Set the bar

Having been involved in youth ministry for a couple of decades, I’ve read a fair few books, been to a lifetime’s worth of conferences and heard a lot of speakers. I have sought out the wise, the sage and the guru in an effort to improve my skills at working with young people. This article is based on the most helpful thing I have ever heard or read. Ever. Seriously, I mean ever. It is this:

You and I, as practitioners, full-timers, part-timers, extra-timers and I-have-no-time-but-do-youth-workanyway- timers, will be familiar with the words of Jesus, often quoted from John 10, ‘I have come that you might have life to the full’. It is one thing, as a youth worker, to be teaching, encouraging and equipping young people to believe they can have a full life following Jesus - it is quite another to live that life ourselves.

Maybe you manage this, but for me, the greatest challenge in youth ministry is not finding the right resource, coming up with a cracking illustration, developing a team, doing a funding application or monitoring something out of the corner of my eye at youth club while engaging in conversation with someone right in front of me. Nope, for me the greatest challenge in my youth ministry is me. My weaknesses, my fallibility, my inability to live life to the full.

So, I want to share three things that help me. They help me because I keep coming back to them to remind myself, not because I am ‘on it’ with these things every day but because these three things help me set the ‘BAR’ (or, if I’m doing alright - they help me raise the bar, I can always improve in all three areas). So, why not set the B for a healthy you?

Balance

Balance covers a whole host of things. I’ve worked in ministry where the expectation has been that you work until you see a bright light and then stop for a bit, recovering just enough to keep going until you collapse in to bed. I have also worked 37 hours a week with (you will hardly believe this) time off in lieu if I worked evenings and / or weekends (shocking, I know!). Balance is different for everyone, but, to give our best to young people it helps if we are not absolutely shattered by the time youth group rolls around. It is simple. It is hard to do. Balancing work and life is hard when your life is your work, yet, getting balance right makes such a difference.

We might often encourage young people to, ‘be the difference you want to see,’ but do they see us being ‘different’? Being balanced with our time, energy, social media habits, work, rest, seeing our mates and buying groceries takes discipline. So, here is my suggestion:

Forget for a moment that you purchase resources occasionally to use in your youth work. If you have not purchased, The Beautiful Disciplines by Martin Saunders, buy it. Don’t just consider getting it for use with your young people. Get it for yourself. Investing in spiritual disciplines is an investment in our lives and our spiritual health which we will benefit from - but, so too will our young people.

Gymnasts, when being taught the balance beam, are told to look at the end of the beam rather than staring down at their feet right in front of them. Look ahead, look where you are going! Balance is about not being caught so much by what we are doing right this moment, staring down at our feet and willing ourselves to not lose balance, but looking ahead to where we want to get to. Think about your balance. Where do you want to be? The obvious scripture that comes to mind is Peter walking on the water. Let’s keep our eyes fixed on Jesus; let’s get our sense of balance from the author and perfecter of our faith.

Attitude

Do you have a young person in your group with an attitude problem? Yes, that one. Now, think back - how was your attitude at 15? I used to be called an ‘angry young man’: constantly gobbing-off because I knew better (I didn’t), always having the last word because I was right (most of the time, I wasn’t). As we get older, attitude, almost more than anything else, can draw us into unhealthy thinking and unhealthy practice. When my attitude is poor, there are three things that I am prone to do (the antidote is Philippians chapter two):

Comparison

Comparison can lead to jealousy, insecurity, fear and a whole bunch of other emotions and feelings and thoughts, which if we allow them - will dominate our decision making and our values. The antidote is found in the attitude of Christ, ‘who made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant’. When we consider comparing ourselves with other people, ministries or approaches to life and work, our guide and example is Jesus himself. We can get caught up in this passage from Philippians just thinking about how amazing Jesus is, but the passage begins with, ‘Your attitude should be the same as Christ’. That is our aim: to have an attitude similar to that of Jesus. No other comparison is necessary or helpful.

Competition

I grew up with this. We can easily fall into ‘we have to do what they are doing’ thinking. And often, this means the church up the road. You can earn, so I was taught, your spiritual stripes by giving more of yourself, doing more, being more, leading more and attending more events and conferences. We seem to have a similar desperation today about ‘keeping up’. Social media does not help. ‘I haven’t tweeted about what I am doing, maybe the people following me will think I am not doing anything,’ can easily become our default line of thought. This just gives us (as if we needed it) yet another arena to compete in. Numbers saved? Number of followers? Famous people we can namecheck or youth work ‘living legends’ we can grab that selfie with? What on earth are we doing? Maybe you don’t have this competitive attitude, but, if you do, then back to Philippians my friend… ‘Who did not consider equality with God something to be grasped’. Ask yourself seriously, what are trying to grasp? What are you reaching for?

