Ten years ago, almost to the day, I walked into the church office at South Canyon Lutheran Church in Rapid City, South Dakota, stood nervously at the desk, and said “I’m your new youth pastor”.
I've spent a decade being influenced and directed by the Holy Spirit. He's real and he has the power to change lives and bring fulfillment that's impossible to find anywhere else. My hope is that the title of this article, named after the 2004 song by Taking Back Sunday, might pique the interest of a few fellow Millennials. I've gotten you here, please hear me out. I’ve been in full time ministry for ten years, and as I’ve been reflecting on the last decade of my life, there are a few things I’ve learned that I want to share in the hopes of encouraging anybody who finds themselves drawn to ministry or who is just navigating life in search of meaning.
Truth #1: It’s Not a Job, It’s a Calling
The first thing that has become glaringly obvious to me as I’ve navigated full time ministry for ten years is that youth ministry is not just a job.
A caution:
As I see it, there are two different errant ways people approach youth ministry.
The first is to approach it as practice for “real” ministry. Within American church culture especially, youth ministry is often seen as a steppingstone; a way to “practice” ministry in a setting where it doesn’t really matter because teenagers aren’t taken seriously. The thought is that you practice on teenagers until you’re good enough to be called up to the big time, real pastoral ministry.
Approaching youth ministry this way falls short in so many ways. It’s scientifically true that the teenage brain is not fully developed and that it functions largely without the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain which enables good decision making), but that hardly means that teenagers aren’t worth pouring into or that discipling them is futile. I’ve seen God moving and working in the lives of teenagers in ways that would put the adults in a given church to shame. All it takes is a little patience and understanding.
The second wrong way to do youth ministry is to treat it as “just a job”. The role of raising up the next generation to walk faithfully with God is a huge responsibility. If one approaches youth ministry with the conviction that actions and decisions in this life have eternal consequences and that what Scripture claims is objectively true, there is no “clocking out”.
Treating youth ministry as just another job is fundamentally flawed because the only real reason somebody holds any job is for the paycheck. Of course, a worker deserves his wages (1 Tim 5:17) but treating ministry as just a paycheck betrays a lack of conviction which cannot lead to any kind of meaningful fruitfulness. Clocking out for the day does not absolve you of responsibility to be present in the lives of students. If a paycheck is the only thing causing you to invest in the lives of the next generation, you're doing it wrong.
In my experience, anybody who treats youth ministry in either of these two ways misses the mark of what God expects of those charged with building up his Kingdom. This is not just my personal conviction. Scripture is unambiguous about the expectation of those who teach.
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
James 3:1 ESV
Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.
Mark 9:42 ESV
This is a grave reminder that any kind of ministry (especially youth ministry) is not simply another job. Anyone who teaches God’s Word and helps walk young believers through the ins and outs of the Christian faith has the responsibility to handle Scripture carefully and rightly.
An encouragement:
And yet, the truth that ministry is a calling and not simply a job is also of great comfort, because we know that theologically speaking, God is the one who does the work. If you’ve been called into ministry, it’s not up to you to succeed because God is the one who really does the work. God called you and God is the one who will use you to do his work . This has been a repeated source of peace over the last ten years as I’ve experienced the highs and lows of ministry.
I remember the first lull in numbers I experienced as a youth pastor. I was driving to work, laboring over the fact that my group which had started with 35 high schoolers had recently diminished down to 12. I prayed for God to show me if there was something I was doing wrong or if there was something I needed to be doing differently in order for the students to keep showing up. And in the silence of my truck, sitting at a traffic light I still remember how God spoke to me.
“It’s never been about you.”
God is the one who works in the lives of the people we are called to minister to. The Holy Spirit is the one which convicts the world of its sin (John 16:8). It’s not on me to convince anybody of anything. All I’m called to do is to bear witness to what I know God to have done in my life, and God promises that he’ll handle the rest. This is incredibly comforting because rather than having the pressure of eternal fates on your conscience, you simply get to be a part of the work that God is doing. He doesn’t need you to participate, he allows you to for your benefit. Your inability isn't preventing God from doing what he wants to do.
Truth #2: Your Personality is from God
Another thing I’ve learned in my first ten years of full-time ministry is that God did not make you to be a template; he made you to be you.
Especially in America, there are certain expectations and assumptions that go along with ministry. “Oh, you’re a youth pastor? You must be [X,Y,Z]!” The cultural norms around “church life” can tend to try to conform people occupying different roles into pre-packaged cookie cutter shapes. My advice to anybody starting out in ministry is that God gave you your personality and out of his own creative goodness made you different and distinct from any other person on the planet. It’s okay to own that.
As someone called from a career in graphic arts into ministry, this has always particularly bugged me. Don’t do things just because “that’s what a youth pastor does”.
I’ve never done gross-out games at youth group because frankly I think they’re dumb and they distract from the real stuff God wants to do in some of the more introverted teenagers who might be mortified at the possibility of being called up in front of the group.
Please don’t misunderstand.
In today’s day and age this truth of embracing your personality needs to be qualified.
If you follow Christ, your identity is first and foremost in him. You’re a new creation (2 Cor 5:17) and there are qualities that come with having the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of you. If you’re living for Christ you cannot also embrace sin (sin being defined by what God identifies in Scripture as sin).
