Youth Pastors didn’t exist prior to 1970

Think about that.  In less than 50 years, this position has become an essential piece of almost every church staffing structure. So much so that it is often the second or third hire that a church makes.  In my area, it is very common to see small churches with only a Lead Pastor and a Youth Pastor.

And on paper, this looks pretty good.  Churches need to prioritize the young for many reasons. In practice, though, I’m beginning to wonder if this is always the best way to do it.

Now, I have nothing against youth pastors (I was one of them for 8 years).  The introduction of paid staff to focus on adolescents was an innovation that introduced a lot of teens to Jesus and significantly elevated the importance of investing in the younger generation within the Church.

What Results Were We Getting?

However, as I gained more experience as a youth pastor and began to hear the stories of others in my role, I couldn’t help but notice a number of discouraging trends that had emerged:

•  Youth Ministry had become its own world. Both the program and the pastor often functioned in complete isolation from other ministries in the church. Silos can form around any ministry in a church but the one around youth ministry tended to have especially thick walls. Pastors had their own mission statements, their own system for recruiting and developing volunteer leaders, their own rooms, their own buildings, their own financial systems, and just generally their own way of doing most things.  This has created competition and disconnection between ministries and church staff.
• The significance of the volunteer leader was often diminished as the youth pastor was elevated.  He, or sometimes she, were the ones who were trained and paid to connect with teens, so often the heavy lifting of dealing with doubt and questions or other tough situations (i.e. parents) were left to them. The bar for volunteers was set low in an attempt to make sure there were enough of them, which there never were. As a result, these leaders who signed up to do something significant in the life of a teen were often functioning as little more than glorified chaperones at the fun events that we had planned.
• Youth pastors didn’t stick around long. After only 5 years, I was already considered one of the “senior members” of our city’s Youth Ministry Network. Many youth workers would move on after only 2-3 short years.  Coupled with the fact that these youth pastors were often the primary relationship that teens had in the church, resignations (or firings) could be devastating.
• Parents were nowhere to be found.  If they weren’t left out of the picture entirely, they were usually seen as additional volunteer support, financial donors, or simply people needing us to teach them about their teenagers. They were very rarely spoken of as a group to learn from and partner with. The most important influence in the life of a child was relegated to the sidelines while the “professionals” took over (until they abruptly dropped out of the picture after High School graduation, that is).
• The success rate didn’t seem to be very high.  Teens weren’t connecting with the larger church and weren’t sticking around after graduation. Despite intentionally targeting this teenage demographic, 50-70% of them still walked away from the church, and from Jesus, when they “aged-out” of our programming.

A Systems Problem

I am, obviously, painting with a broad brush here. This is not every situation.  Your story or experience of being a youth pastor might be quite a bit healthier.  Fantastic! Unfortunately, though, these trends are quite common and have become fairly well recognized in the Church.  Now that I am no longer a youth pastor, but in a position to lead and oversee youth pastors, these trends have just become more apparent.

Before you start to think that I’m throwing youth pastors under the bus, let me clarify: I don’t believe these problems are their fault. At least, not primarily.  It was Edwards Deming that famously stated that 97% of problems we face in our organizations are not people problems, but systems problems.

The typical youth pastor is a well-intentioned individual who is passionate about investing in the next generation, but they are often stuck in a system that continues to give us the same results.

Case in point, as a youth pastor I was not a silo-building type of person by nature, yet I inadvertently ended up building one anyway.  Why? I was just trying to do my job. The combination of my job description, my place on the organizational chart, and the precedent set by youth pastors before me all led me to a place that was hyper-focused on teenagers, to the exclusion of everybody else.

So, if this is a systems problem, which I believe it is, then we can’t fix it simply by hiring better educated, more experienced, and more gifted youth pastors (they will simply do a better job of what is already being done).

What we need to do is identify the underlying assumptions and systems that drive youth ministry and then begin to rebuild them from the ground up.

Moving Forward

In 2011, I was hired as a Family Ministries Pastor in the Winkler MB Church and was finally given the opportunity to tackle this rebuilding process.

We addressed many of the issues and tried to change as many things at a programmatic level as we thought we could at the time (e.g. building bridges between parents and small group leaders, integrating teens into church ministry teams, eliminating Sunday morning teen ministries, etc.).

Many of the measures we took were effective to some extent, yet if we were honest, progress was slow.  After 5 years, the youth ministry silo still stood.  If we were going to move forward, a deeper and more thorough process of demolition would have to happen.  The opportunity came when both our Children’s Pastor and Youth Pastor resigned within the same year (on good terms, thankfully).

We now had a new level of freedom to ask the question, “If we were to re-write the job descriptions and rebuild the staffing structure from scratch, what would it look like?”

After a great deal of research and learning from other church leaders, it seemed as though the way forward would be guided by a few basic principles:

• Alignment. There needs to be one connected strategy for investing in the younger generation, right from birth all the way through to young adulthood. Each age group can no longer craft their own strategies but will need to fit into the overall whole.  Every member of the team needs to feel a sense of ownership over the big picture and be guided by the same values.
• Collaboration. This word sounds good and everyone seems to agree that it’s valuable, but in reality, working together across ministry functions can be difficult and is often seen as an extra bonus (I.e. If you get all your regular work done, then you can tackle your collaborative project). We need a structure where collaboration is baked in, where it is no longer optional but essential for doing your job.
• Integration. Despite all our energy on teen-focused programming, studies show that the highest correlating factors for teens staying connected to Jesus past graduation include their involvement in “all-church” worship services and the number of meaningful relationships they had with the people of the church. In other words, teens need to be integrated into the church family long before graduation.  It was this rationale that caused author April Diaz to recommend we start hiring “Student Integration Pastors” rather than Youth Pastors in her book, Redefining the Role of the Youth Worker.
• Parent-focus. Thanks in part to the good people over at Orange, the Church is rediscovering the central part that parents play in the life of their kids.  Not only do parents have the Biblical role of spiritual leader but, practically speaking, they just have far more opportunity for influence than the Church will ever have.  We might have 40 hours/year with a child or teen in our programming, but a parent can have 3000 hours with their kids in that same year.
• Volunteer-ownership. If integration is key, then the most important relationships in the church for a teen are with the actual people of the church, not with the paid staff of the church. The role of the staff person overseeing youth ministry is not primarily to invest in teens directly but to mobilize the church to invest in teens.

No More Youth Pastors

So, with our finger on the trigger, ready to demolish some silos and move into a future of greater collaboration and partnership with families, we began the messy adventure of creating a new structure for a new team.

You can discover what we came up with by checking out Part Two in this series where I’ll give you all the details, job descriptions, and Org charts of where we are now as we enter year two of our new team structure.

What’s Your Take?

I’d love to hear your observations on what you’ve noticed about youth ministry and the staffing structures in the churches in your context.  If you could make a change and rebuild something from scratch, what would you come up with?  What values would guide you?

Leave a comment and enter the conversation!  I am far from having all the answers and would love to learn from you.

Thanks,

-Dan