Biggest Challenges in YM? What would you add?

I received an email from a prospective student who simply asked: What would you say some of the challenges of youth ministry are? Here are my responses off the top of my head.  What would you add?

1. To maintain your own spiritual health – there are always more kids and parents to help and serve, lessons to write, and retreats to plan.
2. To maintain a healthy balance with your family – see above!
3. To learn humility as a young leader – when we are young, we always assume we know what is best. However, do I really know everything I will ever know at 25? at 35? at 45? etc.  What might I learn in the future replace what I know at 25? Everything I know is to be held with faith and open palms… and much humility!
4. To relate and encourage parents as a young leader – What does a 22 yr old ym have to say to parents? Plenty! And Plenty NOT! It is about listening and offering help and suggestions when invited and in loving ways… Oh to be a parent and really understand how hard it is! Parents are the real youth ministers; we want to partner with them and help them any way we can.
5. To empower and equip a staff – most young leaders (and many seasoned ones) think that the YM is theirs, “My Ministry” and they bark out orders to recruit others to work for them instead of listening, serving with, empowering and ordaining others to their ministries so that they own it.  It is “flattening” the hierarchy of top-down leadership seen most often in American corporations.  Turn it upside down so that the janitors and secretaries are the most important people and then you have something!
6. To deal with conflict – how do you spell politics? P-E-O-P-L-E!  Any where you have people, you will have politics and conflict.  It is because we operate with what we know to be right (see number 3 above) and we have a hard time seeing it differently.  If I was wrong, I wouldn’t know that I was wrong but that I was right.  It would feel the same if I was right or I was wrong and didn’t know it. Working with others and humbling myself to listen. You will always have conflict with other staff, other leaders, parents, kids, your own family, your own self!!!
7. To develop a clear understanding of where you need to go (vision and mission), what to do and how to get there (strategy and teaching plan) – Our ultimate aim is to be sure that our students do not need us when they go off to college… they must be independent and able to “fish on their own” because we “taught them how to fish instead of giving them fish for four years of HS youth group!” That takes deep theological reflection, collaborative planning, and a tenacity to never give up “presenting everyone as mature” (Col 1:28-29).
8. To incarnate yourself in the lives of kids and the church you will be serving with – I saved this for last, not because it is of least importance, but because I want to emphasize how vital it is to understand first when you begin a new ministry and that it is completely different from any other church or youth group that you have ever been a part of… even it the church was in the same town.  Every group, church, people, individual has a different culture or environment. As a cutural anthropologist, you must enter a new situation as an anthropologist enters a new people group always learning and never assuming that you fully understand the customs, idioms, language, ideas, etc. I was in a church for 15 yrs and was never considered a Streatorite, one born and raised there. How do leaders think they can make changes in a church or youth group within the first month! Silly!

So, what do you think? What would you add?

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