The Ultimate Survival Guide for Youth Ministers: Maintaining Boundaries in Youth Ministry

By Joel L. Lund

Ever wonder why the average career in youth ministry is so short-lived? Its not because the youth minister grows up into real ministry. Too often, it is becausewithout adequate boundariesthe youth minister is swept away, burned out, or chewed up. From someone that has been there, author Joel Lund brings the ultimate guide for a healthier ministry and a healthier you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449729608

Joel L. Lund

Joel Lund worked in full-time youth ministry for eight years, before becoming a part-time assistant to his wife’s ministry, during her seven years of full-time youth work. Joel and Janet are the delighted parents of a teenager and live in Boise, Idaho. Last week Joel was very involved in Idaho’s largest writer’s conference, and was delighted to receive an Idaho Top 10 Author’s Award.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

SECTION ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

SECTION TWO

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Appendixes

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Bibliography

For my father,

Rev. Conrad E. Lund,

a minister to ministers.

Preface

The motivation for writing this book primarily came from my own experiences while engaged in eight years of full-time youth ministry in a church setting. There were so many things it would have been helpful to know about before entering the world of youth ministry. There were so many resources on the activities of youth work, but so little on the actor…the youth minister. And there is still very little that clarifies the role of the youth minister, particularly as it relates to the relational boundaries that come into play within youth ministry.

But motivation also came from having grown up in a minister’s home (yes, I’m a PK—a pastor’s kid) and being a witness to how important establishing and maintaining boundaries is. It’s imperative for the minister, but also for the minister’s family.

The expectations that one brings to the role, as well as those brought by those ministered to, are not always based in reality, scripture or even clear thinking. Examining where they come from, how they might manifest themselves and what to do about them is what this book is about.

As you will see it has been some time since I was directly involved in full-time youth ministry. I worked alongside my wife during her seven-years of full-time church-based youth ministry. We’ve both been involved in volunteer work ever since. While the world has morphed since our direct youth ministry experience, the themes addressed haven’t changed. But the challenges have, along with what’s at stake.

So if you are involved in youth ministry, full or part-time, in a church, a camp or a non-profit, learn about the boundaries you need to establish. Take time determining where your boundaries are. You’ll be glad you did and you’ll be a more effective servant.

Joel L. Lund

Boise, Idaho

Acknowledgments

A book of this type is not written in a vacuum. Many people, knowingly or unwittingly, have had a part in it.

I am grateful to those I have worked alongside of in ministry. Especially those who have been good ministers to me personally, ordained and lay: Jay Ford, Fred Sickert, Lance Anderson, LaVerne Anderson, Cathy Mutschler, Roger Steinke, Cheryl Kulas, LeRoy Anenson and Chris Boerger.

I am grateful, also, to the many people who have worked with me in various ways in youth ministry, the good people of Northlake Lutheran Church in Kenmore, Washington, and Trinity Lutheran Church in Fresno, California. I learned much from you.

There are the special mentors and friends of solace: Tim, Barbara, Don and most importantly, Irene.

My biggest debt is to my wife, Janet. She has been a constant within a world of change. Her support and enthusiasm has made writing possible. Of God’s many gifts to me throughout my life, she is the most astonishing and undeserved.

Introduction

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun:

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet and walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

Stay where you are until our backs are turned!

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, Good fences make good neighbours.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say Elves" to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there,

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, Good fences make good neighbours.¹

The whole thrust of ministry, in whatever capacity it is performed, but most especially that of youth ministry, is community, to bring people together in a shared experience of faith in Christ. Nurturing is a goal of any ministry, indeed it is the goal, perhaps. To attain this goal people must draw close to others, ministers must come alongside the members with whom they work. To be in community really assumes that there is intimacy at some level. Community means proximity. Closeness. A depth of knowledge of each other. It certainly assumes openness on the minister’s part. Being accessible to the people one minister’s to is a given.

And here is the rub. We don’t do openness well in western culture.² For many reasons, we don’t have much of a clue about boundaries in personal relationships, outside or inside the doors of the church.

