eZine 01.26.2010

“One Thing”
Months ago my friend Brandon, a youth pastor of a growing new church near Sacramento, asked me, “Jonathan, what’s the one thing I really need to teach my volunteers this fall?”

Wow! One thing? That really narrows it down.

He must have seen the smoke coming out of my ears as my mental gears were grinding to find a simple answer to his question. So he elaborated. “You know, I’ve got some new volunteers and some who began volunteering last year. What is the most important thing they need to know as we begin our ministry with students this year?”

Good question. How would you answer? The quick reply I gave him was, “Equip your staff to love students and connect with them.” But Brandon’s question continued to nag at me. I wondered, Is the answer really that simple? Did other youth workers agree?

So I set out to research an article on the topic. I surveyed youth workers who use our Web site as a resource, and I talked to a number of authors and youth ministry professors. When I asked them Brandon’s question, I was surprised at the similarity of all their responses. The importance of connecting one-on-one kept rising to the top.

Saddleback’s Kurt Johnston responded quickly with his “priority one” for volunteers: “It’s all about relationships.”

That sums it up well. It doesn’t matter what you call it: Contacting, connecting, building relationships- it’s all about our relationships with students. I don’t think I received a single response that didn’t include this important element. We need to connect with students.

But sometimes this doesn’t come naturally. “Connecting can be extremely scary for volunteers at first,” shared Don Talley, Senior Director of YFC USA Ministry. “In my experience, volunteers (whether in a church or parachurch ministry) initially struggle with the concept of contacting or initiating relationships with students. Teaching your volunteers the importance of how to initiate a relationship with a teenager can produce a ministry of hospitality and warmth.”

Let me ask you this: Do you want uninvolved chaperones, or would you rather be part of a youth ministry team that is interacting with students, hanging out with them outside of youth group, and loving them for who they are?

There’s a big difference between a youth ministry with what I call chaperones and one with volunteers who connect. You may have witnessed a youth ministry that uses chaperones and observed a bunch of students in the middle of the room with the adults around the perimeter in a large horseshoe shape. Guess what? We don’t need uninvolved chaperones who want to sit around and talk with each other. Instead we need people who love students and want to get to know them. We need adults who will break out of the horseshoe and start initiating contact with students.

Here’s another thought: What if it’s not that our adult youth workers don’t believe in initiating contact-perhaps they just don’t know how?

Mark Oestreicher agreed, “I think all volunteers need basic training on how to connect with teenagers.”

So how can we help our volunteers not only understand the importance of initiating contact but equip them to do it?

Be Like Flatulence
I trained my junior high staff how to avoid the “horseshoe” by telling them, “Be like flatulence.”

Uh, come again?

Let me explain. Remember in elementary school when everyone sat at their desks quietly working on their math, and the student in the corner of the classroom let out one of those silent-but-deadly ones? One by one, the stench reached each student in the classroom, starting in the corner, working its way to the uttermost parts of the room. If you could watch students respond from above, you would notice students react one by one, the closest first, then finally the farthest away.

This process is called dynamic equilibrium. I can still remember my science teacher Mr. Jenson explaining it to us. He opened a jar of some stinky chemical in one corner of the room and told us to raise our hands when we smelled it. One by one I saw dynamic equilibrium taking place. The molecules spread throughout the entire room until they could spread no more. Hmmmm. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t we all love to see our volunteers spread evenly throughout the room and mixed in with the crowd of students?

At the beginning of each school year, I always invested time in training my staff and volunteers. At these trainings I emphasized that I didn’t need uninvolved chaperones; I needed relational staff. I explained the idea of dynamic equilibrium and instructed them to be like molecules seeking dynamic equilibrium. In other words, I wanted to look across the room at any time and see a sea of students with staff members spread throughout-not in bunches, but mixed throughout the students.

My staff never forget the flatulence analogy-crude but effective. Simply dissipate through the room evenly. Whenever I saw staff bunched up in clumps, I simply told them, “Break wind,” and they knew exactly what I was talking about.

I’ve used that analogy for years now in articles and various training seminars. At a recent National Youth Workers Conference, a group saw me and pulled me aside. With a smirk on his face, the leader pulled out a small card they gave to all volunteers which simply read F.A.R.T.-the acronym was even surrounded by artwork of a stench cloud: Float Around the Room and Talk. My friend Danette has adopted this acronym and actually puts the word F.A.R.T. on her youth group schedule each night at 6:30 p.m. as a reminder of what her volunteers should be doing.

Making Connecting Priority One
Encouraging and equipping our volunteers to mingle with students is a great start, but making connecting a priority throughout our entire ministries is a whole different animal. For many of us, contacting students is just one little item on our list of training tools-it fits neatly into our Saturday training between small groups and youth culture. But what would it look like if instead it was at the forefront of what we do?

It’s no secret-when I recruited volunteers, I was very clear about their number-one objective: Spending time with students. Connecting with students is more important than any programming or logistical need. I wanted my volunteers engaging with students one-on-one.

Think about this: If our volunteers are recruited with the understanding that their number-one job is loving students and hanging out with them, what impact would that have on our youth ministry?

What if we created an atmosphere where every student in our ministry has at least one adult who is crazy about them?

“In order for students to make it, they need dedicated fans,” said Brock Morgan, YS workshop presenter, “adults who will come alongside them and walk this journey of life with them-through the good, bad, and the ugly.”

“This is NOT something our volunteers JUST do during youth group,” added Susan Eaton, a youth worker in northern Kentucky. “I want them emailing students, sending them cards, making some kind of contact with them during the week. Don’t just depend on Sunday night (youth group night) to be enough. Be intentional about connecting with them during the week.”

