There’s leading and there’s implementing, and the difference is about more than creativity or authorship.

You can lead something you didn’t create with purpose and integrity just as well as the project you conceived. Leading is about ownership. How much do you care about this event, this idea, this experiment–and how much have you staked on the outcome? If you care, I will follow you.

Just don’t implement. Someone else’s idea or yours: implementing is just following the steps that are supposed to get you a predetermined outcome. There’s no mystery in implementing and no curiosity.

Martin Luther King didn’t implement the civil rights movement. He led it.

 

I’ve never assaulted a woman, but my mother thought I came close once and boy did she let me have it. Here’s what happened:

It was a warm winter afternoon during my senior year of high school. There was lots of powdery Denver snow on the ground, and my girlfriend and I were making the short walk from the front door of my suburban home, where we had been doing homework together in the kitchen, down the narrow driveway to my dented up Datsun, parked on the street, adjacent to the front lawn. I was driving her home.

With my mother watching from the doorway, my girlfriend stealthily cupped a handful of snow and flung it at my head. I retaliated by wrapping my arms around her knees, lifting her off the ground, and–with her slight frame squealing in protest–dropping her in a pillowy mound of front lawn powder. We both laughed.

I helped her up, but as we brushed ourselves off, my mother called to me from the front door. There was anger in her voice.

When I got close enough that my girlfriend couldn’t hear her, my mother warned me in a low growl to never do that again. I was confused.

“What?”

“You overpowered her. You are much stronger than she is, and you used your strength against her while she was telling you ‘no.'”

I went red with shame. It was just some roughhousing in the snow. Yet in a moment I came to see myself and my adolescent strength in a terrible light, to imagine the terrible uses to which it might be put.

I’ve been wondering the last several days if more young boys don’t need such censoring from their mothers as I got on that winter day.

I’ve seen it happen more than once: you’re unhappy with how some youth ministry activity or event went–students seemed unfocused and disengaged, planning details fell apart, leadership was conflicted–and you resolve to never repeat it. Yet when asked, some students name that very activity or event as the most influential piece of their experience.

That’s why we ask for student feedback about everything we do. Everything.

The first mission trip I led was a disaster. The leader of the organization we worked with was unstable, and my leaders couldn’t tolerate her. Plan after plan failed. It was hot, and students were getting sick; someone got car sick all over the floorboards of the van. Someone with a nut allergy ate mole against a leader’s advice and required emergency Benadryl. It was a trip full of tears and vomit and mumbled grievances. I came home wondering if I was cut out for this kind of work.

That was nine years ago, and that trip remains the one I hear the most about from former students. In a good way. One of the students from that trip even decided on a year of church volunteer service after college and cited that trip as part of her motivation.

We’re not curating idyllic experiences here. When plans crumble and students struggle, that’s part of the point. Sometimes the things that go the worst are the things that have the biggest impact.

People quit.

I recruited 10 people for a professional development cohort. Nearly half of them quit before it even started.

We assembled a youth mission trip team and bought them all plane tickets. Then two of them quit.

I quit.

When I was 24, a year out of college and new in my job and apartment and breakup, I worshiped at a tiny Presbyterian church in my neighborhood where two college classmates also worshiped and where the hurtling-toward-retirement minister welcomed me eagerly into worship and committee leadership. Then a new friend invited me to his much bigger, much younger, much cooler church. I quit.

Years later I was ordained into the same presbytery as that small neighborhood church and the still-hurtling-toward-retirement minister became my colleague. I took him out to lunch and apologized for quitting. He was gracious beyond description. Years later still his church caught fire, and within weeks he was planning the renovation and rebuild. He didn’t quit.

We learn the virtue of perseverance early and often. Don’t quit. Keep at it. If at first you don’t succeed.

There is virtue lurking in how we handle others’ quitting too, though. We don’t have to shrug our shoulders in helplessness, yet neither are we required to rage and judge, as if we are entitled to others’ participation.

Maybe the virtue is in expecting some attrition and planning for more than we need.

 

Some youth ministry leaders respond to your very well planned and articulated annual leader recruitment effort, the worship bulletin blurb accompanied by a stirring-yet-whimsical appeal from the pulpit followed up with a one-on-one over coffee to discern their interests and gifts while presenting the rewards and challenges of leading youth. I love it when that happens.

Other youth ministry leaders jump in with only a few days’ notice. You need an additional leader for the weekend retreat. It’s Wednesday. You email all the parents. One replies: “I’ll go.” I love it when that happens.*

The leadership of your youth ministry is made up of multiyear veterans and newbies, parents and non, young adults and retirees. They all say”yes” to leading youth for different reasons and during different seasons of their life (some repeat that “yes” in multiple life stages). Some come to weekly youth group. Some go on retreats. Some lead mission trips. Without you.

But they all have an origin story. They all were either invited or they volunteered, out of a personal sense of calling to help young people or a desire just to be helpful. I think a healthy youth ministry has leaders with a variety of origin stories as well as a variety of interests and gifts.

 

*Of course, whether they come to leadership months or days ahead of your event, all leaders of youth get the child protection policy and turn in the background check authorization

 

Hulu hoops? Check.

Ball Jars? Check.

Jet Puff marshmallows? Check.

8″ knobby balls? Check.

Must be retreat season.

 

I purchased an annual subscription to Playmeo last week and used two of their activities on my first Sunday of the program year. I’ve been a subscriber to Mark Collard’s YouTube channel for over a year now. I’ve taken countless activity ideas from it. I sent his “Facilitator Tips” series to the rest of our youth staff as a resource.

It felt like time to pay for value.

I am increasingly aware how much of ministry work is facilitation with groups–small and large groups, groups of adults, youth, children and a host of combinations thereof. A tip top toolbox of facilitation skills and resources is really important, because our work is always calling on us to lead groups of people, and doing that well allows those groups to experience growth and learning.

People like Collard make their living at this and at training people in it. I am an enthusiastic acolyte.

 

We moved our little unstructured all-youth-bagel-time out of a room and onto a landing, and it seemed to make a significant difference. Previously, parents would accompany younger students to the room and then hover nervously by the door as they crossed the threshold and immersed themselves in an intimidating teens-only gaggle. Then they would slow walk away. They rarely came in; it was not a space for adults.

But I think there need to be some spaces in church life for youth and their parents. Turns out we had one staring us right in the face.

There is a nice, open, landing that leads to that room where we’ve been hiding the youth bagels. It’s technically a “library,” but nobody’s sitting in there reading Tillich. There are comfortable chairs and low tables. It’s an inviting gathering space into which we were not inviting people to gather.

We added a few hightop tables and set the bagels right in the middle of the landing. Bingo. Youth, parents, staff, and volunteers all mixed together. The door to that room was open, and some students took to it. Fine. On the whole, the experiment did what I hoped it would.

It’s just one week, I know, but it’s enough to do it again next week.

Bringing someone new onboard your church requires time and energy. Introductions and explanations are a particular kind of work required to ensure that the new person has the information and relationships they need to get started well.

Those introductions and explanations aren’t just one-directional though. In the same way that the new team member needs to understand how things work at the church and who to approach for different things, the church needs to understand the new team member and how they work.

If all we’re doing is fitting new parts into a system, transformation will elude us. We need to allow the new parts to exert some influence on the system they’re joining. It’s not a puzzle. We’re not simply looking to fit a piece into a precisely designed space. It’s more like a dish that needs a new ingredient to flavor the whole thing.

That includes you.

Ministry is human work: connecting, listening, challenging, encouraging.

It can feel like technical work: counting, planning, reviewing, arranging.

The technical work makes space for the human work.