Write that down...

I ran into one of my former church ministry students the other day and she proceeded to tell me about one of the stories that I told to the junior high group some seven or so years ago. And to tell you the truth, until that moment I had totally forgotten about that particular story. But as soon as she recounted it I remembered it and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Not the story itself, but that she could remember it and that she was able to apply my experience to her life then and it stuck with her until now.

Then she asked me, as many a student does, if I made up my stories. And the great part about it is that I don’t! All my stories are my own. As much stuff as I steal from other youth peeps I know that the stories that I tell about my life and apply them to my messages, my stories are true and are my own. In fact, I count it as a blessing and a compliment that peeps do not believe the stuff that has happened to me.

And the sweeter part about my stories is that now a lot of them that I tell today now involve my time with the peeps in my ministry, both kids and leaders. And I know that as I continue to do ministry I will continue to have more stories, as I am always looking for the teaching moment in my life to apply to myself and pass on to others. So, when you are out and about, chillin and doing ministry and life, never forget stuff. Write it down – I do… all the time. I go home and remind myself on paper of the moments in my days that speak to me. You will be surprised how much you can bless and help others with the stuff in your life. So, tomorrow or today even, look at your day as a series of lessons that God may just have you give to others.

The things you do...

We all have them; you know what I mean. Those events that we hate to do but we do them because we know that the students love them. And since we live in the greatest state in the world, California, it means that the beach is always just a hop skip and a jump away. And one of the most favrit days for the world to go to the beach is the Fourth of July. I mean, we are talking straight up chaos. There is so much madness going on at any each that you are bound to have fun and prolly get in trouble at the same time.

If you have never been to the beach on Independence Day, you really must do it at least once. And for me, once was enough, but I somehow got suckered into going more than my quota-filling one time. There are so many peeps there that there is absolutely no parking, everyone sneaks in fireworks and booze and anything else you can think of. There is so much that can go wrong because all of the peeps are not paying attention for anything. However, the excitement of being there is off the hook. The kids always have a great time. They are away from the folks, they feel like they have freedom and it is just a downright good time. And that is why you have to be extra careful.

We would leave early in the morning to get there and try to stake out a place on the beach. There were fireworks shows all over the place and you were bound to have a great seat no matter where you were on the beach. The fuzz is all over the place just itching to give out ticket for anything. When we get down there and take accountability and give out the rules, stuff always changes. There is always some unforeseen circumstance that we would have to deal with. Like one year when we were there and there was not a bathroom in a square mile because someone had blown up the one closest to us with M1000's. Yeah, way to be mature. It was hilarious, I must say. But stuff like that.

By the time the day was over I was ready to roll and get anywhere but there. And I would vow to myself as I hit the pillow that I would never do it again. But come the next weekend and all the talk about how much fun everyone had, how could I resist? How could I say no to fun and relationships? How could I say no to ministry? You are right, I couldn't – what at push-over. What is the event you despise the most in your ministry, the one that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck just thinking of all the prep and turmoil that it will put you through each time – yet, knowing that it is the best event that you put on, one that the kids love? My advice, keep doing it. Suck it up and just remember that you can always look back years later and say, “ahhh, the things I did for ministry opportunities...” Funniest part is, you will always have those events... good luck.

You gotta' ask...

I was out jogging the other day and rolling through some of the neighborhoods to give me some scenery. And when I run I do not like to stay on the sidewalks because it is harder on your bones; and this old man needs all the help he can get. So, I run on the street asphalt to give me a little help in enduring the madness. But as you can imagine, this puts me in a better position of getting run over by vehicles – a chance I am willing to take, I guess. So, yeah, I am on my way and all of the sudden I can hear this truck race up behind me pull up next to me. I was thinking, oh man, i'm about to get an earful fro this guy. And then I hear a jovial voice, and as I look to my left, it is the dad of one of my former students. I have not seen this guy or his son in years, since his kid had graduated high school.

He got out of his truck and we proceeded to chat for like forty-five minutes right there on the side of the road. We were laughing so hard about all the stuff that we used to do together in ministry. This dad was one of the guys who you never would have thought would ever help out in ministry. Not because he did not want to, but because he had and still has one of the busiest schedules I have ever heard of. But it just so happened that this guy helped us out with one of our all-niters that we had for the sophomore boys. We were down a driver and needed to get one fast or else it was really going to screw up our toilet-papering escapade. And this kid was like, “Hey, I know my dad is off for a couple of days... maybe he will drive.” We called, he rolled over, and the rest is history.

Although I had known this dad for a some years before because he and his family had been members of the church for a long time, I never thought to ever ask him to be a part of stuff because he did not look to me like the type of guy who would want to spend what little free time he had with a bunch of students. I was wrong. That nite he had the best time and all the boys thought he was the coolest dad in the world. He even helped in the festivities. At the end of the nite he told me that whenever I needed his help to call him. Those are the sweetest words that any youth pastor can ever hear. And so I took him up on his offer.