Remember Jay, the youth pastor I described at the beginning of this chapter? His youth ministry volunteers meet every week and report who they are hanging out with and what’s going on in their lives. This inventory of changed lives is far more important than any numbers or programming. Jay is all about getting his leaders connected with students.

And hopefully Jay isn’t just telling his leaders to do this. A good leader will teach this by example, connecting with students as well.

More than a decade ago I led a junior high ministry. Like Jay, I gathered my adult leaders after youth group so we could share our experiences with students that week. This accomplished two things: 1. It was encouraging to hear how God was working in the lives of students. 2. It kept us accountable-we knew we would be sharing about the time we invested-or didn’t invest-with students that week.

I didn’t just facilitate these meetings; I took part in them, sharing about my one-on-one times with students that week. Like my volunteers, I tried to connect with about five students regularly. I called each of them weekly and got together with each one of them about once a month.

Ricky was one of the students I connected with right away. His cousins had gone through my youth group, and his aunt asked me if I could keep an eye on him on his first day as a seventh grader. I introduced him to the other students and hung out with him during youth group time. After a few weeks I took him out for fries at one of the fast-food places in the area. As time progressed, I got to know Ricky fairly well. It was common to see Ricky at my house for dinner and in my car with me running errands all over town. I even got to be with Ricky the day he received Christ. That was a good day.

As time passed, Ricky moved to another school, and we saw less and less of each other. This concerned me because I knew he was starting to hang out with a rough group of friends. But he was in the hands of another youth worker, so I prayed God would take care of him. Eventually Ricky dropped off my radar. I felt guilty for letting that happen, and I often wondered what happened to Ricky.

Fast-forward 10 years.

I received an email about a month ago (as I sit here writing this). It was from someone who found me through my Web site:

I wondered if this could be him. I wrote back to this “Ricky”:

I gave him my personal email and phone number. Sure enough, it was the same Ricky I’d spent so much time with, now happily married with two children and working with youth at his church.

Not long ago Ricky and I met for lunch, and he told me his story. Apparently those friends of his were bad news. Ricky explained how he made some bad decisions but knew God had something better.

Enter cute girl, stage left. God grabbed Ricky’s attention with a girl. She was the daughter of a pastor and invited Ricky to church. To make a long story short, Ricky got back on track with God, and a few years later they got married.

Ricky told me, “I appreciate everything you did for me. You hung out with me, you had me over for dinner with your family, you took me to church-you even took me shopping for your wife’s birthday.” The now 25-year-old Ricky hugged me and thanked me for the time I’d invested in him. He couldn’t remember a thing I’d said 10 years before, but he thanked me for spending time with him and loving him.

Loving students. Isn’t that what youth ministry is about?

This article is just an excerpt of Chapter 2 of Jonathan’s brand new book, CONNECT. Click here to get this book now at a huge discount, AND receive a free PowerPoint training to help your leadership team set the stage to start CONNECTING!

In the U.S., we are pretty fanatical about our Super Bowl. This televised event is a great excuse for social gatherings across the country, so we like to encourage those of you in youth ministry to cash in on this great event opportunity.

Each year we provide a “ready-made” Super Bowl event idea that you can use during this time. It’s this simple:

• Plan a Super Bowl Party with food, fun and giveaways
• On February 1st, host the party at a place with a big TV
• Use our ready-made quiz (coming NEXT WEEK- in the EZINE issue before the big game) that we provide as a fun “event activity”

Youth Groups have used this activity for years as a great event for fun and fellowship.

Pop Quiz: How many hours do kids spend consuming “entertainment media” each week?

You Might Be Surprised
The correct answer is “C.”

According to the long awaited and highly anticipated Kaiser Family Foundation’s report entitled Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, students between 7th and 12th grade spend 7 hours and 38 minutes every day (or 53.4 hours, weekly) taking in various forms of “entertainment media.”

That’s more time than is required to drive from coast to coast. (Google it if you don’t believe me.) And as for homework…well, if you picked “B” it’s clear you need to do some homework.

Every week, kids spend over 53 hours listening to music, surfing the web, watching TV, taking in a movie, thumbing through a magazine, playing video games, enjoying mobile apps on their cell phone… or all of the above… at the same time.

That’s right. Since kids tend to “media multitask” – for example, watching TV while listening to music at the same time – KFF inquired about that tendency, and found that kids actually cram a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes of different media into the span of 7 hours and 38 minutes!

That’s like an all-you-can-eat media buffet…

David R. Smith is the Director of Content Development at TheSource4YM.com, providing truly free resources and ideas that help youth workers reach kids. David speaks and trains around the U.S., sharing the gospel, and equipping others to do the same.

Let’s face it, this last year has been full of transitions for many of us. Some of us are looking for change, have had to leave jobs, start new ones… or just wish we had jobs! If that’s the case, this podcast is for you!
Episode #33 (1/11/2010)

Join Jonathan, David, and Todd as they discuss The Seven Sins of Making a Transition in Youth Ministry.

Listen to it now for free on iTunes! (CLICK HERE) Or, if you don’t have iTunes already… jump on Apple’s web page for a free download, then click on our podcast page.

Episode Highlights:

• Todd opens up about his recent experience being “let go” from his youth ministry job
• Learn what Duck, Duck, Goose is called in South Africa
• Hear the guys talk about some difficult transitions they’ve faced in ministry
• Listen in as Jonathan tells his joke about church splits
• Gain some wisdom for what to do in hard times in ministry