Tom McKee
Where can we find good volunteers to sponsor the youth program?
Robert Townsend portrays this dilemma for us: “Probably whenever Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and the other chiefs powwowed, the first topic of conversation was the shortage of Indians. Certainly today, no meeting of the high and the mighty is complete until someone polishes the conventional wisdom: ‘Our big trouble today is getting enough good people.'”1
Perhaps you identify with the problem of finding enough good people to sponsor an effective and vital youth ministry. Perhaps you inherited (or recruited in a moment of panic) some volunteers you wish you didn’t have. Take Stan, for example. Stan loved to work with young people. He was always on hand at every activity—energetic, committed, and enthusiastic. But one night at church, he passed around pictures he had taken of one of the girls in the youth group who had modeled for him out in the woods. Although there was nothing wrong in the pictures themselves, people began to be concerned about the countless hours Stan was spending with girls in the group. His wife complained that she and his two young children never saw him.
What do you do with a Stan? You can tell him to stop taking pictures; you can urge him not to neglect his family. However, his unwise and undiscerning behavior will continue to appear in other forms.
Or what about Randy, a parent who volunteered to work with the teens? On his first Sunday evening as youth sponsor, with fifteen teens in the back of his pickup, he was spinning “donuts” in the parking lot after church on his way to an afterglow.
Or consider John, who would never do anything to keep you awake at night. At times, though, you wished he would, because he needed some life. He loved kids, he prayed for them, and he thought he had the gift of teaching. But his classes were boring, and the young people were constantly making fun of him.
Since none of us wants to spend our time untangling webs and lying awake wondering what crazy thing is going to happen next, we need to take seriously the problems of recruiting volunteer staff. Two problems seem to trouble us all.
First, how do I work with the staff I inherited as a new pastor?
Second, how do I find new people to minister on the youth team?
Working with Inherited Staff
The pastor entering a church has two options. One is to clean house. If the youth staff is fanatically loyal to the former pastor, this may be the best option. Every time the pastor tries to work with the youth leaders, all he hears is “But that’s not how Pastor Jones did it.”
Many of us are not bold enough to fire our staff the first week in a new church and start fresh. However, it is an option; Bill Stuart used it when he arrived as youth pastor at First Baptist of Modesto, California. He had come with the understanding that all youth workers would be dismissed and he would recruit his own staff.
“I just didn’t want to fight with anybody who didn’t agree with me,” he explains. “I wanted to do it my way.”2
Bill is a strong leader and is able to use that leadership tactic. Others perhaps use the same method but disguise it in political maneuvers that attempt to avoid hurt feelings.
The other option is to work with the staff already in place. However, if you have a problem like Stan, Randy, or John, it has to be faced. No matter how you approach Stan, it will not be easy, because he is basically immature and shows a lack of spiritual depth. If the teens are attached to him, the problem is compounded, and you are in a no-win situation. You can call it “temporary leave” or “creating a new position for Stan,” but in his mind it will be interpreted as “firing.”
In this case, the Christian education board of the church made a decision to ask Stan to take a temporary leave of absence to spend more time with his family. Stan became very hostile toward the church and bitter toward his wife. After six months, the CE board had to face the matter again and did not reinstate Stan. Although some young people left the church, Stan did not. He remained and continued to hang around the young people every chance he could.
The church never really did solve this. It learned a valuable lesson: Never recruit on an impulse.
Randy does not present as difficult a problem. He is a parent trying to be a kid again, and he can be confronted on his behavior at face value. Usually, if handled immediately, this will solve the problem. If not, he can become another Stan.
When the pastor talked to Randy up front, man to man, and let him know the sponsors needed to set the example even in areas such as driving, Randy responded beautifully. Of course, not everyone will do so. A smaller person will be defensive and get upset about the confrontation.
But we cannot be afraid of these confrontations. The problem that most of us face is not wanting to hurt feelings, so we ignore these kinds of problems. As a pastor I sometimes have to make painful decisions and ask a few people to step down from ministry. I have never been good at this kind of thing, and it does not always go smoothly. I know that some who were dismissed still think they were wronged; however, for the sake of the group and the ministry it was necessary.
