Youth leading worship is great. Our youth-led services were yesterday, and, as happens every year, jr. high and sr. high students both provided a stirring blend of insight and levity to the worshiping congregation. My colleague did a bang up job organizing all the moving parts and making sure that every student knew what they were supposed to do and when. I look forward to this experience every year, and it did not disappoint.

I’m always thinking of ways to enrich it though.

I wonder how youth-led worship would go if 1) it was more than one Sunday per year and 2) if leaders participated in extra reflection and preparation ahead of time. What if we had something like a youth worship leader guild?

I’m not embarrassed by the nerdiness of that.

There are two things I can think of right away that would make such a thing less good than how we organize youth-led worship now, which is that the Sunday morning youth groups work on it for a week or two. First, some students might not know they want to work on worship leadership but might actually be gifted for it and enjoy it, even if they wouldn’t “sign up” for some dedicated “worship club.” Second, do youth not already have enough things to opt into?

Given the choice between fitting youth-led worship preparation into an existing youth activity and creating a new vehicle just for those who would choose it, what do you do?

Go to minute 47 of this week’s “Culture Gabfest” by Slate to hear the most entertaining discussion of Bullet Journaling you will hear. Ever. Be warned, the hosts swear a bit about it, as hard as that is to imagine.

Anyway, minute 47.

https://megaphone.link/PPY9054525813

The Managing Editor of Slate’s podcasts, June Thomas, wrote a defense of the system last week which featured this helpful summary: “It’s Getting Things Done for people who like old fashioned pens and paper.”

Getting Things Done. I did that too. I also did dozens of digital organizational tools that wore me out, which is a bad, bad sign for a tool that is meant to take away stress and enhance effectiveness.

Steve Metcalf can guffaw all he wants, Bullet Journaling has helped me for longer than anything else I’ve tried to keep track of projects and tasks and to feel good about it. I have half a dozen completed Bullet Journals on my shelf. When I start to feel buried, I look at them. They say, “This too shall pass.”

 

 

In explaining Confirmation to parents and students, I have said dozens of times that when it happens doesn’t really matter. Some churches do it in 8th grade, others 9th. John Westerhoff, the influential Christian educator, thought it should be saved for college. I’ve said over and over again that what matters more than when.

There is no way that’s true though.

Take Westerhoff’s suggestion off the table (I don’t know a single person who experienced anything like Confirmation as a college student) and focus just on the 8th vs 9th grade question. There is a world of difference between the experience of an 8th grader and a 9th grader in most contexts in North America. Not only has the 9th grader experienced an additional year of emotional and physical development, but her life as a high school freshman is ordered in fundamentally different ways that it was when she was still in junior high. She is in a new school, often with new peers, trying new activities. She is beginning things.

What Confirmation is, then, to a 9th grader, is substantively different than what it is for an 8th grader. It’s not better or worse, but it most certainly is different.

Many youth ministers I know have complained about 8th grade Confirmation as a kind of graduation from church. Frankly, I don’t see how you can avoid that when you do Confirmation in the 8th grade. So much of the final year of middle school seems tied up in endings. The 8th grade graduation is a thing I never experienced, but it seems pretty common now. For church kids, it’s part of the same season as Confirmation. I don’t know how you avoid it getting subsumed under that same rubric.

The when shapes the what in Confirmation, even if the difference is only one year.

Youth Sunday can be a very meaningful experience of youth ministry at the congregational level. Young people, many raised in the church, finally get the chance to address the body–from the pulpit. The insight that comes tumbling out can be staggering.

Of course, it can also be awkward. I once had a student introduce the routine period of silent confession by saying, “And now let the awkward silence begin.” Another student invented an energizer to the song “Happy” for the congregation to perform as the Call To Worship.

I spent yesterday afternoon on the phone with some of the Youth Sunday preachers. Their text is the transfiguration story from Mark, not the easiest story to say something about. I asked them all the same questions, and this blog post is to suggest a worksheet of those questions for Youth Sunday preachers to work through their text.

• How did you feel reading the text? Confused? Excited?
• What did the text make you wonder about?
• [For a narrative] Whose perspective do you take in the text? Is there someone you relate to in the story?
• How does this text relate to the one that comes right before it and the one that comes right after it?
• Summarize what the text is about in one sentence.

I think that would be a useful start for Youth Sunday preachers. What else would you add?

It is normal for 6th grade boys to utterly disrupt your discussion of Noah and The Ark.

It is normal in the year 2017 for worship participation at your Presbyterian or Lutheran, or even free evangelical, church to be declining.

It is normal for a nine year old to be scared at night an unable to sleep in his own bed.

Effective problem solving might require granting that the issues that vex us are not novel and without historical precedent. They’re normal. Developmentally, culturally, sociologically normal.

Yet allowing that a problem is normal does not permit us to leave it unsolved. “It’s normal” is not a strategy. It ought to compel us to connect with other people working on the same problem, and there are several, because it is so normal.

Normal means we’re not alone.

It keeps coming up in conversations I’m having about church initiatives: somebody needs to be in charge. Without leadership from someone who cares, no project can succeed.

I heard about a young mothers group that met in homes and was led by a motivated volunteer who didn’t ask but just took charge of things like scheduling. It was great. But it stopped working when it tried to meet at the church and become part of the organizational decision-making structure.

