working together to navigate youth ministry well through relationships—where every teenager matters…….

–by Ben Zabel

I have been reflecting a lot lately on what it is like to bring about change in a ministry setting. I have attempted to be an agent of change in two different settings and I did this in two completely opposite ways, with opposite outcomes. The two settings are completely different churches, but i think that the method-to-outcome relationship should transcend setting because I think that there is a right and wrong way to do change, as you will see from my experiences.

Right out of college I took a youth ministry job at a small church where I was working with a senior pastor. I came in with passion, excitement, and big dreams. I saw where the church and the youth ministry were and I wanted so much more for it. So I set about changing things. I added ministry programs that I hoped would bring in more youth, I added more form and structure to the weekly programs that already existed, and I did this quickly. I thought, “people will see this as a step forward, a step in the right direction. People will want this and support these changes!” Instead, I was met with apathy and patronizing comments like, “Oh when I was your age I had that much energy too.” for the first six months I worked very hard at trying to get people to be excited about these changes, but when they didn’t really care about them much I became bitter. I checked out and my attitude was, “fine, I’ll just keep doing what they were doing before without putting any effort into it.” In short, I became a really bad youth pastor. I blamed the people in the church and my apathy led to me leaving after 2 years.

In my second setting of change I stepped into a larger church with a long history of a solid youth ministry. Unfortunately, the recent history had been a series of unfortunate events, and the ministry had been functioning on bare bones, treading water mode. My immediate thoughts were, again, “This is where we are, this is where we need to be, let’s get there now.” Luckily I had spent a year and a half in seminary between these two experiences and I had the privilege of taking a few classes on leadership. I had learned why my first attempt at bringing change had failed: I had tried to force change on people that neither felt the need or the desire to change! I had led from my passion instead of from a relationship with those people I was trying to lead. Thankfully I had learned enough to take a step back and ask a few important questions:

1. Who am I trying to lead?
2. What are their felt needs? Unfelt needs?
3. Do they know me enough to trust and follow me?
4. Do I know them enough to know what they need?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the questions that need to be asked, nor is it a full step-by-step process to bringing change. The are plenty of much smarter and better leaders than I who have written books on this. What this list is, though, is a list of the questions that helped me to walk through change with a group of people. The difference in my two settings is not that I cast vision well. This is important, and I did this in both settings. The difference is that I built a relationship with people in my second setting before trying to bring change, and then I walked through the change process with them, instead of staying up ahead with my vision and yelling back to them to hurry and catch up!

I think that change is so often the the noose that youth pastors hang themselves with. We have a passion, an excitement, a vision, and we expect people to just go with us on it. We expect people to immediately be as excited as we are, and we never build relationships with people before doing this. Sure, people in the church are often guilty of apathy, but that doesn’t give us the right or the responsibility to force them into action and excitement. Has that worked in your experience? I know it hasn’t in mine. But as we built relationships with people, as we give them time to build trust in us, and as we prove ourselves trustworthy, then people will hopefully let us lead them. And when we don’t have immediate success with this, we can’t just jump ship. We have to commit to relationship with people that last long enough to build that trust.

So please take the time to build relationships with those you are trying to lead before you force change on them. When we don’t do that we hurt ourselves, our families, the local and global church, and whomever follows us in our ministry setting. Hopefully I have learned my lesson, but history tells me that I am likely to repeat my own mistakes. We are in this together though, so let’s continue encouraging and walking together as peers in this journey. Peace.