Evangelicals Now
<< September 2005 >>

Monthly youth leaders column

Priorities?

Most youth work has a fresh start about now. We work in rhythm with the school year and, if you have time for any forward planning, it’s been done in the run up to the September new start.

Your priorities

Perhaps it is simply maintenance — you are going to have to work extremely hard just to keep your ministry on the road. Your team are only just coping. You may have the energy for planned growth in your work and you may even have a gospel project ready to go.

Schools are going to hear the gospel in a way they’ve never done before. After the summer, there may be a need for further discipleship following on from commitments made in the summer. There may be a real hope that integration with what the adult church is doing can be done better and young people can feel that the church is their place.

All these are very worthwhile aims and I really hope you make progress in, at least, some of them. All of these plans demand effort and time and can even encounter opposition.

Support from the church?

I am increasingly finding that youth workers are often tired and unsupported and they very soon feel isolated and discouraged. After the ‘honeymoon’ period often experienced by new full-timers, the euphoria wanes and the invitations for lunch stop happening. Elders’ or leaders’ meetings, when confronted with a plan to give youth ministry a new structure appear bemused or even disinterested because they have far more important ‘adult’ business to transact.

If you appoint a full time worker, that is not the answer to all your problems and a guarantee that 50 young people will fill the back three rows in church next Sunday. Strategic plans need to be drawn up and the interest of the church leadership is vital. Is the youth worker able to get to the leadership and expect some response within six months?

Churches often fail to realise that the new worker, keen to make an impression, needs quick responses to their ideas — it’s what they do every day and they are keen to make progress.

Someone has said that the appointment of a new full time worker is like two cog wheels going at very different speeds coming up against one another. It’s like the sound you get when you miss your clutch.

Is there anybody in the leadership set-up keeping a watching/caring brief on the full time worker? Does anybody ask such personal questions as: ‘How are you really doing?’ Many full time workers feel distant from the central planning process of the church (if there is one) and they need to be both consulted and listened to. It is easy to dismiss mentors or support groups as fads of the current age but that is what most youth workers both want and expect, and are disappointed when it fails to materialise.

What about the workers?

How do we support those faithful people who have regular ‘ordinary’ jobs (which are just as ‘sacred’ as any ministry job) and then turn out in the evening or on Sunday to do youth ministry? Is it just assumed they will keep going for another year? We may acknowledge them in one service at the start of the year, but then, it is assumed, they will just turn up. Could you offer some training? Root 66 on The Oakes’ website (http://www.oakes.org.uk) and The Good Book Company (http://www.thegoodbook.co.uk) offer training for both full-timers and volunteers.

Where will new ideas come from? Will teaching skills just develop naturally? Most of us needed some kind of coaching. Paul certainly thought Timothy needed it. It’s no use bemoaning that our leaders are biblically illiterate if no one’s ever taught them how to teach.

Need for prayer

Please don’t go into yet another term just to grind away without support, training and prayer. Have we forgotten the power of prayer in this touchy/feely century? — get a group of non-practitioners to pray with or for your whole youth and children staff.

And why not round off the year with a celebration meal — all staff and their wives/husbands served by the church leadership. Could there be a better model for true servant leadership than that — or are we all still too bound to hierarchies?

Let’s pray that it really will be a fresh start for our committed band of workers — we need them for the long haul, so we need to look after them, not take them for granted.

Dave Fenton