From both the perspective of the minister and also the church member, there is more often than not very fuzzy thinking about boundaries, if there is any thought about it at all. I would argue the latter is most often the case. There is something we do not love about walls. Ministers, lay and clergy, strive to bring down the walls that separate. This is well and good, depending on what walls are being torn down. Walls of racism, ageism, economism, etc., are worthy of dismantling. So, of course, is the wall of sin that separates us from God. However, there are walls that need to remain standing. These walls have to do with privacy, with personality, with individual space. These rabbits need a place to hide. A well-tended garden is a wonderful thing to see, but it would not become one without a protective fence that keeps unwanted scavengers out. Leaders in the church, especially those involved in youth ministry, need to walk the line and set the wall between us once again. These words, no doubt, sound threatening to some. Perhaps even heretical. They should not. And they need not.

Ministry is unlike any other profession. It has similarities to many of the helping professions, but is unlike them all in that it has cast over it the long, and very abiding, shadow of God. There is the assumption, too often unexamined and unconscious, that the minister is God-in-the-flesh to the church member. You hear in the church statements like, Perhaps you are the only Jesus they will meet…, referring to the awesome responsibility we have as Christians, and especially those who work in the church.

A modest pastor, greeting parishioners after worship, was met by an enthusiastic old matriarch of the church, who thanked him for his sermon. In his meekness, he replied, Ah, it was the Lord…. The Lord was speaking through me. It was all the Lord. To which this wise old saint fired back: Well, it wasn’t that good, pastor!

Unfortunately those in the church, members and staff alike, are not always so observant (or honest) as that old woman. There is a problem in that shadow that is crucial to recognize. It isn’t always the Lord casting the shadow. It isn’t always the one in ministry. But if one isn’t looking to see from whom the shadow comes, one wanders into a sticky web of potentially disastrous problems that affect not only the minister but the folks being ministered to.

In church work it is difficult to not be all things to all people. It’s expected. There is, it would seem, a good precedent for that (1 Cor. 9:22). However, there are not many around today who would qualify as being able to do as the Apostle Paul did. And one might wonder just how successful Paul was at it. Conversely, one might wonder if what we mean when we say we try to please everybody in every way (1 Cor. 10:33) is what Paul meant.

It is a very powerful siren-song to believe that we can really make a lasting difference in a person’s life. It can be intoxicating to think that "I am so needed!" Not only needed, then, but placed, chosen, installed by God, to be as God to those one serves. Pretty heady stuff. It can be quite an ego booster, to be sure. To not recognize this potential response to the position one holds in ministry is foolhardy, at best. Of course, the heartache it can bring is beyond measure if left unchecked.

It is probably true that a great many people doing youth ministry today didn’t have such a great experience in their own adolescence. It has been theorized that quite likely most of the people in any helping profession are there, at least in part, to right some of the wrongs they experienced in their youth. They want to help others through a rough spot. Youth ministers are there to help adolescents and preadolescents through a very rough period of life. They want to help. This is certainly a worthy profession, and a worthy reason for engaging in it. But it has more than its fair share of snares and pitfalls, precisely because of the motivation for doing ministry and the target audience involved.

Often times the youth minister is not much older than the kids he/she is charged to love and care for. The rationale for this approach by congregations that call young people to minister to their kids is that the young youth minister will have the necessary energy to go the distance with the kids and that they will be able to speak the language. While this may be true, it is quite likely that the younger the youth minister is the less life experience this person will bring to their ministry, and the more likely it is that they will be serving a short time. The reason for this is that there are few boundaries that exist in church work. The young, or new, youth minister will not know this and is at high risk for getting creamed. Their thorn in the flesh might be:

1) an adult member with outrageous expectations

2) a staff colleague with strong ego needs for control

3) a kid with little ability to distinguish between Love and love

4) a parent, fearing they have failed, projecting their angst at them

5) a ministry peer threatened by their success(es)