Finding New Staff
Filling vacancies has its hazards as well. How do we find sponsors for that rowdy junior high group? This seems to be a constant struggle; people frequently resign their positions, leaving significant gaps in our ministry team.
Back in the twenties, when little Center College’s “Praying Colonels” football team defeated mighty Harvard, Captain “Bo” Macmillan was asked how they did it. He replied, “There were eleven men in every play that Center made!”3 One superstar cannot make a football team or a youth team, and it is important to consider every position carefully.
The truth is, some have the gift of working with young people, and some do not. The Bible teaches that the Lord has put gifts in the church, and one of our primary responsibilities as pastor is to help people discover these gifts and equip them for the ministry (Eph. 4:11-12). We’ve all known youth leaders who had about as much rapport with young people as a wounded cobra.
Someone suggested placing a want ad in the church paper that reads:
Wanted: A youth worker for a growing youth group—a real challenge for the right person. Opportunity to become better acquainted with people. Applicant must offer experience as shop worker, educator (all levels, including college), artist, salesman, diplomat, writer, theologian, politician, Boy and Girl Scout leader, minor-league athlete, psychologist, vocational counselor, psychiatrist, funeral director, master of ceremonies, circus clown, missionary, and social worker.
Helpful but not essential: experience as a butcher, baker, cowboy, and Western Union messenger. Must know all about the problems of birth, marriage, and death; must also be conversant with latest theories and practices in areas like pediatrics, economics, and nuclear science. Right person will hold firm views on every topic but is careful not to upset people who disagree. Must be forthright but flexible. Returns criticism and backbiting with Christian love and forgiveness. Should have outgoing, friendly disposition at all times. Should be a captivating speaker and intent listener. Will pretend he enjoys hearing junior highers talk. Directly responsible for views and conduct to all church members and visitors; not confined to direction or support from any one person. All replies kept confidential. Anyone applying will undergo full investigation to determine sanity.4
Is this what it takes to be the successful youth sponsor? If so, we can stop looking now. Yet, to be honest, we often think the best person to work with youth is a tall, good-looking, blond-haired young man who is a cross between Joe Montana and Johnny Carson. And in fact, that is what some churches demand today.
But the truth is that often some of the best youth workers are the most unlikely candidates. We need to forget caricatures and be open to the person of God’s choosing.
A Recruiting Strategy
It is important to establish a procedure to help people find their gifts. Whether we are working with a team that was handed to us or recruiting a new team, we should consider several key practices:
Recruit task-oriented teams rather than individuals.
Lyle E. Schaller says, “A growing trend is to create a team of five to ten adults to serve as advisers to the junior high youth group. Instead of asking one adult, or perhaps a husband-wife couple, to be the adult counselors, this approach calls for enlisting a team of perhaps seven adults who will share on some community-building experiences, including training, and who will function as a team in working with the fifteen to twenty-five junior high youth.”5
Schaller goes on to say that churches using the team system usually discover it is easier to enlist seven volunteers than to find one adult who will carry the whole responsibility alone. The team needs an up-front person who can communicate with teens, someone who has the gift of teaching biblical truth in an enthusiastic manner. If the church is small, you may have only one other person on this team with the gift of helps to take care of behind-the-scenes details—distributing and collecting sports equipment, bringing food for the socials, gathering the odds and ends needed for the games. In the larger church, the team may also have someone who is a good listener, effective in one-to-one discipleship, and someone with the gift of administration to organize activities and social events. But the point is that if people can know their roles on the team, they can function with confidence in their area of responsibility.
Help people on the team know exactly what they are supposed to do.
John, the quiet, dedicated young man mentioned at the beginning of this chapter who loved young people, was an unlikely youth worker. Since he was single, he was available to give evenings and weekends. He was available and dedicated. But he really did not have the gift of teaching and had a hard time relating to the young people. He was so quiet he could not command authority, and the youth group often manipulated him. However, to tell John he could not work with youth would crush his spirit.
His pastor took John on a trip; they spent a week together evaluating his life. During that week, the pastor saw the deep dedication of this young man and his unusual desire to pray. In the many hours they spent in the car they talked about his abilities, and they began to forge a job description to fit him.
