Author Archives: Josh

The student minister has a strange role in many churches.  Actually, they have several strange roles.  The student minister’s charge is to disciple students, but how this works leads to a complex set of responsibilities.  Many student ministers find themselves essentially running a mini-church.  They fulfill the role of worship leader or at least worship planner.  They fulfill the role of education minister as they direct the curriculum and discipleship aspect of the student ministry.  They have the task of communicator as they speak or preach to their students.  They fulfill the role of event planner as they schedule opportunities for their students.  If we’re honest, we also probably play the role of janitor more often than we wish as well.

Student ministry is a unique vocation.  It requires much but also offers so much to the minister.  We have the honor and privilege to disciple and speak into the malleable lives of teenagers and their parents.  There are times as a minister where I can hardly believe that this is actually a paid job.  There are times when other people wonder why it is a paid job, and I typically ignore those people.  While it is a great honor to work as a minister, it is also complicated and takes some serious contemplation of what it means to minister.

So many people get into ministry without really considering what doing ministry really is.  So many people see doing ministry as this summer camp type of experience where you are always close to God and you are changing lives simply by reading a Bible verse out loud.  This would also look like a person becoming a doctor because they want to help save lives.  Here is what the potential doctor and the potential minister are missing: they are focusing on the peaks of those vocations, not the normal experiences.  Doctors save lives, but they also put on bandaids, do a ton of paperwork, work long hours, and watch people die.  Ministers make disciples and help save souls, but they also do tons of planning, do a ton of paperwork, clean up messes, and have painful conversations with people making bad decisions who may never start making good decisions.

Does this mean that ministry is unrewarding?  Absolutely not!  It does mean that it will be infinitely frustrating if someone enters ministry thinking that their only role will be preaching to people for 30 minutes each week.  Now that would be an amazing full time job.  Few people, including aspiring ministers, understand what the day to day work of a minister includes.  Just last night a student asked me what my real job was.  I recently read a blog post that suggested that a student minister can really only expect to spend a third of his time in direct work with students.  The other third would be spent with meetings, empowering volunteers, and administration.  If you want unlimited time only doing face to face ministry, that is typically called volunteering.  Being a minister means being a ministry architect and a shepherd.  It means speaking into the lives of students and speaking into the lives of volunteers so that they might speak into the lives of students.  It means keeping the church going so that the student ministry can even exist.

One final note is that regardless of where you are, but especially if you are just about to enter ministry, you need to know that you do not have ministry figured out.  The people who have ministry figured out are typically the people who are destined to be out of the ministry in a year or two.  We are doing spiritual and eternal work.  Ministry is a journey, and you are blessed to have been put on the journey.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a youth pastor of a large church in our area that absolutely rocked my ministry perspective.  Due to a school schedule conflict, a small group of about 15 students that were a part of his student ministry could not attend their church’s large mission trip.  As a concession, this lead youth pastor agreed to take this small group on a later trip.  The youth pastor went on and on about how great it was to get to spend time with such a small number of students.  Ironically, 15 is a pretty good number of students for me when it comes to getting students to attend an event that lasts more than a day.  It really made me wonder if I was using the size of my group to our advantage.  What were we doing that embraced our size rather than in spite of our size?  Are we making the most of our ability to be flexible and spontaneous with certain events?  Are we using our smaller size to have big conversations?

The term leveraging has become a somewhat overused one in church leadership recently, but I feel that it particularly applies to this discussion.  Regardless of your church’s size, you must use that factor to your advantage.  When I look at the big programs in our area, I lament our lack of resources and critical mass for big events.  When I look at their numbers, I admit that I get antsy and wonder if I am making a difference.  Here’s what is crazy: sometimes when large church ministers look at smaller churches, they wonder the same thing.  They worry about students falling through the cracks and wish they could run a simpler ministry that does not require charter buses when they want to take a trip to Sonic.

One of the problems with leveraging your groups’s size is that the models of ministry that are advertised in books and articles are almost entirely based on very large churches.  If a student minister with 40 kids tries to do everything Saddleback or Willow Creek does, there will typically be problems with duplicating that model in the smaller context.  The resources that come out of larger churches are great, but the problem arises when we think that our church should look like that church or our program should look like that program.  It would be like Mayberry deciding to restructure using the plans of New York City.  It just won’t work, and it really shouldn’t.  When we focus on becoming more like a larger church’s ministry, we are denying all of the benefits of being a smaller group.

The same holds true for larger churches wishing that they could be smaller.  The trick is to embrace the size of your church and determine ways to make the group smaller.  Perhaps my friend saw the benefit of the smaller mission trip group and will consider doing multiple mission trips with smaller students.  Maybe rather than having the large group times as your key point of emphasis, larger churches constantly discuss the importance of small group discipleship.  I served as part of a large college ministry that found it difficult to disciple the mass of college students who came in the doors.  The answer was to create small groups that brought certain people together and created different discipleship opportunities.

