Youth Ministry Leaders

Knowing Nothing Is Everything
Steve Argue

Let's admit it. Youth, youth culture, youth dynamics, and youth ministry are a mystery. We're kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. Sure, we have youth ministry degrees, church budgets, students showing up at our gatherings, and our own experiences to lean on. But it's all sooo 2006, in the past, out of date, bordering on irrelevant.

Let's admit it. We don't know anything.

At least, this should be our posture. Why? Because everyone (parents, elders, pastors) expects our volunteers and leaders to know everything! And I wonder if we think we should know everything, too. We get caught up in this illusion when we assume that our new volunteers "get" youth ministry. Maybe they're a friend, or they're cool, or they have experience, and so we assume that they'll do great. But making that assumption will likely produce anxiety for our volunteers and frustration for our students.

Knowing youth ministry isn't the same as knowing our particular teenagers. They are each different, unique, special, and worth knowing. And maybe this is the point. What we need to cultivate with our volunteers (and if we're honest, ourselves), is a posture of knowing nothing. It's only at this starting point that we'll discover—rather than assume—who our students really are.

In Chap Clark's book, Hurt, he suggests that teenage culture is changing dramatically. For us to assume that we know what adolescence is like because we were adolescents is to make inaccurate assumptions that are irrelevant for this generation. I had one volunteer say to me once, "I don't think I understand the world of a middle schooler!" It struck me that this volunteer was able to admit that she was already out of touch with middle school, as she herself was still in high school! This is right on. If a high schooler is willing to admit that he or she is out of touch with a middle schooler, I hope we 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, 70+-somethings will admit it as well. It's important that we guide our volunteers beyond current trends and inspire them to know their students and families.

So let's assume we know nothing and help volunteers get close enough to their students so that they might discover who they really are. There are plenty of ways of doing this...

Offer Training on Adolescent Development
•  I talk with college students and volunteers about a teenager's internal and external world. Their internal world is the realm of physical, cognitive, developmental, and relational change. Volunteers and leaders need to understand the internal world of adolescents and take this into account when they have conversations, study the Bible, talk about life, and call for commitment.

•  Get to know what's happening in the adolescent's external world. While video games, movies, and music are important, it is much more than that. Take time to prepare your volunteers for the multiple dynamics affecting teens. Studies show that many are wrestling with abandonment issues. When teens refer to their family, that might include parents who are married, multi-racial, single, divorced, gay, step, or absent. Siblings are related, step, blended, and adopted. Holidays might be wonderful or painful. But we won't know unless we discover the external contexts of our teenagers. While family is one issue, also consider school scenarios, economic conditions, relationships, pressure to succeed, sexuality, the Internet, and the diffusion of teenager subcultures (music, style, values, cliques, clusters, gangs, and so on).

Go Where Students Are the Experts
Teach your volunteers to go where their teenagers go in order to appreciate what their lives are like. Go to their homes. Meet their families. Go to their games, their concerts, to MySpace, to their blogs. The goal isn't to be nosy but to understand. The church cannot simply do things that have a Christian adjective in front of it and call it youth ministry. The incarnation demonstrates entering the adolescent's world, not simply creating an alternative one.

Ask Questions
Throughout the year, take your volunteers to the places in your community or church where your teenagers hang out. As a group, go there to see, smell, taste, and feel the environment. Attempt to truly understand why students hang out at that particular spot. This may lead to a deeper understanding and more questions.

•  Why is this coffee shop so important to our teenagers? What does it offer? What need does it fill? What do they do there? What can we learn?

•  Why do our teenagers always sit in this part of the church service? Why together? Why there? Do they feel a part of the congregation or not? Why?

•  I took my leaders into our youth room and had them sit anywhere they liked. I suggested, "Imagine who normally sits in the area you sit in (the back, the front, the middle, the side)." Then I had them envision who was sitting there, who they were sitting with, why they were sitting there, and what this might mean. Then they prayed for those students.

Questions Might Be the Answer
When volunteers are on retreat with youth, make sure they have a list of questions that they can fall back on for discussion. Prepare 10 to 20 open-ended questions that encourage teenagers to be the experts of their lives and volunteers to be genuine listeners. Remind them that their role is to discover, not download Christian information.

Maybe one of the problems with youth ministry is that sometimes we think we have to deliver all the answers. We need to cultivate a youth ministry culture that admits we only know something when we admit we know nothing. This will propel us to discover who our precious teenagers are, and we are certain to discover something about ourselves, as well.

{Ed. Church Volunteer Central members can get a good start by having all their volunteers take one of our free online classes on Understanding High School Youth or Understanding Junior High Youth.}

Steve Argue (steve@intersectcommunity.com) is co-founder of Intersect, an organization designed to connect and coach emerging leaders. He is also a regular contributor to Group magazine.

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