Archives For Personal growth

The 7 regrets of youth pastors (2)

January 21, 2013 — 2 Comments

Looking back isn’t always easy. Many of us have regrets when we look back on our life and ‘career’ as a youth pastor. We’ve listed four regrets so far in our first post on the 7 regrets of youth pastors: avoiding conflicts, not communicating the vision enough, settling for a low salary and not training a successor. Here are three more regrets many youth pastors have:

5. Not taking care of yourself

As youth pastors, we seem wired to put ourselves last. We take care of everyone else, but we forget to take care of ourselves. Our own physical health, our spiritual health, they don’t get the attention they need to stay healthy. As youth pastor Jason Sansbury tweeted to me:

lifeofjaws (jasonsansbury) on Twitter

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The 7 regrets of youth pastors (1)

January 18, 2013 — 7 Comments

I’ve been in youth ministry for about fourteen years in one capacity or another. Looking back, I sure wish I would have done some things differently. I’m fairly sure many of us feel that way.

Now I personally think regrets are a waste of time but ‘7 things many youth pastors wish they’d done differently in hindsight’ didn’t sound quite as catchy for a title…

So here, we go with 7 things many youth pastors wished they had done differently aka the 7 regrets of youth pastors:

1. Avoiding conflicts

As Christians, we’re supposed to be loving, kind and forgiving. The problem is that this often results in an avoidance of conflict at all costs. I’ve let certain situations continue for too long because I wanted to avoid a conflict. Well, the conflict happened anyway and it was munch nastier than it would have been if I had faced it head on.

The perfect youth ministry is an utopia, but looking back there sure are things I wish I'd done differently...

The perfect youth ministry is an utopia, but looking back there sure are things I wish I’d done differently…

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The 3 healthy habits of an effective youth pastor: spiritual health

January 11, 2013 — 2 Comments

So far, we’ve looked at two healthy habits each youth pastor should have: taking enough rest and eating well. While both seem to be purely physical, they will have a great impact on your mental well being. With the third healthy habit it’s the other way around: it’s a mental habit, but one that will impact your physical health as well. I’m talking about taking care of your spiritual health.

Spiritual health

So what does keeping your spiritual health up look like? I don’t like the concept of rules when it comes to spiritual health, because it’s about working on your relationship with God, not some checklist you can cross off. But I think it’s safe to approach it from a definition of what being spiritual healthy looks like:

having an honest, open and continuous relationship with God, which you work on on a daily basis.

What ‘working on your relationship with God’ looks like, is up to you then. It might be Bible study or meditating on a verse, it might be prayer walks or meeting God in nature, it might be serving or solitude. It’s not about specific acts, it’s about experiencing God’s presence in your life and about constantly trying to become more Christ-like.

Who checks your spiritual health? Do you do check ups yourself regularly?

Who checks your spiritual health? Do you do check ups yourself regularly?

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The 3 healthy habits of an effective youth pastor: eating well

January 9, 2013 — 1 Comment

What you eat, how you eat and how much you eat has a direct influence on how well you do as a youth pastor. We can sugarcoat it any way we want, but in the end this is the simple truth: in order to be effective as a youth pastor, to do well in the long haul, we need to take good care of our bodies. That starts with eating well.

We don’t always realize it, but what we eat affects our performance. Obviously eating too much junk can cause overweight, which will impact our job as youth pastors indirectly. Also, there are other long term health issues related to bad eating habits, for instance heart problems. That alone should be a reason to mind what we eat.

But there are also direct, everyday consequences of what we eat. Take the infamous ‘after lunch dip’ for instance. It’s caused by the rise and subsequent dip in your blood sugar level, causing you to be tired and sleepy (Tip: If you want to avoid this, try keeping your blood sugar levels steady!).

If we want to be effective as a youth pastor in the long haul, we need to start eating well because how and what we eat affects our performance.

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The 3 healthy habits of an effective youth pastor (1)

January 7, 2013 — 4 Comments

New Year resolutions are worthless if you depend on discipline alone. If you want real change in your life, you have to change your ineffective habits. Creating new, healthy habits is the only way to make your New Year resolutions last longer than February.

So let’s have a look at three healthy habits each youth pastor should have in order to be effective. Today we’ll discuss the first one: rest. Without rest, you may be a very effective youth pastor, but you won’t be one for long. If you’re in it for the long haul, if you want to prevent burnout and depression, you have got to make rest a habit.

If you want to be an effective youth pastor in the long haul, you have to make rest a habit.

If you want to be an effective youth pastor in the long haul, you have to make rest a habit.

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Rebooting your youth ministry: making it relational

November 7, 2012 — 2 Comments

We’ve been talking about the paradigm shift in youth ministry and what this means for how we should do youth ministry. I think it’s time to make it practical and take a look at how we can reboot our youth ministry to make it better fit the times and context in which we’re living.

As I wrote in the previous post, I think there are three essential elements of doing youth ministry the new way: relationships, discipleship, and outreach. We’re going to discuss these in detail in the next three posts. Today we’ll focus on how you can reboot your youth ministry to make it more relational, to put relationships at the center.

First of all, it makes a big difference if you’re new to your church or if you’ve been there for a while. In the first case, you may want to take it slow and get a good feel for the church and the key ‘players’ first. It’s never a good idea to start right away with rocking the boat and dissing your predecessor.

