My children are huge fans of
“Dad’s Dinner Night” which is essentially what they call any night mom is gone
and dad is in charge of dinner. There is
a fine craftsmanship to whatever creation dad is making for dinner. It involves some precision choices of
ingredients, flavors and just the right timing and by the time it’s on the
table there is just a simple artwork of creating the exact right dinner
experience for myself and the kids.
The exact recipe for dinner
really comes down to some key decisions:
Wendy’s? McDonald’s? Pizza?
Or whatever mom left us?
You can’t lose with your kids
with those choices but it all comes down to one foundational truth: I hate to cook food.
My wife loves it. She’ll watch the Food Network all day long, Google
recipes and try culinary experiments. We
have a married couple that we are friends with who cook together as a romantic
pastime. I do not like these
people. You should not like these
people. They set an unrealistic
expectation for myself as a husband. For
every husband really.
But boy, they do make some
fantastic food.
Recipes are extremely
important when it comes to cooking, however if you’re really going after
something more than just the basics, if you’re seeking some actual “culinary
design” there is more than just a science to it, there’s an art form.
People who know this art form
are either people who have been cooking for decades or people who are just
naturally gifted with food creations. My
grandma was one of these people. She
memorized the recipe for her favorite dishes years ago, and has since added,
subtracted and experimented with the dish until it became perfect.
There is something about
creating ministry with Millennials that is as much an art form as it is a
science. I like to use the word “Alchemy.” There are just pieces of the young adult
recipe that you can’t necessarily prescribe, but you know need to be
represented in the creation somehow. For
those creating this ministry recipe, these are factors that greatly increase
the sustainability and success of the ministry, but they are often very
difficult to measure. It’s simple to
create a ratio of dollars and cents or staff people to attenders, but finding
ways to measure the goodwill and buy-in of the church’s leadership, or right
mix of people involved – that’s a different story altogether.
Sometimes it’s by
design. Sometimes it’s intuition. Sometime’s it’s just the Holy Spirit bringing
to the mixture exactly what is needed.
My encouragement to you would be to find some way to account for each of
these following factors in your ministry on purpose, whether you can measure
them or not. You’ll find the exact
amount and measurement for each might be hard to measure or prescribe, but the
discipline of seeking out these factors will help your ministry soup become
much more satisfying.
Achieving buy-in from the
leadership
In a conversation with one
young adults pastor, he recounted the story of a previous position at another
church:
“The church had decided they wanted a college
program to reach out to the students in the area. The congregation wanted a college
program. The elders wanted a college
program. The staff wanted a college
program. But in the end it was a lot of
rhetoric and when we restructured our ministry 18 months later, they eliminated
my position. No one really thought about
this as a real investment that needed a 5 year plan.”
Look, no one is going to say
to you, “I don’t think we need to reach young adults and college students –
they’ll probably figure it out on their own.”
That would be a stupid thing to say.
Everyone knows it is a need.
Almost every church will agree to the value of passing the baton into
the next generation. The spoken value for this ministry is
through the roof.
But actual support,
investment and buy-in can be more difficult to secure. When the rubber meets the road, will ministry
to this demographic take priority over other ministries in your church? Seek hard to find out some of those answers
before building anything and find strategic ways to increase the value of this
ministry throughout the organization.
Leading With A Team
Teamwork makes the dream
work. If your dream is to reach young
adults and college students, find ways to make this a team effort. Many efforts in developing young adult ministries
fall apart before they ever get off the ground because they are being envisioned,
implemented and worked out by a single person.
Ministry is lonely. Reaching into
a generation that is mostly uninterested in connecting with your church is
hard. Allowing yourself to go it alone
will only lead to burnout & failure.
Here’s a clear warning label: Do
NOT attempt this on your own!
Create benchmarks around team
development. When starting this ministry
make your first marker about getting 5 other people on board with helping you
launch this ministry. If you’ve been up
and running for a while, find ways to bolster a leadership team, assign them
meaningful work and develop a strategy for coaching and equipping them. There are all kinds of ways to make this work
in your ministry but the “team” ingredient needs to find it’s way into the mix. It’s a non-negotiable.
Paying the Rent
This is a value we talk about
all the time with Ministry Architects.
There are wrong ways and right ways to implement changes in our
churches. Wrong ways involve telling
people who have been invested in something for a long time that what they have
valued for a long time is no longer valuable.
Wrong ways include creating new ministries without regard for the impact
they might have on existing ministries.
Right ways of implementing changes are helping people connect with and buy-in
to a vision of new ministry and building it with you. They include helping other people care about
the value for this ministry as much as you do.
