retweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook. The ultimate model of this collaborative, participatory way of thinking is Wikipedia itself, the majority of which was written and compiled by Millennials, Kinnaman notes, challenging us with the collaborative reality of this generation:

“Who would have guessed that one of the largest, most influential and well-funded technology companies (Microsoft) would mothball Encarta, losing the race with Wikipedia to create a comprehensive online encyclopedia to thousands of unpaid volunteer contributors, many of whom are Mosaics? It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but think about which model the church most resembles – the established monolith or the grassroots network – and what that mean for its relevance in the lives of a collaborative, can-do generation that feels alienated from hierarchical institutions.” 

How much of the meaningful stuff of our youth ministry is participatory? Between games and singing and a lesson and maybe small groups, the traditional paradigm has students playing the passive observers to us as we do ministry. Sure, we may have students leading the music and maybe have a drama team or a student speak the occasional week, but as a whole, are we giving space and permission to our students to participate in truly meaningful, ministry-shaping ways every week? Or do I just stand up there every week, say what I want to say, and hope that something gets through their iPod headphones into their brains, and then, if I’m lucky, their hearts?

Students expect and want to participate in meaningful ways in our ministries. I know that might be hard to believe, considering that it’s a hard enough struggle to get them to put down Angry Birds in small group, but perhaps that’s not because they don’t want to participate, but because we haven’t given them permission to. In general, they are not used to being treated as co-creators, as individuals with worth and with worthwhile things to say. Talking heads are everywhere – the news, the classroom, the internet. Students don’t need another person talking to them about them. They need individuals who will care enough about them to listen and to seriously consider the things they say and the emotions they feel, and to give them power and permission to truly make a difference. It’s a daunting task, and one which doesn’t seem to have clear solutions, but perhaps the solution is in the process: ask your students how we can minister to them, give them the power and the permission to speak into our own ministries to them, to shape what we do and how we do it. That’s certainly an easy solution to write, but a hard reality to make happen. But it starts in the context of the relationships and conversations we have with our students.

Off the Shelf: Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry by Doug Fields

The first time I picked up Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry two years ago in my freshman level “Intro to Youth Ministry” class, my first thought was, “Who does this Doug guy think he is telling me how to do ministry, and why does he keep asking me to imagine we’re sitting in a restaurant together?

At the time, I was a brand new youth ministries major, coming off of two years as a camp counselor, convinced that I knew how to do youth ministry. After all, I was a few years out of my own experience as a student in ministry; I knew how to relate to students and what to do and not do. This Doug guy seemed a bit out of touch compared to me and my relevance to students.

In the two years since, I’ve thankfully learned a whole lot more about youth ministry. I’ve learned that Doug Fields knows what he’s talking about (turns out he has his own sub-section in the Wikipedia article on “Youth Ministry”), I’ve learned and experienced relational ministry and the difficulty of small groups, and I’ve become convinced that it’s far more than a high-tech hangout space that draws kids to Jesus.

Now, facing my impending graduation and in the midst of a search for an “entry-level” youth ministry job (which usually means “junior highers”), I decided to revisit Your First Two Years. Reading it this time, I felt like that teenager who is finally coming to the realization that his parents might have been right all along.

In Your First Two Years, Doug tackles the second-most pressing question facing me in my current state of life. The first one is, of course, “Will you hire me?” The second, and the focus of the book, is “Now that I’m hired, what the heck do I do now?”

In his great conversational and often witty way, Fields “sits you down” and shares from his wealth of experiences (and failures) in ministry, giving us amateurs an edge and a solid foundation to begin once we convince a church we won’t give their students fireworks or set animals loose in the youth room. It’s a broad sweep of what it takes to start well, one which no “green” youth pastor should go without. Doug’s 10 Youth Ministry Commitments in the first chapter should be tattooed across the eyelids of every youth pastor. The goal is longevity, according to Fields, and these ten commands alone are worth picking up the book. His discussion in the later half of the book on how to handle conflict are incredibly practical and obviously come from Doug’s honest experience. I have yet to come across a discussion on conflict management in youth ministry as helpful as what Fields provides in his book.

Relationships are the heart of youth ministry. More than any other endeavor in your first two years, Fields pushes the reader to get to know your students, your staff and your parents before doing anything else. This takes much more patience than we in youth ministry tend to be known for, but as Fields will remind you several times, youth ministry isn’t a sprint, and our work is never done.

