Monthly youth leaders column

My knowledge and expertise at golf is strictly limited. I play the same hole very differently each time I take to the fairways — you can do that with par 5s (they’re the long ones with the bunkers at all the wrong places) but when you play the par 3s (they’re the short ones) there’s only one way to do it. The first shot must hit the green then you have to get the wretched ball in the hole with two putts. It’s sometimes called target golf but your target on a par 3 is clear — hit the green in one.

It is very possible to do our youth ministry like a par 5. We wander all over the place and from week to week you’re never quite sure what you’re going to do. You just turn up, run a meeting or a drop-in and go home again. Youth ministry done this way can very soon become stale because you are not setting yourself clear targets each time you go along. You’re such a relational being that you just hang out and hope something happens and another meeting just comes and goes.

I’m not heavily into management speak but I know that having clear aims when you go to a meeting with young people is something we youth leaders aren’t too good at.

But if we are to ‘be shepherds of God’s flock’ (1 Peter 5.2) we are clearly meant to ‘watch over them’. It is all too easy to have superficial conversations like ‘Hi, how you doing’ and we’re often too easily satisfied with ‘Great’ as a response. Maybe there’s a slightly more structured way of hitting God’s targets.

Pray

Pray before you go out of your front door. Ask God to prepare you for any conversation you may have and ask that those conversations will have depth and help them with their discipleship. Ask that the fun times will be great fun and engage the young people, but pray that real work will get done in the session. In my experience many students want to talk about the things that really matter to them. To prolong the golfing analogy ask God to help you find the targets he really wants you to engage with — not to knobble them but to help them grow in their faith. I am still amazed how often God directs me to someone who needs to have a conversation.

Meet

Meet with fewer people in the course of the evening. Of course we have to lead a meeting and talk to the whole group but when you get to the informal bit don’t just flit around the room saying ‘Hi’, ‘great’ and ‘cool’ in every direction. We need to be sociable, but maybe we should be looking to engage with a smaller number of people.

Remember

Remember their stories. Young people tell you many things and I wonder how often we go back to them and ask them how their beloved Granny is or how they did in their Maths exam. You may find it helpful when you get home from your group meetings just to note down some reminders (or prompts) so you can both pray for them and ask them about it the following week.

Think

Think about who you need to speak to before you go to the meeting. You may need to ask a leader about a pressure point in their work/life balance and you have real concerns about how a young person is developing in their discipleship. These are issues for your group and you may find it more profitable to talk to three people in depth than 30 at a superficial level. You can always say ‘hi’ to a few people as you move between in-depth conversations.

Encourage

Encourage the rest of your team to mix up their conversations between short length ‘Hi’s and in-depth chats. If you have small groups get every small group leader to be aware of who’s missing that week and text them and say you’ve missed them. Every week, a young person is missing increases the difficulty of them returning. Be aware of missing persons not because you’re running a police state but because you are caring for the flock.

Motivate

Motivate your team and young people. It’s impossible to make every weekly meeting deeply significant, but try to create continuity between meetings. Make sure young people and leaders all know why the group is meeting and the theme to be leaned about. Link this week’s session to last week’s and so on. Make them aware of what is being studied for this term. Remind them how important it is not to give up the ‘habit of meeting together’ (Hebrews 10.25) and if there is something important to be launched (e.g. a summer house party) make sure you tell them for the previous three weeks that launch day is coming up. Young people will come if they even wonder if they might miss something — use their natural curiosity.

There are many more ways of creating some clear targets for each week’s meeting, but it needs to be both planned and communicated to the rest of your team. If you want your leadership team to be ready to do good ministry each week there has to be some sense of purpose. As the old wayside pulpit said — if you aim at nothing, you’ll probably hit it. Happens to me on most golf days.