6) their own unexamined expectation

There are plenty of war stories out there. You need only peruse one of the many professional journals available. Or simply consider that the average career in youth ministry must be judged to be short by just about any definition of career.³

So what is one to do in youth ministry? There are countless books, journals, seminars, conventions, videos, cassettes, magazines, etc., that address anything from the methodology, philosophy and theology of youth ministry, to the mechanics of how to do a decent job of Shaving Cream Wars. Resources for youth ministry are truly wonderful and seem limitless. Until you get creamed. Then the pickings are slim. Why that is I don’t know. But plan on getting creamed. It will happen. It is only a matter of time before something painful comes alongside you and snuggles close in for a spell. And know that it will happen more than once, unless you are very fortunate, or you jump ship frequently.

Roland Martinson, a veteran pastor in the Lutheran Church, and professor of pastoral care and counseling at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, has said:

The history of primarily calling inexperienced and inadequately trained young people to do youth ministry reflects the myth that youth ministry is a beginner’s job that does not require much education, experience or skill. Nothing could be further from the truth. Youth ministry is one of the most demanding ministries—so demanding and frustrating that many pastors and congregational leaders don’t know what to do….

Excellence in youth ministry requires persons of lively faith, solid theological understandings, substantial relational skills considerable organizational ability, and maturity. Youth ministry requires competence. It is a challenging task that can be learned. It is worthy of aspiration and thorough preparation by our best youth and adult lay leadership as well as our best pastors.⁴

In other words, youth ministry is much more difficult than regular ministry (read adult). The reasons include the nature of ministry, the radical changes of adolescence and the challenges that it brings to you and your kids, the broad expectations that you bring to ministry and everyone else brings to you, the long hours, the lack of affirmation, inadequate support networks (especially compared to those available to clergy), generally poor salaries…. Well, you get the point.

Good fences make good neighbours still. We need fences in the church. We need fences in youth ministry. Fences are boundaries, and boundaries mark limits. Boundaries proscribe where you can go with another in ministry and where you cannot. Boundaries are necessary. They do not minimize or limit ministry. They will limit where you go in a person’s life, as well as where they go in yours. Boundaries provide safety. They acknowledge that you are not all things to all people, nor will you ever be, and furthermore, you don’t want to be. You are not invited into any area of a person’s life; neither are they invited into any of yours. That’s the truth of the matter and acknowledging that is what this book is about. Not enough asking has been done to know what we are walling in or out, since not much asking has been done at all on the subject. Tearing down walls has been the task, whether recognized as such or not. We are not elves exactly, so why do we do it?

This book is written especially with the young youth minister in mind, either by age or by experience. Most often the person charged with the high honor of ministering to kids is both. It is my hope that you will be able to experience some of those painful times vicariously, and in the process learn how to recognize the conditions that create them and thus avoid them in your own ministry.

Good fences make good neighbours.

SECTION ONE

Internal Boundaries

CHAPTER ONE

Your Ministry,

God’s Ministry

We’re not worthy!

Wayne and Garth,

WAYNE’S WORLD

To be in ministry is to be in tension. At the same time it is possible, perhaps even likely, that you feel unworthy and inclined to grovel (ala Wayne and Garth—or even Moses), and you are agitated that some of the people you work with can be so dull as to not immediately recognize your amazing abilities and the validity of your calling to ministry. Furthermore, in ministry you can experience in the same day, the same hour, a terrific sense of loss over a failed event and consequently a fair bit of anger and resentment over the failure (especially if the failure means a small turn out), only to later feel like you’ve only been along for the ride anyway when God pulls off some amazing work of spiritual change in one of your kid’s lives.

So whose ministry is it, anyway? The question was posed to me pretty early on in my first full-time position of church-based youth ministry. As near as I can recall I mumbled something about it being God’s ministry. Of course, at the time this was the theologically sound response, it seemed to me. Now if someone asked me, Is this youth ministry yours, or God’s? I would reply, Yes. In many ways the question isn’t even valid, let alone valuable. It suggests, whether it means to or not, that it is relatively easy to make a distinction between God’s part in your ministry and your part in it. It isn’t easy.