Over the next few years he was one of the stalwarts in our ministry. He was the dad that put in tons of time on and off campus with our group. He had a great time, always. And when the peeps were around him, they loved it! This guy was a diamond in the rough. I would have never known. I would have never have asked him. And I would have missed out on tons of ministry with a guy who is still a blessing to me. That is the stuff that we talked about on the side of the road the other day. He went on and on about how appreciative he was of me and our staff at church for putting time into his family. I was humbled.

For a guy like him to feel like our team gave to him and not the other way around was incredible. He was thankful to be a part of our activities and on the parental staff. I was shocked. And I know I should not have been, but I always am. I don't know what I would have done without this dad and the time, effort and love that he put into our ministry. God is good. I realized after that first time that he helped us drive for the guys nite out that I needed only to ask more. I needed to be proactive with the parents in our ministry. And as I expected, there were many others who were just waiting to be asked.

Some know it and some do not. The peeps who will spend time in your ministry volunteering are waiting for you a lot of the time. You are the leader and they know that you have a plan, or that you should. Involve as many in the proces as possible. There ware some superstar peeps who are just waiting for an invitation. When is your next event? Who are the peeps you have been meaning to call to spend time in your ministry? Give them a call, you may be pleasantly surprised.

If you build it...

Field of Dreams, I love that movie. I still cry at the end. Kevin Costner builds the coolest home baseball field in his backyard in the middle of a corn field. When he does this all the old dead baseball greats come to play ball. It's every boy's dream. Don't you wish ministry worked this way; you know, you build a team of volunteers, you get a piece of the church building to use and then all of the sudden, tons of kids come from out of nowhere and give you this dope huge ministry??? I know, that would be awesome!

We have to bring ministry out to the students in our community. They want direction. They are a spiritual generation. But they aren't gonna come to your group just 'cause you think that you have the best one around... and maybe it is the best group. I don't care if you have great music, games, groups, food or speaking; if you do not go to them then you are going to miss a lot of opportunity. They want to know what it is that you think is so important. They hear from their friends at school all the time about how fun youth group is and that they should come check it out. But they will not if you do not first reach out to them. Some will come, a majority will wait.

A couple of items to consider. First you need to know what you believe. Are you the evangelism person or do you prefer a smaller group? Peter had it right when he said that you need to always be ready to let peeps know why you believe. And even further than that you have to do it in a way that is not going to drive them away from wanted to be sensitive to the calling of God. Now, whether this is easy or difficult to you it must be done. When you know what your passions and goals are then you will be able to take the Gospel to the community and peeps will want to be a part of your group.

Do you go to extracurricular activities that your students are involved in? Do you go to school activities, eat lunch with them at school, dinner with their families, visit other church groups, go to seminars and conferences, etc. I hope you do. Have a plan. If you use your time wisely then you will be able to calendar these times in. they are important. Model the ministry you would like to see your staff and students do. Value your ministry and take pride in your time and work, and your ministry and its success will follow.

Wasting time...

I talk a lot about running your ministry on all cylinders at all times. I get a lot of questions and concerns that I expect too much from others and myself, ministry and people in general. And they are right... I do expect a lot. But ministry is not about just working for no reason, spending your wheels, doing activities just for the sake of doing something. Everything is intentional. I remember one of my boys asked me one time what it meant to be a youth pastor. This kid was a sophomore at the time and one who I was mentoring. We would meet about once a week and talk over coffee and chill, go over church stuff, family issues, theological questions and whatever else. The funny part about it was that I had and asked the exact same question to Cobb when I was in high school. I answered the question in terms of time.

I told this kid that ministry was about relationships. Spending time with peeps was going to bring about the most fruit in your ministry. I wanted to add value to others every day of my life. This was a tall order. John C. Maxwell talks about this in all of his books. Leadership is all about adding value to at least one or more peeps each day. Henri Nouwen writes that ministry is “having meals at different houses, 'wasting time' with my own people, talking, playing, and praying with them, and allowing them to really know me.” To do this takes tons of discipline in your life. There is a difference between spending time with peeps and investing into their lives.

Cobb was and still is the master at this. When I was in high school I remember when he and his wife would invite a bunch of us at a time to have dinner at their house. Mind you, this is when our ministry was a lot smaller and we pretty much knew one another on one level or another. But we went though a season where Cobb would invite about ten students and leaders to his house. We didn't do any program or anything specific. I do know that the time was intentional though. It was one of the best seasons of ministry in our time together at HCC. A lot of good relationships and commitments to ministry came about from those moments of intentionality.