Following that week, John was moved into a helping ministry. He took charge of transportation for the group. He provided quiet one-on-one counsel with many guys. (One-on-one, he was great. With more than two, he was at a loss.) John came alive with his new role as part of the youth team. The church had done John a disfavor by assuming that everyone who wants to work with youth should be a teacher.
We cannot take every person in the church on a week-long trip; however, we need to look carefully at our staff and evaluate their positions. Some pastors do this at leadership retreats. Some do this at youth staff meetings once a year. Others meet with their key leaders for lunch or breakfast.
Write job descriptions and a covenant for ministry.
One of the big problems in the church is that we are too nebulous; we do not communicate in writing what we expect of our youth workers. It is helpful to have the requirements expressed in two documents: the job description (what the volunteer is supposed to do), and the covenant for ministry (what the volunteer is supposed to be in terms of spiritual maturity and commitment to the job).
Stan had no problem with the job description. He knew he could attend all the meetings, plan games, teach lessons, and do anything else on the sheet. Stan also knew what the other members of the team were supposed to do: John would meet with young people individually for discipleship and arrange for refreshments, Mary would call the girls each week, George would teach the Sunday class.
But Stan was never told what he was supposed to be in the area of spiritual maturity. The guidelines about being an example in his devotional life, his attendance at church, the priority of his family, his relationship with the girls in the group, and his supportive attitude toward the entire ministry of the church were never spelled out.
All this can become legalistic, of course, but it is essential to try to make our expectations clear. Some churches include in their youth worker covenants the Scriptures about elders and deacons (1 Tim. 3); others go into great detail about the lifestyle expected of the youth worker. The point is that at the very beginning of the interview you can outline exactly what kind of commitment the church is asking for. Parachurch groups such as Bible Study Fellowship have taught us a valuable lesson: They demand a high level of commitment from their leaders, and they get it. We do the church an injustice by lowering the standard of commitment.
Publicize volunteer needs in the church.
Often people say to me, “Tom, I didn’t know the church needed teachers.” The opportunities for ministry need to be constantly presented to the congregation. This may be done through sermons, church newsletter, regular surveys (perhaps annual), new-member classes, Sunday school classes, and special presentations in the services. Recently we devised a page of “Want Ads” that we publish every few months advertising our need for workers. We highlight not only teachers but also ushers, volunteer officer workers, and maintenance workers as needed.
Now this can present real problems when the “Stans” quickly volunteer immediately after you have “fired” them. That is the significance of the next practice:
Interview all prospective workers.
Some time ago a young girl cornered me after a message from Ephesians 4 on being equipped for ministry. She felt called to be a youth worker in our church. I had some reservations about her, but since I had opened my mouth in the sermon, I made an appointment to talk with her about it. I called the session an “interview for ministry” and told her I would be asking questions about her philosophy of ministry, Scripture knowledge, and typical counseling questions teenagers ask.
When I asked Karen what Scriptures she would use to talk to a teenager about assurance of salvation, she didn’t have an answer. When I asked what Scriptures she would use to talk to a teenager about sexual temptations, she admitted she did not know very much about the Bible. However, when I asked her what counsel she should give to a fifteen-year-old girl who was pregnant, she suggested several insightful options.
Karen seemed to be a good counselor, loved young people, and showed concern. We went through the Bible helping her to find answers to some of the questions we’d discussed; then I challenged her to enter discipleship with an older woman in the church, from whom she could learn more of these things. After a year she could apply for the position again.
She was disappointed, but she was also encouraged about being discipled. Instead of being turned down, she was affirmed in her desire and guided toward training.
The hours devoted to implementing these practices consume so much valuable time that we are tempted to take short cuts. However, only by establishing a strong base of leadership will we in the long run be free to minister in other areas.
Robert Townsend, Up the Organization (New York: Fawcett, 1971), p. 96.
Interview, Wittenburg Door, August 1971, p. 4.
Gaines S. Dobbins, Learning to Lead (Nashville: Broadman, 1968), p. 79.
Ray Stedman, “The Lord and His Workman,” Discovery Papers (Palo Alto, Calif.: Peninsula Bible Church), February 24, 1974, p. 1. Adapted.
Lyle E. Schaller, The Parish Paper, February 1984, p. 1.
© 1986 Christianity Today
