Raising the Bar on Youth Minister Management
Raising The Bar: Effective youth ministry requires more than just trust; it calls for intentional oversight, structured training, and accountability to develop leaders capable of genuinely guiding young people in their faith journey.
At our Friday night youth group, the occasional shenanigan is par for the course. When they start, you might hear me say something like ‘It’s cool with me—as long as I don’t have to fill out an incident report.’ I guess that line is my attempt to show some measure of concern while also perpetuating the notion that deep down I’m a pretty chilled out guy. Here’s my theory though: ‘It’s cool with me, as long as I don’t have to fill out an incident report,’ comes scarily close to describing the way some churches treat, train and supervise youth ministers.
Like many youth ministers, I have another portfolio to bulk up my role to full time. Unlike many youth ministers, my other portfolio is leading and supervising our church staff team. I don’t lead the rest of our church—it’s just that me doing the staff team leading and supervision suits the way my senior pastor and I are both wired. While I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest supervisor, this has got me wondering about general approaches to the way we care for, train and support the leaders of that space. I think that there’s three unique things about youth ministry that makes the support of youth ministers extra critical and extra valuable.
Great Power, Great Responsibility
I have way more freedom than anybody else on our staff team. I can unilaterally decide on our next sermon series, the content and style of our studies, the weekly program, the leaders on the team, the training they receive, and the way we spend our youth ministry budget. As I look at all the hoops our senior pastor has to jump through to get even one of these things off the ground, it seems that he has half as much autonomy as I do. Seriously, if I woke up one day and wanted to completely change the direction of my ‘congregation’ from sermons, songs, and small group Bible studies to a pre-evangelistic outreach cafe, I could do it in less than a month. I don’t know anyone else in the church office with that kind of freedom. This might not be the experience of every youth minister—but I’m willing to bet they still have more freedom than most other ministry leaders.
Youth ministers are entrusted with planning a program of evangelism and discipleship which may well shape young people for years to come. And because the youth are often encountering this material for the first time, they don’t always have the capacity to challenge us the way an adult church member might after the sermon at church. Often the leaders serving under us are inexperienced as well.
Ultimately, it’s those in charge of supervising the youth minister who should take responsibility for how it’s going. But on the whole, supervisors tend to give heaps of trust to the youth minister when it comes to designing the program. Trust is a good thing, but it doesn’t exclude training. Too much freedom can simply be a fruit of not enough oversight, or not enough interest. In this context problems can grow, and don’t get noticed until it’s too late. In contrast, the best soil for growing leaders gives them room to explore, but also a tight feedback loop to reflect on how things went. Youth ministry is dignified when the senior leaders of a church take a keen interest. This kind of oversight includes practices such as regular 1:1 meetings, a reporting spot in staff meetings, and regular visits to the youth ministry.[1]
The Training Ground Paradox
I take issue with the idea that youth ministry is nothing more than a training ground for ministers. But even if you think that’s true, people will develop best with a proper feedback loop, great supervision, and models of ministry they can look up to. Delegating to someone and training someone in something are not the same thing. And even effective delegation is not simply giving jobs to people and walking away—that’s more like abdication. When we find the nearest willing person available and give them responsibility for a youth ministry hoping that ‘they’ll grow into it,’ it might fill a gap for a while. But unless we’re consciously invested in their growth we’re just perpetuating our problem and creating a gaping hole in our ministry ecosystems.
Tomorrow’s pastors are today’s neglected youth ministers. But if today’s youth ministers were less neglected perhaps they’d stand a chance of also being tomorrow’s youth ministers. And even if they moved on to other ministries they’ll be better supervisors for their experience. Perhaps that’s why many pastors fail to train and support their youth ministers today—they’re simply just passing on the same (lack) of training they received. But we don’t have to keep making that error. People can learn to swim when they are thrown in the deep end. But many can also drown. The best training happens when opportunity and expertise come together.
There’s a whole range of stuff to help young leaders as they’re starting out: thoughtful job descriptions, a clear reporting line, and reasonable expectations. Sadly churches often fail to provide these basic things for their youth ministers. But even if those things are in order, they are preventative measures rather than training strategies. Waiting for your youth minister to come to you with their problems (or their incident reports) is unlikely to develop the kind of reflective and robust leaders needed to help young people navigate their complex world for the long haul.
Here’s what I’ve learnt: the best trainers are two things—proactive and present. A supervisor who regularly invests time and energy into the learning, feedback loops and training opportunities of the trainee is a great blessing to them. Doing this often provides an incredible return on investment over time. But it won’t deliver that return unless you give it the time it needs. If you’re convinced that a key function of youth ministry is the training of future leaders, then start by putting some of your best trainers there too. Otherwise, you risk the blind leading the blind leading the teenagers.
The Elephant in the Room
Finally, another reason to support your youth minister is because youth ministry seems less valuable than other ministries. We know it’s not less valuable, and we may not talk that talk, but the way we walk the walk tells a different story.
It’s all too common to find a church that spends more on flowers than young people, or a diocese that spends more on archiving than investing into ministry to teenagers. It’s all too common that ministry to teens gets sequestered off into darkened corners of the building and unwanted pockets of the week. As a result, it’s all too common to find youth ministers questioning whether serving young people with the gospel is a viable and valuable way for them to spend their lives. When I decided to step out of ‘grown-ups ministry’ to pursue a youth ministry job, it was pretty clear a lot of people thought I’d been demoted. I hadn’t, but their assumption was revealing, and a little confronting.
It’s not that we’re against youth ministry: we agree that someone should do something for the teenagers. It’s just we don’t tend to care enough about who, or what… at least until our own kids reach youth ministry age. By then, it’s usually too late to build the kind of ministry systems and develop the kind of leaders that we wish we had in charge of discipling our own kids.
But we can do something about that now. We can get around the guys and girls in those ministries now with training, support and encouragement. Whether you’re responsible for the staff member in charge of your youth ministry, a parent invested in it, or a church member whose days of dodgeball and donuts are long gone: do what you can to dignify and celebrate youth ministry in your church. A kind word, an interested question, or a regular spot on your prayer list might seem like a small gesture, but it will make a big difference in telling a better story about the value of youth ministry. Not least of all to the youth ministers in charge of trying to write the present chapter.
Originally posted on The Gospel Coalition 12/10/2023
[1] I’m not saying we should micro-manage our youth ministers. Senior ministers might be more experienced leaders with lots of wisdom to share, but the stuff that worked in the nineties and early two thousands doesn’t necessarily work now. A relationship of encouragement and accountability, rather than simply top-down instruction is what I have in mind here.