When I graduated and came on staff I knew the expectations that Cobb had. He did not ever worry about the work that I could do. He knew that I was a work horse and that I was down to put in the long hours. But what he was more concerned with was that I was “wasting time” the right way. Anyone can spend time with another person, but few could be disciplined enough to invest on a continuous basis. This is how I do ministry today. I am always aware of the relationships in which I invest. When I speak to youth pastors I encourage them to do ministry this way.

The peeps on your staff are too busy with life to have you devalue their time. They will put in long hours investing into students if you teach them to do so. But to keep them healthy, yourself and your ministry from hitting burnout, you need to be very careful. Ministry moves fast. It always has ans always will. It is the nature of the game. But moving fast does not mean spinning your wheels. Learn to waste time in the right way. Use it to invest into peeps. Your staff will see the way you treat them and value their time. When they feel loved and cared for they will put more time in, which will produce tons of fruit in the ministry you share together.

The Main Event: Follow-through

This is where you find out who your key players are. Your good leaders will follow up and follow through with the kids that came to your event; the kids that visited for the first or second time or the like. So what does this look like? You need to know the protocol for your ministry and it has to be ingrained into the heads of everyone on your volunteer and paid staff. If you have interns then they need to know what you expect of them. For the parents, they have assignments unique to them. The college kids, same things. If you have high schoolers helping out in your junior high ministry then they will also have something to do to make stuff work. It's gotta be in line and you have to know what you are going to do way before the event even starts.

Here are a couple of examples of stuff that our ministry has found to be helpful in our quest to get kids to want to come to church. Your leaders should be calling each of the students who are considered new to your ministry. And this needs to be done before the next activity that your church is putting on. If you have something on a Wednesday nite that is huge and off campus maybe, then your leaders have only a couple of days before the service on Saturday or Sunday or both. It depends on when your leaders come to help out. Do they lead groups on both weekend nites... just one of the two? Remember, the new kids want to come to church and see familiar faces. This includes the other students already in your ministry, preferably their friends, other leaders of all ages, etc.

you have some kind of list that all the kids signed up on when they came to the event and this is the basis of your master plan. Once you know which new kids were in particular groups, you need to distribute that list to each of the leaders so they do not forget about the new kids. Whether your leaders have two or twenty students in their groups, they will forget. Trust me, in their busy lives they do not always think about your ministry. I know, I know... crazy! But that is why you are the leader, that is why you are the youth pastor. It is your job to make their jobs easier. The more you do for your leaders the more responsibility and ownership they will get in the end because they will not be able to let anyone slip through the cracks. In fact, you will be the one to forget and one day a leader will come and ask you if you still have a certain student in the database and you will be like “oh yeah... I forgot about that kid.” but the group leaders will not.

If you want to make it even easier for the leaders, you can make some pre-stamped and addressed postcards with the information of the new kids ready for them by the end of the big event. Before the leaders go home, they fill out that postcard and give it back to you. Then you are the one to send it out for the leader and by the time that the leader forgets about it, you will have called each of your leaders to remind them to call the new kids from the event before the next activity. And when they call the new kid, he or she will have already have gotten the postcard and the leader is a hero! I know, too easy. But this will do wonders for your ministry. The better you make your leaders look and set them up for success the more they will want to put in for the ministry. It will not be a burden for them because they will know you are on their side. These are the simple decisions that will make or break your ministry. Do it right more than you do it wrong and you will see the fruit.

Hit the nail on the head... sometimes

I heard one of my teachers say that if all you have is hammer then everything looks to you like a nail. As pastors we need to have a tool box of ideas. Each situation must be treated differently according to its uniqueness. However, if we have not learned how to use the different tools of a youth pastor then we will not be very effective. For instance, when a student or staff member comes to you to talk about a problem or crisis there a good and not so good ways to address the situation. You do not have to have all the answers all of the time. They should doing most of the talking and you should be doing most of the listening.

We all know that you and I do not have all the answers, so why do we feel like we have to when someone comes to talk with us? Most likely its because we have a really cool masters degree that makes us extra special and smart. And we like to cut peeps off mid-sentence to give them all of our wisdom and enlightenment. Here's some advice... don't. The last thing someone wants to hear is, “Hmmm, very interesting. You know, the Bible says blah blah blah.”

yes, I know that you are prolly right and yes, it is important to get the JC perspective. However, when someone comes pouring out their heart to you it would be ill advised to just give them a three-point sermon on how to fix their life and problems. John C. Maxwell himself says that he has to continually watch out for this kind of behavior from himself. So if a smart old guy like that is still dealing with it, I know that I am going to be dealing with it as well.

That is just one example of how to begin to set up your ministry tool bag – starting with a pair of listening ears and some duck tape for your mouth. What else can you use? Well, begin with your imagination and start to write stuff down. You will come up with some good stuff. Quips, anecdotes, stories, games and props, sermons, etc.

your peeps need to know that you are well rounded. They want to know that you can not only solve problems, but also be there for them. They need to see you grow and learn. You can never be done doing so. Your staff will see it. They may even contribute to your learning process and make you an indispensable piece to the ministry.