Every youth pastor, wanna-be youth pastor, and youth leader should read this book. Fields has written it specifically for this audience, at times giving permission for volunteers to skip the boring sections so he can talk to paid youth workers about meetings and church staff relationships and the more technical, office-y side of ministry. Especially if you’re like me, facing the daunting task of stepping into a ministry green, you should read this book. Several times. And keep it on your desk. And think about that tattoo thing I mentioned earlier.

Theology in a Wikipedia World

Last year, I attended a benefit dinner for World Vision’s End Malaria campaign, put on by a student org on campus at Cedarville. The event was packed, probably at the offer of homemade soup and bread from several faculty and staff families. If you want to get a big turnout of college students, offer homemade food.

As the ladles were scraping the bottom of the crockpots in the back of the room, several members of the org stepped up to the microphone to share about the End Malaria campaign and to make an appeal for our awareness and support of this important issue. I happened to be sitting at a table with several friends of mine who are communication arts majors, which was quite a fascinating experience as the keynote speaker stood up and gave her presentation. A minute into her presentation, a large, highly detailed diagram of the path the malaria virus makes from a mosquito’s body into the bloodsteam and into the human system was projected across the screen, and we all squinted to see the details as she all too quickly walked us through the process. After that, we were audience to another highly detailed diagram of the scientific process by which pharmaceutical drugs are able to combat the spread of the malaria virus. It was all quite a dizzying and eye-straining experience, one which my com arts friends couldn’t wait to finish.

I came away from that experience with this one thought: we don’t need more information, we need meaning. We had all come to the benefit dinner because we wanted to make a difference, not because we wanted to know the exact anatomy of a mosquito, but because we saw suffering and wanted to take action. We didn’t need a diagram; any of us could have found those diagrams in a simple web search. We came because we needed a direction in which to point our passions and sacrifice.

We live in an age where we have more information than we know what to do with. Ten years ago, when I would be doing a research project, I’d have to go to the library, check out some books, read journal articles. Today, I can find all the information I need to make an informed decision in three clicks: Click google, type word, click Wikipedia.

What difference does this make to how we approach education, ministry, teaching? How are we to go about teaching students about the essence of the Christian life when they can Google the names of every theologian and theological position in the time it takes us to explain why its important?

What our students need from us is not lengthy discussions and explanations of theological systems, or Venn diagrams on the differences and similarities between Peter and Paul. Surrounded by a whirlwind of information and messages, our students need someone to come alongside them and provide meaning, context, and motivation to action. Our students will find the information on their own, probably on their phones while you’re making your opening announcements or your final plea to sign up for the upcoming missions trip. Students have all the information they need at their fingers. We can best serve them and point them to the life-change Jesus offers by teaching them how to think, where to move, how to sacrifice. Information is everywhere. Our students don’t need us to lecture to them. What they need is someone to help them process, someone to teach them how to think and how to ask penetrating questions that point to deeper meaning behind the latest statistic or argument or cultural movement.

How do you incorporate teaching theology into your ministry to students? What kind of theological questions are your students asking?

Off the Shelf: Reviewing Hurt 2.0 by Chap Clark

Hurt 2.0 was a challenging book for me as a young soon-to-be youth pastor, mostly because I find myself assuming that I have an edge on youth ministry over the “older guys” because I’m younger and can relate to students more because I’ve been there. Clark destroyed that thought, and I’m thankful for it.

“These kids are no different from when I was a kid.” This is the first and greatest misconception that hinders our understanding of what Clark refers to as “midadolescents”: (generally teenagers between the ages of 15 and 18). Adolescence is vastly different from what you or I experienced, and Clark’s central thesis revolves around one concept: abandonment. Midadolescents experience abandonment everyday from parents, teachers, coaches… everyone except their “cluster” of friends, with whom they form an unspoken bond of trust and a “world beneath.” Most striking to me was the observation that Clark makes about how often we as adults seeking to minister to students completely misunderstand them, primarily because we meet them on our terms. How often have I left an encounter with a student thinking we really made progress, I really understand them, when in reality I know them even less than before? Clark says this:

“The [students] I had known were in reality only conjured presentations. In effect, those relationships were based wholly on my social and worldview contexts rather than theirs or even a mutual context. I had failed to recognize that each young person exists in a social setting vastly different from my own. Therefore, as painful as this admission may be, I missed truly knowing most of them.”