Right ways of introducing change also might just include doing some
things YOU don’t personally like or find value in, so that you don’t use up all
the goodwill you might have with the congregation.
When you live in an apartment
and you pay your rent to the landlord every month, you might just find yourself
in a great relationship with that landlord.
He might even be willing to let you choose some of your own paint
colors, or keep that cat in the apartment as long as it stays inside. Go ahead and try to ask for special favors
with the landlord when the rent is three months behind. It ain’t happening.
There are things in our
churches that people value and often the introduction of NEW values can be
threatening to the OLD values. If you
are seeking to raise a new value of reaching into the Millennial generation in
significant ways, be sure to “pay the rent” with the congregation wherever you
can.
There’s no great way to
measure this. I’ve always hoped for a
“the congregation’s happiness with and confidence in Scott” meter could be
installed in my church. When the needle
tipped far enough to the right, I knew I had some credit to build in some new
values and try out some ministry experiments.
But if it tipped far enough to the left, I knew I needed more time
before introducing change.
As far as I know, this meter
doesn’t exist – though I hope to see it in a Sky Mall catalog soon. Until then, pay attention to this factor in
your ministry.
Designing Influence
We’ve talked a lot about
giving Millennials access to the life and leadership of the church in previous
chapters. This is key to the foundational
strategy of why and how we seek out ministry with young adults in the first
place. They want to make meaningful
contributions to the world and to the church.
They desire and need connections to coaches, cheerleaders and
mentors. There is no wrong or right way
to provide the context for giving young adults influence in your church.
One key strategy is to find
real leaders in the young adult population.
People who have influence among their peers or people who are looking
forward to building something significant with their life. Find these people and ask their input on
leadership decisions in the church, on anything and everything from the color
of the paint in the gym, to the theme of next year’s Christmas pageant. Leaders want influence. They want to feel like their opinion matters,
that someone has taken what they had to say seriously. If you engage the younger leaders in your
congregation intentionally, you’ll not only engage them in the church, but the
decisions you make will suddenly have relevance to the next generation.
Senior pastors would be wise
to seek regular and significant input from 18-30 year olds in their
congregation. Have them critique the
Sunday morning sermon. Ask them to
select some worship music. Invite them
to join a potluck and sit at the pastor’s table. Sprinkling a dash of
intentional influence into the Millennials of your church will go a long way in
your recipe of success.
The Right People
Of all the factors to build
your ministry with, finding “the right people” is the most controversial. As Christians building ministry reaching out
to people, it seems unintuitive to say, “Keep some people out but let some
people in” when you are building your ministry.
But let me warn you, if you start a ministry with the wrong people, it
will be doomed to failure.
Those of us who have worked
in a church for a significant period of time will recognize what it feels like
to work with E.G.R.’s. These are the
people in our ministry that are “Extra Grace Required” type people. I know exactly what these people are like – I
was one of them growing up.
People in our ministries who
need a little extra grace are typically not very influential with their peers. They are people who are looking for
connections and for friendship. They are
the students in our youth ministries that text us every day. They are the people who will sit at coffee
with us for an hour in conversation before they ask us what’s going on in our
world. They are people who are looking
to consume the ministry we are
providing rather than help contribute
to it.
There’s nothing wrong with
these people. I love these people. However they are not the people that will
strategically help us build our ministry to Millennials. If you’re starting your young adult ministry
by a small gathering of “whatever college students are hanging around on a
Sunday night,” chances are you’ll be finding the students that are struggling
to find a social connection point and don’t have many active friendship in
their life. Because if they did, they
wouldn’t be available to hang out with YOU on short notice.
The right people to build new
ministry like this are people who have lots of friends. They are people who have busy schedules. They are people who are outgoing, extroverted
and would rather throw a party than set up chairs at your next event.
They are also people who have
relationships with other Millennials who are disconnected. Include people in your early stages of
leadership that have no involvement in a church whatsoever. These people have friends just like
them. Find people who have left the
church. Find people who’ve never been
inside of a church. Nothing will limit
your ministry with Millennials more than building a team of people who already
know each other and the church very well but haven’t built any relationships
outside of that group.
I have one of these people on
my team right now. When I started
building ministry towards college students, Chelsea got connected to me through
another student I was working with through a simple “Hey, my friend, Chelsea
wants to get involved in something.” I
met Chelsea and I knew right away that she was the exact type of person you
want starting new ministries, planting churches or reaching new people.
Chelsea has a hard time
walking to class on campus. Often she
ends up 20 or 30 minutes late for class because every third person she passes
has a relationship with her somehow.