Bring yer A-game

There is not time in your ministry where you can let off. Yes, you do need to use your time wisely and get the proper amount of rest and down time. However, you cannot treat your job any differently than those who work for companies and other non-church organizations; your volunteers work hard too. In fact, they put 40+ hours in a week at their jobs and then give the church ministries a bunch of time on top of that. I remember my senior pastor would have us turn in time sheets to make sure we put in our hours each week. And then he expected us to put in an additional twenty or so hours on top of that because that is exactly what our volunteers did. I loved it.

Stellar athletes train overtime much of the time. They know that if they want to be the best and compete at a level with the best then they have to put in that time. Artists spend tons of time on the little details, often throwing away a piece of art and starting from scratch. Architects know that they must work hard and be precise so not to fail at keeping others safe. We have to do the same. If we are the ones who are working to save and nurture the souls of others, for eternity in the strength and will of the Lord, we too cannot take our jobs lightly.

Don't expect kids to come to your group if you are sloppy; don't expect others to give their time to the same kind of ministry. They know wussup. And I know that we all have hang-ups. I know that your church has insane rules that don't let you do stuff that you know could help your ministry. You know, like not letting the youth use the big sanctuary or fields, for fear that you ill mess them up. But we have to deal with it. I know that there are rules imposed upon your ministry that you think are dumb. So do I. But you need to work through that madness and do ministry anyway.

I remember when we had so many kids coming to our group that we either needed to move to a bigger place, which we did not have available, or we needed another nite to split the kids up, which also was not available. So I had to watch as we could not capacitate the amount of kids that were coming. The result is that we would lose kids because they were as frustrated as we were that we did not get the space needed. What did I do? I did my best to make the space that we needed. It did not always work the way that we wanted it to. But it is all we could do. But one thing we did not do was give up. You need to work through it. A bad attitude won't get you anything at all.

Cobb always made sure we were on our A-game. At the beginning of my time at the church in my early years we did stuff to move through the hard situations – before they happened. He knew what we were up against most of the time before it happened. And that was the key. If you can be ready for stuff then you can head it off. You have to be intuitive or have someone who is. Luckily, I had Cobb.

If you have a superior who you report to then I hope that person is keeping you accountable. If not, do it yourself. Get some discipline. Much of what I do with pastors now is help them be accountable, to themselves, their superiors and their volunteers. If you are on top of stuff then it will be seen by others in your ministry and transfer down to them. If not, well, you know what will happen.

Believing in students...

I would have to say that the single best reason that I spend time investing in students is that my youth pastor put time into me. I remember being the new kid at youth group and I was there solely because I knew there would be girls – and there were! It was awesome. However, as I spent time with the youth group and became more involved, the youth pastor spent time hanging out with me. And I thought that it was all just whatever whatever. You know, he did it because he had to. I would find out years later that there was a much different plan for him and the other leaders in the group.

That plan was to help me reach my potential. The cool thing is that we all have potential, and it is just a matter of attaining or missing it. My leaders and youth pastor were determined that I, and all of the other students in the group, were going to and the very least be given the chance to reach our potential in JC. As I came up through high school I was eventually feeling good about my relationship with Christ, as I had accepted him as my personal Lord and Savior mid-high school. And then I ended up on the leadership core team with a few other students. And when I say a few, I mean just that. We were the small youth group in town.

There were other churches in the area that were a lot bigger than ours and sometimes I wondered why they had more kids than we did. And it wasn’t about the numbers, but more about my curiosity of what they were doing different than we were. So, one day I asked my youth pastor, with whom I had become very close. He laughed and appreciated that I was so candid. And then we had one of those serious moments. I bet he would prolly not even remember saying this to me, because I could tell that the next words that came out of his mouth was more than just a sentence, but a vision! He said to me, “MO, you stick with me and we will change lives together.” Wow! That was it. That was all I needed to hear.

You see, I believed him because I knew that he believed in what he was saying and more than that I knew that he believed in me. And that is what I needed – someone to believe in me. He had up to that point spent countless hours investing time into my life through coming to my sports stuff, other extra-curricular activities at school, being there for me when I needed guidance, etc. And after that conversation he continued to do so. The funny thing is that our group over the next few years grew like mad. I graduated from high school and came onto staff under him. I continued to believe in his vision and message and still do to this day.

Now, a thousand miles away he still puts time into me on a weekly basis and more if I need. And believe me, I need it. Here is what I am getting at… I am dedicating my life to changing others and believing in them because guys like him believed in me. Who believes you? Whose vision are you grasping on to? Like John Maxwell says, we need to add value to others each and every day. And that is what we get the privilege to do as youth workers...