Beneath all of these observations and interviews that Clark offers, there was one theme I continued to see in the adolescent experience: an intense desire for community. In each chapter of the midsection of the book, Clark discusses how teenagers have experienced abandonment in that area (family, sports, sex, etc) and demonstrates how they have made up for that sense of abandonment with their own set of community standards and rituals in the “world beneath.” Alcohol, sex, partying and intense gaming (to name a few) become expressions of a deep desire for a truly accepting community. Clark does well in pointing this out and calling those of us who work with students to offer acceptance and love to our students without expecting them to meet our standards beforehand.

I highly recommend this book for youth pastors to read, and then to ask ourselves the question that Clark presents to us: Are we willing to take the time to meet students where they are, mess and all, without any agenda or expectation? This is where youth ministry must begin with the new generation of teenagers.

In addition, his observations on how parents especially abandon their children provide a good groundwork to begin a discussion with the parents of your students. If you opt to read it, get Hurt 2.0 (not Hurt, the first edition). Clark makes some additions to the book in relation to how students interact in community over social networks, texting and gaming that would be valuable considering the proliferation of these technologies among our students.

Reflections from a Wanna-Be Youth Pastor: “Success”

Being a volunteer small group leader can have more ups and downs than being a stock market broker.

One week, I can lead an excellent Bible study where students speak up and open up about their lives. Another week, we spend the majority of the time laughing and joking and sharing about what went on in the past week. But another week will be spend in awkward silence as I ask questions that no one answers, and nothing good seems to come of it.

The idea of “success in student ministry,” while always a murky concept, has been discussed and debated in pretty much every book on youth ministry in recent history. But a hole that I’m beginning to see is that we as youth pastors can have an idea or a vision of success in our ministries that, while murky for us, is at least somewhat defined. We see the big picture more so than our volunteers. So while our concept of success may be evolving and fluid, we’ve at least sat down and thought about it, maybe even wrote some of it down.

“Success in student ministry” is a concept that I think gets lost to a lot of volunteers. Perhaps we as youth pastors are not sure enough of our own big picture idea of success to share it with our volunteers. Or maybe we’ve just assumed that the questions we hand our leaders each week and the discussion guides we give them and the yearly contract they sign is enough. But I can’t think that it’s a small minority of volunteers that leave our weekly events wondering what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Without a compelling vision of success on a large scale and for individuals interacting with students weekly, discouragement, confusion and misguided focus can creep into the spirits of your volunteers.

As youth pastors, we need to give our volunteers a picture of what success looks like for them in their specific role. Define success for our whole ministry, and then paint the picture for your volunteers in real and vivid terms. Again, in order to do this, we must shift our focus toward seeing ourselves there to set up others for success, rather than propping up a ministry on our own merits, like-ability, or creative ideas.

More attention has been drawn to this need in recent years, thanks in part to the work of Mark DeVries at YM Architects, who advocated in Sustainable Youth Ministry for results-oriented job descriptions for all volunteers as a way to convey this idea of success. While a results-oriented focus does give leeway to the volunteer to accomplish their role in his or her own unique way, it can be tricky when we stalk talking “results” with students’ spiritual formation. But a written and understood concept of where an individual fits in the ministry is a good step toward defining success on an individual basis.

Define success for your ministry and your volunteers, and then celebrate it when you see it. This is more behind-the-scenes work that I think many youth ministry upstarts don’t often see as part of their job description, but when this definition is in place, the intangibles of “student ministry” can be brought into greater focus. If your ministry is all about reaching the lost through evangelism, celebrate with your volunteers when they lead someone to Christ. If you’re all about social justice and service, tell stories to the entire ministry when a small group of guys goes out on a weekend and helps at a food bank. Tell stories.

“Success” can be a loaded term if we don’t approach it with the right focus. In the discussion surrounding what “successful student ministry” is, I wonder if we aren’t inadvertently really talking about the perpetuation of our ministries (and thus our jobs). Successful student ministry has to always point students to a life shaped by a pursuit of Jesus. That’s not as easy to measure as statistics, conversions and mission statements. Our volunteers are entering our ministries coming from a world that defines success in numbers and measurable results. Part of our role in leading and pastoring volunteers in their ministry to students is helping them break out of this mindset, giving them eyes to see the less tangible realities of presence, formation and the “long obedience in a single direction” that marks the spiritual development of all of us, but students in particular.

It could be that some of our volunteers are one more silent small group discussion away from reconsidering this whole thing. Let’s not send them out on a mission without giving them some idea of where they’re going.

How do you define “success” in your ministry? And how do you communicate and encourage this vision of success to your volunteers?

Reflections from a Wanna-Be Youth Pastor: Names

Names are hard.

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?