I think there are four levels to youth ministry. One is ministry with parents. Here are three things that help with that and one that doesn’t.

1. Clarity. I am learning the hard way that clear, consistent communication with parents makes most everything work better. So we publish an annual events calendar in August. I write a weekly e-newsletter with the upcoming weekend’s schedule and assorted announcements requiring action. I also write a monthly e-newsletter just to parents (hat tip to this Youth Cartel Course). I use our website to post static information with clear links to register and sign up, as well as, increasingly, explanatory descriptions of those things. Finally, as I wrote here, I’m going back to sending things home in the mail.
2. Trips. I’m big on youth ministry trips. One reason is the partnership they offer with parents, especially, in my experience, parents of young teens. We took 5th-8th graders to Detroit last summer, led by a team of five parents. Some of those parents were already involved in youth ministry activities, but most weren’t, so the trip provided really valuable time to get to know them as we drove long hours, worked side-by-side, and strategized each day. It is perhaps the most valuable parent ministry I’ve done here.
3. Coffee (or tea). One-on-one conversations at coffee shops or related public spaces are the lifeblood of effective ministry with parents. Some contexts make this more challenging than others, if people live over a wide geographic area and transportation is complicated. Also, most of my students’ parents work the same hours I do and aren’t necessarily looking for things to add to their evenings, so this requires some flexibility. But it’s worth it. There simply is no replacement when it comes to learning about the youth in your church, their families, and the things they’re both struggling with and thriving at, for an hour-long talk with a parent. Also, I find that these energize me more than almost anything else I do.
4. Meetings. I have a calendar of Sunday morning parent meetings that I’d hoped would generate meaningful connections among parents and help me grow my relationships with them, but they’re not really killing it for those things. I’m finding them mostly to be vehicles for sharing information. That’s fine (see #1), but I want them to be more. Perhaps one hour on Sunday morning isn’t enough. Maybe there aren’t enough of them. Whatever the reason, parent meetings were something I expected to be a big part of my ministry with parents but that aren’t really.

Have a nice weekend!

I think there are four levels to youth ministry. Each level requires a different way of working and different skills.  Here are two skills that help with the “youth” level and one that doesn’t.

1. Listening. This is the most critical skill for working with young people. Adolescence is a time when teenagers are told things by grown ups: what’s going to be on the test, when the application is due, what time to be home, and how many laps to run. Youth ministers have things to tell young people as well, like when youth group starts and where to find the book of Titus, but the more valuable work we do with students is listening to them. We don’t listen to collect data. We don’t listen to diagnose or treat. We listen to listen. Youth ministers listen to teenagers out of interest, because we are curious about who they are as people created in the image of God more than as players on a team we’re coaching. Learning to listen well, both in one-on-one interactions as well as in group processes, goes a long way toward excellent youth ministry.
2. Facilitating groups. Learning how to structure group gatherings and how to steer them toward productive outcomes is one of the most important things we can learn to do well in youth ministry. It’s important as a tool for welcome and hospitality above all else, in my view. Young people who are uncertain of themselves or who are uncomfortable in group settings or who are new to the group will benefit tremendously from a well-designed gathering that accounts for their contribution. Planning is only half the battle, though. Unexpected things occur, and the best youth workers know how to incorporate those things into their plan and how to ditch the plan and improvise in the moment.
3. “Relating” to youth. I’ve spent hours in my youth ministry career trying to demonstrate to teenagers that I get them, that I experienced the same kinds of things they’re presently experiencing, that my tastes in music are not that different from theirs, that I know how to use Snapchat (actually, I’ve never done that). I don’t do any of that anymore. I think young people are much better served by adults who own the distinction between themselves and teenagers than by ones who are trying to collapse it. Now, when I feel like I don’t relate to teenagers, I revert back to skill number one above.

There are at least four levels to youth ministry in a congregation.

1. The youth level. This is the most obvious and feels like the most urgent. The youth level is where all the interaction with students happens. In vans and Sunday School classrooms, in coffee shops and church basements, youth ministers talk with and listen to young people in ways that, we hope, mediate the acceptance, the call, and the love of God.
2. The parent level. Relationships with parents are indispensable to strong youth ministries. Parents are partners who have a far greater influence on the faith and discipleship of young people than do youth ministers. Processes for listening to parents are critical tools for youth ministers to learn and to strengthen their work with students.
3. The leader level. At this level, youth ministers tend to their own spiritual and professional development, but also do the work of inviting and nurturing leaders from the congregation to work with youth. Some of these leaders are parents, many are not. Congregations are full of talented women and men who have time and attention to share with students if only invited and given some simple tools.
4. The congregational level. Youth Sundays, fundraisers, and adult education classes are just a few expressions of the fourth level of youth ministry. Here is where leaders invite students into grown up roles–as worship leaders and teachers, officers and ushers. Here, too, is where youth ministry leaders interpret adolescence as a gift to the church and adolescents as its bearers.

Youth ministry isn’t one thing. It’s at least four things.