In the end, our mission is not to have an awesome program.  Our mission is not to have the largest number of students in town.  Our mission is to make disciples.  A huge step in doing that is to stop worrying about how cool our program looks on a flow chart or how awesome our logo looks.  When we get down to simply looking for the unique ways that our church can lead students to know Jesus and become his disciple, we will find that God has given us everything we need to accomplish the task that he has called us to.

Sometimes ministry is all about theory and creativity.  We talk about dreams and visions we have for our ministries, but sometimes ministry is about paperwork and planning.  Depending on your role in ministry you may spend a significant time planning and doing office work or maybe you are mostly out of the office.  Either way, your job is probably full of a multitude of tasks that are often unrelated.

After experiencing the pain of trying to juggle all of my responsibilities by memory, I came to the point where I needed to have a better approach in order to keep stuff from getting dropped.  My answer was to come up with a work flow for my week.

I realized that most of my week followed a pattern.  Preparations for Wednesday night programs were being done Monday and Tuesday, Mondays were full of follow-up and check requests.  Thursdays were used to get Sunday programs worked out.  Noticing this flow, I constructed a super simple list of the things that I would work on each day of the week.  Each day I have a list of the major things that I need to accomplish.  This list gives me a great framework for building my day and helps me to focus on accomplishing the stuff that really needs to be accomplished.

One of the hard parts about working in ministry, which is also one of the great parts about working in ministry, is that you pretty much control your schedule and what you do.  Outside of certain weekly expectations, you basically have to be self-motivated and entrepreneurial.  It’s great not having someone stand over your shoulder telling you what to do, but if you are not a self-starter, it can be a recipe for laziness and mismanaged time.  That is where I have found my work flow to be extremely helpful.  There are days when I am worn out from activities the day before or from nights when my kids decided to wake up every hour, but having a set task list each day ensures that what needs to get done gets done.

One other benefit for doing things this way is that it forces you to be better prepared for your events and programs.  I now have no excuse to be planning Wednesday night activities on Wednesday afternoon, that was Monday and Tuesday’s job.

In case it helps, here are my essential projects for each day:
Monday: Hospital visits, Sunday follow-ups, check requests, website updates, Wednesday night planning.
Tuesday: Staff meeting and staff lunch, send out Sunday curriculum for our morning and evening programs, finish Wednesday night details
Wednesday: Work on upcoming events, lunch at schools, Facebook page update, lunch with other student ministers
Thursday: Finish Sunday details, missions team responsibilities, volunteer encouragement, Wednesday follow-ups, lunch at schools

Keep in mind that these are just the must-be-done-every-week things. And yes, Wednesday has two lunches.  Built onto this work flow are things like gearing up for events, random meetings, preparing for fill-in sermons, and all other kinds of random duties.  The key for me is that I have some level of accountability, even to myself, that the schedule is followed as closely as possible.  Hope this helps.

Do you know those sounds that absolutely drive you crazy like rubbing a towel on carpet or scratching a chalkboard?  To me, this question, “where is everybody,” is the equivalent of that.  I cannot stand it when a youth worker, paid or volunteer, acts as if they are disappointed in attendance.  Sure you were expecting a few more, but why should the people who came feel bad for coming?

Showing that you are disappointed in attendance at a program or event communicates these three things:

1. Sure it’s nice that you are here, but it would be better if there were other people here too. It’s not good enough for just you guys to have come.

2. Well, I guess we can still sort of have fun with this small crowd. We’ll just make it work if we can.

3. The effort I put into this lesson/program/event is now going to be wasted on a group this small.

One of the biggest problems that arises when youth workers say stuff like this is that we kill morale.  Students have come to have a great experience and now they find out that this experience was dependent upon other kids coming too.

The other big problem with this way of thinking is that we as youth workers miss a huge opportunity to demonstrate how excited we are that anyone shows up to our stuff.  Instead of being excited that we can now have more one on one interaction, we lament the fact that we will have to manufacture more energy for our activities to work.

I get that having a smaller crowd than expected can be discouraging and can force us to change plans.  Last year we had almost 40 students sign up for a weekend event, one that required more than three months of planning.  In the end only 18 students actually attended the event.  I of course declared that my last day in youth ministry forever in the whole universe.  Eventually I calmed down and realized that we now had an opportunity to really invest in a group of kids in a way that would not have been possible with 40.  Did it mean making a few changes to the schedule and events? Sure.  Did it mean that I was a failure or that my career was over? Nope.

Rather than focus on what is totally out of your control, i.e. attendance, it is much better to focus on leaving each event knowing that you made a real impact and that you helped a student have a better relationship with God.  I have found great solace in planning events where we can have an effective event even if five or six kids show up.  And when the numbers are small, I never want to act like it’s not good enough.