Whether you’re in ministry or not, the personality God gave you is distinct from your tendency towards certain sins. Pet sins and vices are not part of your personality – they’re a distortion of it, and to say that they’re part of how God wants you to be is to misunderstand sin and misrepresent God’s perfect design.
God gave you a personality, and gives you space to live into who you are while also pursuing righteousness and walking in lockstep with the Spirit (Gal 5:16-26). Within living passionately for Christ, there is also plenty of room to be who God made you to be, and not what other people think you should be.
Over the years, I’ve realized that my approach to ministry is modeled much more closely to the pop-punk bands of the early 2000’s than on anything I’ve seen or experienced in church (in approach, obviously not in content). The vulnerability of that genre of music spoke to me at an age where I was deciding who I wanted to be. When I’m up in front of the church preaching or leading youth group, I try to act more like Ryan Key of Yellowcard between songs than Billy Graham preaching to thousands (again, in approach - not in content).
There is nothing wrong with polished preachers, but I’ve never been one of them. I want to be real and transparent because that’s how I’ve found I can connect with people, and the more polished and artificial a presentation is, the less authentic I feel.
Other preachers are natural salesmen and lean into that from the pulpit for the Kingdom of God. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s also nothing wrong with taking a different approach if the conventional way of doing ministry doesn’t fit with the gifts that God has given you.
God didn’t make you to be a cookie cutter with no individuality; he made you to be you. Accepting who you are in this way brings glory to God.
Truth #3: Your Reward is in Heaven
The third insight I’ve learned is that ministry is a very thankless job. There are strange hours, long stretches of overstimulating activity, and even when you’re not “on”, you’re still on. Every church context is different, and healthy boundaries can go a long way, but at the end of the day it can often be hard to see the fruits of your labor.
Another factor that can lead to disillusionment is the current trend, especially among young adults and families, of approaching church with a consumer mentality. The question often asked (albeit probably not aloud) is “what can I get out of this church?”
What happens is that families will use one church for their Sunday morning worship experience, another church for their children’s programming, and another for their youth ministry.
This unintentionally creates a system where local churches are pitted against each other in competition. The threat is always looming that if a family is unsatisfied with some aspect of the church, they’ll simply leave and find what they’re looking for elsewhere. If Matt's not always on his game at youth group and my student isn't constantly stimulated and engaged , we'll just go find that elsewhere.
Add to this the current cultural climate we're surrounded by and it can be easy to get discouraged. I have often felt (and actually understood from the outset) that God has called me to what looks like a losing fight. Looking around at societal trends and trajectory, the Christian faith is looked on with less tolerance by the year.
If you lose the eternal perspective, it can be hard to justify putting in such emotionally involved work. The key is to remember that we work not for human bosses but for God’s Kingdom. God does not see what man sees (1 Sam 16:7), and the work we do is not for an earthly reward.
Even when nobody sees the work you’re putting in, even when your deep care and love for people is rejected, even when you put everything you have into the ministry God has called you to and it seems not to yield any results, you can take hope because God sees everything, and God judges your faithfulness, not visible results.
Consider Jesus’ words:
Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven.
Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Matthew 6:1-4 ESV
God sees what you do even when nobody else does. God sees your heart, even when nobody else notices. When you faithfully follow what God has called you to, regardless of recognition and accolades, you’re storing up treasure in heaven that far surpasses any fleeting satisfaction here on earth.
Jesus goes on:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21 ESV
In ministry, it can be hard to keep this eternal perspective, but faithfulness matters much more to God than numbers or popular opinion.
This is not to say that you will never have encouraging results or tangible growth. What I’m saying is that you need not look to them for validation and your sense of identity and worth. There will be payoffs, “lightbulb” moments, and encouragement that will keep you going. God is very good at that. Take the encouragement where you find it but know that your reward is ultimately in heaven.
Truth #4: God is Faithful
Reflecting on a decade under the influence of the Holy Spirit directing my life and growing me in order help grow others, the most emphatic truth I’ve come to recognize is that God is always faithful. I have seen God show up and sustain me in places and times where I would have much rather given up and thrown in the towel. God is everything you need and promises to never let you down. It's easy to say this, but I've lived it for ten years. It's different when the weekly giving at church is your source of income and you're trusting in God to constnatly provide. And he does.
If God has called you to do something, he will see it done. Take comfort in that, because it’s deafeningly true. God has never failed at anything. Not once throughout the entire history of creation has God’s will not been accomplished.
The fact that ministry in our day and age is difficult is nothing new. Jesus told his disciples point blank that the world would hate them and reject them because it hated and rejected him first (John 15:18-25). The fact that we can look at Jesus’ words and see them clearly reflected in the face of our modern society speaks strongly to the fact that none of what we’re seeing happen has happened outside of God’s grand plan.
And the thing that keeps me going is that we know how God’s plan ultimately ends. We know that God wins. We know that Jesus is coming back. We know that there will always be a faithful remnant who continue to faithfully serve God after everyone else has turned away.
We are on the right side of history.
God has promised that Jesus will return and will fix everything that is wrong with this world. God has never broken a promise and has never failed or even been wrong about anything in history. What God says will happen is virtually guaranteed to happen. We know that the ending is immeasurably better than we could ever imagine.
All God calls us to in the here and now is to be faithful and persevere, and he will handle everything else.
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