She’s been an RA in the dorms for the past two years – her superiors
love her and recommend her to underclassmen when they need someone to talk
to. She’s hard working, a great listener
and loves people. She was the
university’s homecoming queen this year, no small feat for a self-proclaimed
“high school nerd.”
All of those qualities about
Chelsea translated into one truth for me when I got to know her; When Chelsea
loves something, everyone around her knows about it and is invited to it. I made it my goal to make sure that Chelsea
loved anything I was working on and it wasn’t because Chelsea was popular, it was because she was influential.
Christ himself even used this
model in John 4 when he found himself in conversation with an unpopular but
influential woman at a well. After their
encounter about living water, the woman let everyone in town know about it:
Many of
the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony,
“He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged
him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many
more became believers.
They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you
said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior
of the world.”
Building ministry teams
filled with influential “well women” is a key factor in reaching Millennials. Find ways to craft your teams with purpose
and intention around getting the right
people on board.
Consistency and Innovation
One of the marvels of the Millennial
generation is their interaction with mobile technology. As the world counted down to the year 2000,
the turnover ratio on technology began to skyrocket and today nothing is more
evident of this than whatever cell phone is in someone’s hand right now. The minute a cell phone, a tablet, an iPod is
released plans for the next upgrades are already underway.
Millennials not only embrace,
but also expect constant innovation in the world around them.
I was leading a small group
Bible study with a group of 18, 19 & 20 year-olds and we were discussing
Gordon McDonnell’s book, “Who Stole My Church?”
The conversation was revolving around what it’s like for their parents’
and grandparents’ generations to struggle with allowing for changing trends in
the churches they lead.
Then my friend, Stephanie,
made a very profound comment, “I wonder if we will struggle with that at all
when we are their age. I mean everything
about our lives is changing all the time.
I think I would get bored if things stopped
changing in my church.”
Stephanie is growing up in a
culture of rapid innovation. She expects
her life will always be surround with new and improved and improving
opportunities and that her church would reflect that value.
Now that doesn’t mean making
change for the sake of change in our ministries, but it does mean that we
should develop a comfort level with beta testing, experiments and failed
efforts.
The more we involve teams of
the right people, the more we’ll have access to new ministry ideas and
opportunities. It’s important to allow
our ministry with Millennials to continue to experiment and try new ideas on a
regular basis. If you were to develop a
young adult program in your church and it looked exactly the same four years
later, there’s a great chance you’ll have no young adults as a part of it. While it isn’t unusual to lock in a
programmatic model for years at a time in youth ministries, children’s
ministries, Sunday school or other areas of the church, ministry with Millennials
thrives on innovation and experimentation.
Be careful, however to forgo
any level of consistency with your Millennial ministry. There are college and young adult ministries
across the country that experimented their way into a downward spiral because
they failed to include any consistency in their ministry.
It’s one thing to change the
look, the style or the purpose of your Tuesday night gatherings, but the fact
that you still meet every Tuesday night gives a backbone to the ability to build
a relational culture in your ministry.
Often, we are quick to give up on a young adult ministry or program
because it seems like the style of
what we offer isn’t working. The reality
is that there might be a problem with some of the underlying, sustainable
factors that is keeping the ministry from thriving.
We must find ways to be
consistently inconsistent. To constantly
experiment yet remain constant in our foundations of ministry with Millennials.
Let it simmer
Great cooks know that genius
takes time and that’s true with Millennial ministry as well.
Friedrich
Nietzsche is quoted as saying, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and
earth’ is… that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there
thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has
made life worth living.”
Eugene
Peterson even used this quote as the title of one of his books and this axiom
holds true with develop ministry for and with the Millennial generation. Sometimes it just takes a long obedience in
the same direction in order to find success or traction with young adults. We need to find ways to allow the ministry to
simmer, to realize that next year we might not see the results we are hoping
for when we start this year. We need to
realize that all our experimentation will cause us a lot of failed
attempts. We’ll learn “1,000 different
ways NOT to make a light bulb” as Edison says.
If we are
driving the bus for our church to catch the vision for ministry to Millennials,
prepare them for a long drive. This is a
family-vacation-to-the-Grand-Canyon-in-a-mini-van type of ministry
development. Encourage your church
leadership to join you in this journey for a long time. Think about the 5-year investment in creating
something that will begin impacting the next generation. Let it simmer.
I want to encourage your work
as an artist of Millennial ministry.
There is no silver bullet to this work.
There certainly are some sustainability factors and building blocks that
must help create the foundation and strategic approach to what you are doing –
but there are no guarantees.
There is faithfulness,
however, and that is the most key ingredient to engaging this work. Be faithful in your pursuit of young adults;
be willing to engage the work of ministry with factors you can measure and factors
you can’t measure.
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