Do you like who you are? Are you the spouse, the parent, the youth leader you want to be?

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I have a tendency to manage. It comes natural to me, as I’m very structured and organized by nature. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I always look for ways to do it as efficient and effective as possible.

But sometimes I forget you have to lead first.

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This summer, I joined a group of volunteers from our church as leaders in a Christian teen camp. I had a wonderful time and I’ll definitely be going again next year, but I did observe an interesting phenomenon. There were a lot of unwritten rules and habits, things the leaders who’d been going before all knew. But I didn’t and it made me feel frustrated and left out at times.

One example was the fact that even though there was a ‘bed time’ during the whole camp, the last night the students were allowed to stay up all night. Had I know this sooner, I would have made sure to get some extra sleep the nights before, but I only found out the day before when I was already pretty tired. When I got home, I was so exhausted I was dizzy. Sure, a good night’s sleep took care of most of that, but I did wish I had known earlier.

 

The curse of knowledge

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As youth leaders, we are called to serve primarily, not to lead. Though I wasn’t wild about Leonard Sweet’s book I am a follower, I did agree with him that the Bible says a whole lot more about following and serving than it does about leading. Being a leader means serving and as youth leaders, we should serve our pastors above all.

I know that there are lots of youth leaders and youth pastors who have an issue with their pastor. It saddens me to see ‘disagreement with pastor’ pop up as a search term for finding my site so regularly. And I’m not saying youth leaders are always at fault here, nor are the pastors. It’s just a sad reality that youth leaders and pastors don’t always work well together for whatever reason.

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We’re finding inspiration for blog posts in interesting search terms people have used to find this blog. It strikes me how many times you feel a story behind a search term, a deep underlying emotion. Today’s topic is another example of this: my youth ministry isn’t growing.

My youth ministry isn’t growing. If someone would tell me that, my first response would be: how does that make you feel? Because I feel a world of emotions behind this simple search term.

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This is another search term that I see popping up regularly: how to motivate youth. I’m picturing a very frustrated youth leader here, struggling with unmotivated young people in his or her small group or youth group. They don’t want to listen, they don’t want to answer question, they don’t want to pay attention or help out. What do you do when your students are completely unmotivated?

I have one advice for you: raise the bar for teens. It may seem very counter intuitive, but in order to motivate young people, you have to raise the bar.

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We’ve been looking at funny or interesting search terms people have used to find this blog. Here’s another one I came across a few weeks ago: my youth group leaders are not serious. Once again, you feel that there’s a story behind this…What could this story be?

Considering the way the search term is formulated, both a youth pastor and a student could have written it. Let’s see what we could advise in either case.

From a youth pastor’s perspective

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