I’ve seen adult Sunday School classes whither after a committed leader quits or moves away. In her absence, nobody feels qualified to lead, so no one does, and everyone is the worse for it.

It’s not just church. Seth Godin developed and gave away free curriculum for self-directed groups of leaders to use for their own development. It didn’t work. Nobody felt they had permission to lead them, so they were ineffective.

It’s not just the church, this problem, but it has a particular shape in the church. Because we deal in “spiritual” matters, and because the Bible, theology, and church history are things that titled church leaders tend to know a lot about, many people in congregations feel like that knowledge is what is required of those who would lead.

How do we normalize the behavior of taking permission to lead? How do we not only tolerate but encourage the habit of inviting people to join you in the thing you’re interested in, without waiting for direction from a person on the staff or on a committee?

 

There are four levels to youth ministry. One is the congregational level, where young people are integrated into the life of the grown up church in meaningful ways and where the grown up church comes to value youth’s contributions to congregational life. There are lots of ways to do this, some of which work great in one context and poorly in another. For example.

• Youth Officers. Done well, the habit of nominating and electing a youth, typically a high school student, to an adult leadership office in the church is a meaningful way of both sharing governance responsibility with the youngest of the church’s active members, forming them as leaders in concrete ways, but also of expanding teenagers’ pool of trusted adults, women and men who are not related to them and who do not expect things of them like teachers and coaches, but who know their names and express interest in their lives. Done poorly it makes a token of young people and asks them to sit through long meetings where they don’t know what’s going on.
• Mission Trip Fundraisers. These can be oppressive events that feature students pleading with strangers to buy overpriced baked goods. They can also be thoughtful invitations for the church to participate in youth mission work. They can involve students sharing their hopes and their fears about the upcoming trip.
• Adult Education Classes. One of my best experiences in youth ministry was an adult Sunday School class that I taught with two ninth graders. The class focused on a book about teenagers and digital media, and the ninth graders demonstrated and interpreted for the adults how they thought about and used digital media in their own lives. We recreated the SMS conversation they’d had about their Confirmation statements of faith. Last year I proposed an adult class on another book by the same author and nobody came.
• Youth in Worship. Youth need to experience and be seen in the community Lord’s Day worship service. They need to be invited into leadership as Scripture readers, leaders of prayers, and all the other things. Coaching them in this role is another opportunity to expand their pool of trusted adults.

How else do you integrate young people into grown up congregational life?

There are four levels to youth ministry. One of them is the leader level. This level involves inviting, equipping, supporting, and developing the women and men, staff, and volunteer, who are doing the youth ministry work (including yourself). Here is one  thing I’ve found help with that and two that don’t.

1. Cohorts. I’ve written here before about the Youth Ministry Coaching Program cohort I participated in. I had such a positive experience with it that I helped launch one. I have *nudged two colleagues to join coaching cohorts, and I’m getting ready to host one next fall. They are short enough (one year) yet rigorous enough (two days of work at a time) to allow for focused, measurable development work, and their emphasis on peer feedback is so, so valuable. Love the cohort.
2. Vague tools. Curriculum that lacks specificity and that leaves learning objectives up for interpretation will not be received by most volunteer leaders as liberating, but rather insufficiently specific to be useful. When we are developing materials for leaders to use with students, they should spell out their aims in concrete terms, and they should spell out their processes in detail: do this, then do this, next say this, and so on. Leaving it up to leaders doesn’t help.
3. Lunch. The “Y’all come” monthly lunch for youth leaders is nice (who doesn’t like lunch), but it doesn’t look like a great use of peoples’ time to get everyone who is working with any students of any age together at the same time without a clear learning or working agenda. It’s probably better to schedule lunches (or breakfasts) with the specific teams of leaders who are working on the same thing. The issues addressed will be limited to things that can be usefully worked on in the short term.

I love this level of youth ministry, and I want to get better at it. What is your favorite tool for developing leaders?

I banned cell phones from church youth trips. Then I allowed them. Then I banned them again. And again.

Now I think it’s time to lift the ban again and allow phones on trips. There is a lot of work to do to ensure phones are used constructively and in limited, consistent increments during trips, and the conversation about gossip most certainly needs to be had with a group prior to the trip. We can talk about those things later.

I have long recognized that parents, as much as students, have a very difficult time leaving kids’ phones at home for a week-long mission trip or even a weekend retreat. Honestly, I have perceived this as a kind of helicopter parenting that is overly dependent on constant contact with one’s teenager. That may be the case for some parents, but there is something else phones give to teenagers that parents rightly want them to have: agency.

Mobile phones give youth agency. They can reach a trusted adult in a crisis. That is how parents justify giving their kids phones.

Requiring phones be left at home strips students of this important agency in a meaningful way that is not remedied by constant text updates from trip leaders to parents or posts to a shared blog or Facebook page. If a student, particularly a young student, particularly a young female student, feels threatened or unsafe on a church trip in a way she can’t share with a leader, even restricted access to her phone grants her agency to help herself.

I don’t like to think that any student or any parent would feel threatened by me on a trip. Nor do I like to think that their interactions with any of the trip leaders, women and men whom we have submitted to criminal background checks, would cause concern. But I can’t fault the parent of a 6th grader, who just met me, from having that thought. I am an institutional authority figure in an age when stories of such figures’ abuse of their positions have proliferated. I sympathize with the thought.

Maybe meeting that thought by demanding phones be left at home is worse than meeting it by allowing them.