Cultivating Mission in Youth Ministry
This month’s emphasis is aimed to help you lead your ministry more effectively. The summer is a natural time to evaluate and refocus, and we want to help you with that! Read our other articles on Leadership in Youth Ministry.
A number of years ago, I was feeling pretty good about the current state of our church’s student ministry. I was about 15 years into serving as a student pastor, with 13 of those being at my current church. We had been blessed with some solid volunteer leaders, and it felt like we were in a great ministry rhythm together. However, after discussing the importance of clarity in vision and mission in a seminary class, I began to wonder if our leadership team was truly on the same page when it came to what is called missional intentionality. I decided to do a little experiment to find out.
I asked our volunteer leaders to complete a simple one-question survey: “What are 3-5 ministry objectives that we desire to be true of students who graduate from our ministry?” Nine of our leaders responded, and I met with them soon after to share the results. From those nine leaders I was able to identify over twenty unique ministry objectives! When I asked the group what this communicated to us, several of them immediately responded, “We aren’t quite all on the same page.”
While this was certainly disappointing, I quickly began to see the valuable opportunity this presented to our student ministry team. As our group was already working well together and aligned in values, I knew that with a little intentionality, we could gain clarity together by narrowing our focus on a well-articulated mission statement. Here is a brief overview of some principles that guided us as we worked to shape that mission together.
Asking the The “Whys?” of a Mission
The careful cultivation of an intentional mission statement helps to guard against what I believe to be one of the greatest dangers in student ministry leadership: drifting into pragmatism. There is a simple, yet important question we sought to be continually asking: “Why do we do what we do?” If we are not careful, we can begin to shape individual aspects of our programming based on a very near-sighted understanding of success. Without a unifying mission, we can begin to trade the focused pursuit of a faithful vision for a “scatter-gun approach”, trying whatever seems to “work” in the present. When this is the case, we may end up doing some good things, but we may miss what the best thing might be. Long-term goals require answering the “why?” questions before planning our approach.
Remembering Our Mission Should be Shaped by Vision
As stated in a previous article: vision is the compass you need to reach a destination. If that’s true, then mission is the road you will use to follow the compass. If we truly desire to see our vision realized, we must determine the best pathways for how we will intentionally move in that direction. Along with our volunteer leaders, we determined that our vision was to work in partnership with parents to see students know and treasure Jesus. This vision articulates why our student ministry exists. For us to cultivate a faithful mission, then, we needed to determine the various ways for how we intended to lead students toward that vision.
We decided together that this best way would be:
to lead them to treasure Truth,
to lead them to treasure Relationship (both vertical and horizontal)
to lead them to treasure Mission.
This mission statement expresses our commitment to our vision through intentionally focusing on these three objectives in all that we do. If our student ministry is driven by our mission, the vision will become a reality.
Connecting Student Ministry Mission and the Church’s Mission
A great danger exists when a student ministry’s mission is not directly connected to the mission of the whole church, thus creating a “ministry silo.” However, while we desired to retain connection with the whole church’s mission, we also understood that student ministry is a unique context within the church. A good consideration that our leadership team discussed together was to determine what a pursuit of the whole church’s mission looked like in the lives of students and families.
During this process, our team kept our church’s articulated mission always in focus: Our church desires to see all people become Grounded in Christ, Growing together in the Word, and Going for God’s glory. We were delighted with how the mission we cultivated for our student ministry ended up aligning so well with our church’s:
treasuring Truth with Grounded in Christ,
treasuring Relationship with Growing together in the Word, and
treasuring mission with Going for God’s glory.
In addition to the intentionality in planning our programming, we also wanted to keep this connection to the church’s mission before our students as often as possible, reminding them that if they are in Christ then they are currently a part of our whole church body.
Pursuing a Mission that Is Tangible and Measurable
A good mission statement is one that is both tangible and measurable. It must be tangible so that it creates a clear paradigm for determining what we decide to do in practice. Every element of our ministry is not in place simply because it is a good idea, but because it contributes to the intentional pursuit of the vision in a discernible way.
This is what offers the opportunity for faithful measurement and assessment of ministry practice. Again, if we default to pragmatic approaches, we stand the chance of defining success by short-term criteria (e.g., attendance, excitement, immediate feedback, etc.). While those certainly may be considered as valuable in some ways, the ultimate success or failure of ministry practice can only be determined by how effectively we are bearing fruit in accordance with our desired vision. Faithfulness is determined by whether or not our what (our practice) is fulfilling our how (our mission) so that our why (our vision) may be accomplished.
Making Sure our Mission Shapes our Practice
The best way we can guard against another danger, missional drift, is to grow comfortable with redundancy. Everyone in leadership should be able to readily articulate the vision and mission for the student ministry. Both should be stated every time leaders get together, and they should guide every single discussion concerning practice. Someone has a new idea? Great! First question to be asked, though, should be, “Where does it fit into our how (our stated mission)?” Then, “How does it fit with other ways we are already pursuing that aspect of our mission?”
Vigilance is also needed for the sake of missional balance, that each element of our mission is given adequate attention. For example, at our church, we may need to guard against giving too much attention to “treasuring truth” that we neglect “treasuring relationship and mission.” This is why ongoing assessment is a good idea. We want to be consistent in assessing whether our various practices are offering the best opportunities for students and families to pursue our church’s stated vision.
Cultivating our Mission
Cultivating a faithful ministry mission begins with this sort of intentionality, but it certainly doesn’t stop there. Even if we are not asking students to recite it, we want to keep the elements of our mission before them regularly, praying that they come to set their hearts on those pursuits. The more they come to desire that vision for themselves, the more they will grow towards it! We also want to carefully articulate this mission to parents each time we meet with them. After all, that mission ought to serve as the clear pathway of discipleship that provides guidelines for how both the church and parents can walk in partnership towards a unified vision together: that their students would know what it means to follow Christ fully, even as a young person.