Complaining

Ah, now we get to it (at least for me). The longer I have been involved in youth ministry, the more I have to complain about. There, I said it. What do I mean by that? Ministry is tough. While we seek to set the bar for ourselves, others are also doing it for us - the PCC has expectations, the senior pastor, the congregation, the young people, the parents of the young people, our volunteers, our spouse, our children… the list goes on.

I can all too easily focus on negatives and allow that to shape my attitude. In fact, sometimes I allow that to shape my entire reflection on an evening with young people. Little things can lead to us moaning that, ‘nobody gets it’, ‘I have to do everything myself’, or ‘there is only one of me - I can’t be everywhere and do everything’. We cannot allow others to determine our attitude or approach to ministry. We cannot allow circumstances to so dictate our attitude that we become jaundiced and cynical. Our attitude leaks out; our young people, other leaders and friends and family will see what ministry is doing to us. We need, again, to follow Christ’s example.

After Paul’s poetic words in Philippians two, we hit a ‘therefore’. Paul is saying if we have the attitude of Christ then this is how we will be; in verse 14 this includes, ‘Doing everything without grumbling or arguing’. We can either ‘hold onto’ things that upset us, bother us, worry us or feel unjust and have a complaining attitude, or we can ‘hold onto’ the word of life (verse 15). Here we find a lovely balance in what Paul writes - the word used for ‘hold onto’ could also mean ‘hold out’. I think Paul is saying that we need to do both. If we are not holding onto the word of life, we cannot hold it out to others - and if we are not holding the word of life out to others then we have not really understood what it means to hold onto it! So, what are you holding onto? What will you just not let go of? Release your grip and give that complaining spirit to Jesus. Ask him to help you rediscover joy in your life and ministry.

Relationships

I once heard a fellow youth worker boast that he knew his youth group better than his own children. At the time, I didn’t have my own children, but I was staggered by this statement. Is this what it means to be in ministry? To sacrifice relationships for the sake of the sharing the gospel with a group of young people? Not in the slightest. If we neglect this area or consider every relationship as simply serving the wider purpose of ministering to others, we miss what it means to be alive, to be human and in this instance, to be healthy.

Relationships are not a means to an end. If we find that we have no time for friends or family because ‘ministry’ is taking all of our time, our ‘bar’ is all wrong. This direction, where ministry becomes all-consuming, leads to disaster. We need to cultivate relationships that are not about serving our ministry but simply about us living whole lives with interests and passions that are not dominated or dictated to by youth work. I now have children - they are not a ‘mini youth work project’ in my own house, they are my kids. I grew up in an environment where it was normal for men in ministry to be in their studies, out every night being a pastor for everyone else - while neglecting home and family. We cannot teach young people about the value of relationships if we decline to have real, vulnerable and honest ones ourselves. Your family and your friends deserve more than your exhaustion or the odd catch up every six months if your diary allows it.

I don’t know how Jesus managed it, but he cultivated friendship, investing in his disciples time that - when I read about it - seemed to be just for the sake of being in relationship (for example, after the resurrection he has breakfast on the beach). Jesus also built others up. He made people feel valued and important - some of those he would possibly never see again. Jesus was also vulnerable with his friends. He asked them to watch and pray with him in Gethsemane - perhaps feeling alone as he faced the cross, just wanting to know his friends had his back. Do we bluff our way through our relationships or can we be honest and real and broken when we need to lean on others? Who can you lean on? If we have relationships beyond our ministry contexts and are investing in and leaning on them, who do we lift? Who do we encourage and nurture? Do we even have time for this? If you haven’t, deal with it now. Take some time out, phone a friend; go out for coffee without an agenda or to use it as an illustration in a youth talk.

So, there we have it. The best thing you have to offer young people is a healthy you. We need to be pursuing ‘living life to the full’ ourselves if our youth ministry is to last. How healthy is your balance? How healthy is your attitude? How healthy are your relationships? Set the bar.

Ali Campbell is a youth and children’s ministry consultant.