To be engaged in ministry means you are cooperating with God, to the best of your abilities and giftedness. It also means that sometimes your natural sense of investment in what you are doing gets in the way of ministry. You wind up being too concerned about an event’s success, or how someone feels about you, or how you look or sound or present yourself. You major on the minors.

There is always that tension. This does not mean it is always tense, but there is always a balance to be struck within the context of ministry.

WHO IS IN

CHARGE?

The tension is always present, though your awareness of it may not be. Who is in charge? Well, unless you are experiencing God’s direction in a real literal way, like Belshazzar’s encounter with disembodied handwriting on the wall, or Samuel’s experience of an audible voice in the night, then you’re in charge. Presumably that is what the folks on the call committee had figured when they hired you. Of course, there will be those times you figure that the answer to that question is, The kids are in charge!!! Or so another adult might tell you. But most of the time, with any luck, you’re the one ultimately responsible for the ministry, practically speaking.

But that is a different question than this one. In various ways you can take charge, in a debilitating way, the ministry to which you’ve been called. Here are a few related questions you might ask yourself:

1) Do you welcome unexpected circumstances?

2) Are you open to criticism?

3) Can you let go of classes, events, conversations, that just didn’t work?

4) How do you spell success?

5) Do you need to be in control?

6) Do you need to be recognized and appreciated?

7) Do you need to be an authority figure?

8) Do you need to be right?

How one is involved in ministry with youth is a multifaceted, dynamic issue. There is no right way to do it. If you’ve been involved in youth ministry very long, you have probably seen as many ways of doing it as you have met people involved in it. But how the youth minister feels about his/her involvement, how the youth minister perceives herself/himself is the crux of this issue. It is here where youth ministers, and youth ministries, can be broken or set free.

ROLE

ISSUES

What does it mean to be a minister? In the denomination to which I belong it generally means that the minister is ordained. Ordination is a rather complex series of events that a person goes through, which includes four years of graduate level education resulting in a Master of Divinity degree, that is finished when the seminarian is ordained in a special worship service where the student is set apart for ministry and their calling from God is given recognition and affirmed by the Christian community they are known in. With other denominations the ordination process is less involved academically; with others it is a rather simple matter to be a minister or pastor.

The point here is that in more than one vein of the Church there is a process that is, in the eyes of many church members, the only way that a person is qualified to be in ministry: they have gone through the rite of ordination. This immediately places most of the people doing youth ministry outside the realm that legitimizes their ministry with at least the adults that make up their audience. In other words, unless Jane, the Youth Minister, is ordained, she is not really a minister at all. She is in the minds of her congregation an adult that works with kids and is in training for real ministry. So she is called a Youth Director, or Youth Worker. And she is asked, "So, when are you going to move on and become a real pastor?" This kind of perception can be even more difficult for the youth minister if the clergy (those that are ordained) one works with suffer from the same mindset.

There is, at least among the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America {ELCA} an effort being made to clarify for all the parties involved in the church, clergy, lay ministers, and the general membership, just what it means to be in ministry. Dealing with these issues is very threatening to some. But the effort is being made nevertheless.

An issue that does not get enough attention is what hurdles exist for the female youth minister. Compounding the complexities of roles in ministry is the issue of gender. Indeed, in some denominations women are not allowed in positions of ministry depending on what is meant by the term. If it means being in a position that might include preaching, and in some cases teaching at least adults (or simply men), then a woman cannot be a minister. So you have cases in which a woman is allowed, maybe even expected, to teach Sunday School, but cannot preach from the pulpit, or teach adult men. Other denominations have no such problem and some have for years been ordaining women. But how is it for a woman involved in youth ministry in a church that is still struggling with how to view her role? How does she view her role? How does she interpret for the members of her church her understanding of ministry? Or does she? In what way(s) do the male clergy and lay leaders around her help the process? Or do they inhibit? How do the women of her