I have often been asked about how I keep fresh in youth ministry which I started some time ago!!
It can be hard to start yet another year of youth ministry even if you’ve had a month off to recharge your batteries. I always found it hard if I simply started a new year in exactly the same way as I finished the previous year. All the routines and meetings were the same and everything we were doing was predictable. So what’s the alternative?
Take a look at the previous year. What did you do that really produced fruit and blessing? Keep doing it ! Maybe it was your small groups or your weekend away or your one-to-one discipleship. Whatever it was keep doing it, but not until the idea is worn out. Change before you get tired of something. Without endless introspection be honest about things that didn’t work. Was it because it was mis-timed or were you too short of leaders to pull it off? I love Nehemiah’s response to the chaos of Jerusalem. ‘You see the trouble we are in ... Let us start rebuilding’ (Nehemiah 2.17,18).
You may feel your youth ministry is not in the best state, but Nehemiah started by taking a good long look at the gates and the walls. Then he made a plan and gave his leaders a vision. It wasn’t always easy, but the wall got finished. There’s still a bit of the wall there in 2012.
Change a little
Having looked at how you do things, resolve to change one thing well. If you have a worship band, there may be a need for one other player. Begin to search for that person and pray that God will raise up someone who can do the job. I always tried to start the new term with something different even if it was how we tell the young people what’s going on. Endless notices were tedious, so I changed to only two notices in the whole meeting — one at the beginning and one at the end. These days social media gives many more opportunities — use it. Maybe now is the time to review how you communicate with the group.
Change a lot
You may feel the whole thing needs a shake up. Perhaps your meeting time needs changing. Many people in youth ministry are so programme-orientated that they forget to care for the young people and forget to pray. A whole culture change might see you put much more into one-to-one discipleship at the expense of slick meetings. Change is unsettling for some, but I tremble when I hear things like, ‘We’re doing youth ministry here just like we’ve done it for the last 25 years’ (real quote).
Remember the non-negotiables
I know what mine are. Whenever we met as a group, the Bible would be open, read and explained. It’s good to decide what you are very unlikely to change, so you know what you don’t have to review. These are your values, which all the leaders need to know and understand. The Bible is your authority on everything — maybe your work has been too much about wise advice rather than what the Bible says.
So as you start a new term take some time to freshen up. We all need those spaces where we think and pray about what we are doing and why. Root 66 is a youth leaders training initiative which would gladly help you with your review (just Google Root 66 for the website address).
Dave Fenton is the Training Director of Root 66 which runs training courses for youth ministries across the UK.