How relational is your youth ministry at the moment? How well do your leaders know the students and how much time do they actually spend building relationships?

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In Leadership, Personal growth, Small groups
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What the paradigm shift in youth ministry means for youth leaders

November 5, 2012 — Leave a comment

Last week I wrote two posts about the paradigm shift that’s happening in youth ministry right now. One of the commenters asked a really good question:

What sort of paradigm shifts do you see for youth ministers themselves? If youth ministry is shifting towards that direction how can youth ministers adapt/change to guide students faithfully towards being active participants of kingdom-work?

I think that the changes that are happening, make youth ministry harder and easier at the same time for youth leaders. Let me explain.

Youth ministry is harder

The paradigm shift makes youth ministry harder because it’s no longer possible to just buy the right materials, entertain the students with loads of fun and ‘show’, run a critically acclaimed program and be successful. I mean, you can certainly debate whether that approach was ever truly successful (personally, I’ve never believed in the ‘makeability’ of youth ministry), but it isn’t working now anymore.

That means youth leaders have the tough job of figuring out what will work in their context. That means studying their context, truly getting to know your community, your culture and subcultures, analyzing possibilities, opportunities and threats. It means actively looking for ideas for approaches, not programs, and experiment to see what works. It means failing maybe tens of times before finding what works.

It’s also harder because youth ministry isn’t safe anymore. Doing youth ministry in this day and age means stepping way out of your comfort zone, being prepared to let go of everything you know, everything that was done in the past and embracing new ways, new methods, new ideas. That’s scary for a lot of people, also because nobody can guarantee ‘results’.

Youth ministry has become harder, because it’s not safe anymore. It’s about stepping into the unknown, taking risks and failing.

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The church and the paradigm shift in youth ministry

October 31, 2012 — 3 Comments

There’s a paradigm shift happening in youth ministry right now. But does your church see this as well? One comment on the previous post showed this isn’t always the case:

Many church leaders are exponents of the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ adage, and therefore they need clear reasoning to understand why the old paradigm has ceased to work.

The question therefore is: where does this paradigm shift come from? Why doesn’t the old paradigm work anymore?

This is one of those questions where it’s important to find and formulate your own answers. The reason for this is that youth ministry is shifting from one-size-fits-all to personal and highly contextual. I can’t tell you what works or doesn’t work in your context, I can only offer some basic ‘guidelines’, a basic paradigm if you wish.

But it’s taken me about two years to define this new paradigm, to thoroughly analyze the current state of affairs in youth ministry and figure out my convictions as to where youth ministry should be heading. I really advise you to take that time as well.

Some resources I found very helpful were:

  • Marko’s Youth Ministry 3.0 – especially because of his spot on analysis, I didn’t agree with all his recommendations
  • Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian – shows how little the old paradigm has really impacted students’ faith
  • The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry from Andrew Root – not an easy read, but a great challenge to take youth ministry more serious, especially theologically
  • Tony Jones’ Postmodern youth ministry – a bit of an oldie, but still very interesting
  • Mark Yaconelli’s Growing Souls – reading about experiments in a completely different way of doing youth ministry really challenged my convictions

Only when you are deeply convinced for yourself the old paradigm for youth ministry isn’t working and have a clear view of a new one, only then will you be able to explain it to your church.

Churches historically don’t have the best track record when it comes to adapting to change. How does your church feel about the paradigm shift in youth ministry?

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The paradigm shift in youth ministry

October 29, 2012 — 15 Comments

I’ve written about the future of youth ministry before and while no one knows what will happen exactly, I do know this: We are experiencing a paradigm shift in youth ministry right now. The question is: are you willing to change your paradigm about what youth ministry is and means?

Let me start by explaining what I mean by paradigm and what I think this paradigm shift entails. A paradigm can be defined as a model, a pattern, a way of doing things. But more broadly, it means a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind.

I think the theological and theoretical paradigm in youth ministry is shifting right now.

It’s shifting from big youth ministry to smaller youth ministry.

It’s shifting from event-driven and program-oriented to personal and relational.

It’s shifting from making converts to making disciples.

It’s shifting from one-size-fits-all to a tailored approach for each youth ministry.

It’s shifting from bought to created.

It’s shifting from entertainment to theological and reflective.

It’s shifting from modern to postmodern (or even post-postmodern).

It’s shifting from a focus on numbers to a focus on people.

There’s a paradigm shift happening in youth ministry right now. Are you adapting or resisting?

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How to read 100+ books a year

October 16, 2012 — 13 Comments

It’s a line you hear often, yet few people seem to really put it into practice: leaders are readers (or: today a reader, tomorrow a leader). So maybe I should say: leaders should be readers, are supposed to be readers. Most of us agree on the necessity of reading, but few actually make reading an essential part of their lives. If you’re one of them, I’ll share in this post how I manage to read more than a 100 books a year (I’m usually around 150 a year I think, I don’t keep track though)…and still have time for a lot of other things I’m passionate about.

What does it take to read a substantial amount of books a year, say more than a hundred? Here’s my advice.

1. Make reading easy

The first thing you have to do, is making reading easy. I’ve bought myself a Kindle and an iPad so I always have something to read with me. When I go to the doctor’s, the dentist, when I’m traveling, where ever I go, I always have something to read with me and I use the smallest amounts of time to read a few pages. I’ve read whole books this way!

Reading more than 100 books a year is doable with these tips and tricks.

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