Curriculum is nothing more than a plan for how to spend time together. For youth ministry, it tells you what you’ll do with a group of 20 junior high youth on Sunday morning for a month or three high school students for a year. It could be scribbled on the back of a worship bulletin or photocopied from a published unit, but if you don’t have a curriculum you don’t have a plan, and youth ministry without a plan is very frustrating–for everyone involved.

I’ve been laboring under the assumption for awhile now that I should be designing my own curriculum. For the Sunday morning youth groups, for our retreats and mission trips, for lock-ins, I feel an obligation to be the one giving thought and structure to what happens, down to the last detail. Two things are challenging that assumption.

1. The stuff I’m coming up with isn’t working very well. At least some of it isn’t. I’m not leading it, but writing it for others to lead, and I’m sensing that it’s a different ballgame when you’re creating lessons that others–who aren’t you–are going to have to lead.
2. We’re using a printed curriculum for Our Whole Lives, and it’s terribly, terribly liberating. Because of the subject, I am relieved to defer to the thoughtful and experienced hands behind the writing and editing. I have never successfully taught this subject without a curriculum designed by someone else.

In the balance of all the youth ministry you’re doing, maybe you don’t need to come up with all the curriculum. Maybe you can buy one for Sunday morning groups and design your own for retreats. Or maybe you design the weekly youth group lessons but use someone else’s for a mission trip devotional.

Maybe doing curriculum well, on the whole, means not trying to do it all.

Somebody I’ve never met and who worships at a church I’ve never visited called me the other day to talk about their church’s youth ministry. He’s part of a team assessing their high school program, calling other churches to learn what they’re doing.

I don’t know if he got anything out of my description of what we’re doing, but I at least got something out of giving it. He asked very basic questions, about structure and purpose, that are easy to leave un-asked when you’re in the weekly weeds of banging out flyers and plans.

Even as you speak the rationale, for example, behind running three youth groups during the same hour every week, a voice in your head speaks up: Why are we doing it this way again? What assumptions are we making? Who does this not work for?

If you’re stuck, ask someone to interview you.

I was so proud of our digital communication plan. We put flyers and sign ups online, and then we created a weekly e-newsletter filled with links to those flyers and sign ups. We even started sending event-specific emails with compelling “register now” subject lines. We even put a job application on our website.

Everything digital. Nothing in the mail.

It’s working to tell most youth and parents in our orbit what is coming up and how to participate. But it isn’t telling them why they should.

Perfect example: the fall Confirmation retreat. Lots of students knew it was happening and when (they’d received emails galore), but many, many of them did not know what it was. Like, they didn’t know what a retreat was. So they planned to skip it.

We’re pivoting back to sending some things home in the mail. This event is on the website and has already been sent out as an email flyer, but I also wrote a letter about it and sent it home. I did the same thing for our Our Whole Lives retreat.

The resurrection of mail is about explaining why we’re inviting students to retreats and trips, not just what those things are and how to sign up.

Making things better from one time to the next is the best part of youth ministry, or of any work. In January of 2017 I led a ski retreat for the first time, with the help of a colleague and a great team of leaders. The colleague and I evaluated the experience afterward and identified several ways it could be made better, meaning more focused and aligned with our aims for ministry. One of those was to make it more prayerful.

So for last weekend’s reprise of the ski retreat, I made a prayer book for us to use. There is a unison prayer for before we left, meal graces, morning and evening prayer outlines for the main retreat day, and–my favorite–an order for the dedication of a Christian home that we used upon arrival at our house, before we moved in any bags. We lit a candle and walked through the house room-by-room, saying prayers and reading Scripture as we went.

None of the prayers are original. They are almost all taken from the PC (USA) Book of Common Worship, the special occasions and daily prayer editions.

The ski retreat can be better still. The team of leaders will get to that. But I’m taking a couple of days first to enjoy the feeling of having collaborated with other leaders to make something better.

Vehicle rental may be the single most erratic youth ministry expense there is. Rent vans for a retreat this summer, budget the same expense for next year’s retreat, then watch the expense double in the intervening 12 months. It’s especially bad in the summer.

I’ve learned that booking vans at least six months out and prepaying for them is almost required.

I rented two vans for last weekend’s ski retreat way back on August 9th, and the cost was $600 more than last year for the exact same weekend.

This. Is. Ministry.

The places some people call “shitholes” are the places churches all over the country will be praying for this Sunday. 

Facebook reminded me of a post I wrote for the NEXT Church blog in January of 2014 in which I suggested that the future of youth ministry in Presbyterian circles might need to be de-programmed, focusing less on organized activities for church kids and more on spontaneous opportunities to “walk alongside” peer networks of youth in our communities.

I took a break from assembling a shopping list for this weekend’s youth ski retreat to re-read it. In the four years since I wrote the post, my youth ministry work has become way, way more programmatic than ever before.

Time and context matter. There is no single future and no single youth ministry, so beware those who say there is; they still have much to learn.