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What I Wish I Knew When I Started Youth Ministry, Part 2: Caring For Your Own Soul While Ministering to Others

Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger.
—Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (Crossroad, 1989)

The call of God is difficult to explain but impossible to ignore. It is the nagging, conscious awareness asking you to do something. The asking comes not from words, but from deep within, as though a voice had been planted inside and, now, is beginning to speak. This voice, the calling voice, has many ways of speaking—your passion for young people, the unique parts of you that seem to attract young people, the sense of joy and fulfillment that overflows into your soul when you're with young people. It is the great YES of your life that fills you with a sense of belonging, the warmth of being home. Heady wine, this call to youth ministry.

The call of youth ministry is unmistakable, relentless, captivating.

And dangerous.

Because in reality it is a job. And once ministry becomes a job, the rules all change, and Youth Ministry The Job conflicts with Youth Ministry The Call. Youth Ministry The Job has a job description, performance objectives, mission statements, evaluation forms. It's about measuring—how many, how much…growth, success, results.

Youth Ministry The Call, on the other hand, is a mystery—and (trust me) the mystery of youth ministry is very frustrating for church boards and executive pastors. Youth Ministry The Call has a rhythm all its own—slow.

• Youth Ministry The Job is about wider. Youth Ministry The Call is about deeper.
• Youth Ministry The Job is about more. Youth Ministry The Call is about one.
• Youth Ministry The Job is about program. Youth Ministry The Call is about relationship.
• Youth Ministry The Job is about being in your office. Youth Ministry The Call is being wherever young people hang out.
• Youth Ministry The Job is about young peoples' souls. Youth Ministry The Call is about your soul.

I remember my first years of youth ministry: my reckless passion for young people, my burning desire to introduce young people to Jesus, my ego and arrogance. It was the late sixties, and the world was ready to bless anyone willing to help America's wayward and rebellious youth. I was anxious to get started, and my church was anxious for me to get started.

It never occurred to either my church or me that something critical was being ignored—my soul.

Not much has changed. The urgency of young people's needs combined with the demands of program and expectations—these push youth ministers along at an ever-increasing speed. As long as young people are showing up and parents are happy, no one—least of all the youth minister—is inclined to ask, "What price am I paying to keep this program moving at such a fast pace?"

The road I've traveled for the last 40 years is lined with the burned-out remains of youth workers who discovered too late the need to care for their own souls.

"Hey, my passion for God will never diminish," you say. "I'll never allow myself to reach the place where my soul is in danger."

I hope you're right. But my experience tells me our souls are especially in danger when we're in youth ministry. Youth ministry is a seduction. Once you've experienced how young people respond to you, listened to you, want to be like you—these make it very difficult to think about your soul. The instant gratification of relationships with young people drowns out the delayed gratification of a relationship with Jesus.

I wish someone had warned me of the hazards of youth ministry. I wish someone would have sat me down and told me what they wished they knew when they started out in youth ministry. I wish someone would have flagged me down while I was rushing around fulfilling everyone's expectations. Of course, maybe they did, but I was going too fast to see them.

So after nearly 50 years of youth ministry, I feel obliged to share what I've learned from my mistakes—to warn new youth workers of the obstacles ahead. I mean, it took me 50 years to understand what intimacy with Jesus even meant. To the contrary, I spent most of my youth ministry years trying to prove to Jesus I was worthy of his love by impressing him with all I was doing. ("Come on, God, tell me something else to do. What do you want me to do now?")

In Stories Jesus Tells, John Claypool writes about putting his four-year-old daughter to bed at night. Of course, like any four-year-old, she took three trips to the bathroom, asked for a drink of water, wanted another story told, needed Dad to put the light on, and asked about sounds she heard. When she was finally settled down, John retreated upstairs to write. He was deep into his writing when he sensed her standing at the study door.

He turned around. "Laura, what do you want me to do?" he asked with more irritation in his voice than he wanted to betray. She padded into the room and grabbed his arm.

"Nothing, Daddy. I just want to be close to you."

I was too long in youth ministry before I let myself hear Jesus whispering to me, "I don't want you to do anything right this minute—I just want to be close to you." I may have learned this a lot earlier if someone had told me then what I want to tell you now:

You are responsible for your own relationship with God.

I still remember my first church and my first senior pastor, a man I admired. When I signed on, I looked forward to many hours together with my new boss, talking about our faith and being mentored by this godly man. He was seminary trained; I was not. He had lived many years; I was young. In fact, a big reason I took this job was the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of this pastor.

Talk about disillusionment. I never saw him. We hardly conversed; when we did, it was about some youth activity or an upcoming mission trip or the lock-in the coming week. My pastor was distant, preoccupied, and seldom talked about his own relationship with Jesus.

Then there were staff meetings. After a string of "regular" jobs during college, I was eager to be among staff who talked about Jesus during their meetings.

Talk about disappointment. The meetings all began with prayer, but the rest of the meetings were all about the choir, the carpet, the building campaign, vacation Bible school, the parking lot, the budget, the damage to Fellowship Hall after the latest lock-in. Seldom did we talk about the Bible or our relationship with Jesus. Even our prayers were typically about church business—at best, they were about church members who were sick or in need.

I had unconsciously counted on my pastor and staff to help me stay on track with Jesus. I expected the business of the church to be incidental to the Jesus of the church.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Though it sounds harsh, this was the truth of it: it took me a long time to realize that no one cared about my relationship with Jesus. Oh, they cared plenty if my dry soul caused me to run off with the organist. But when it came to routine business and weekly meetings, no one expressed any interest in my relationship with Jesus. My relationship with Jesus was assumed. It was up to me to keep current with Jesus. It was up to me to find time in my busy schedule to find time for God. It was up to me to struggle with my own faith. The institution simply expected me to come to work every day with my faith intact and current. Yes, our conversations carried the appropriate God talk. Yes, we often prayed about specific issues that had arisen in our church. Yes, we even talked about the Bible once in a while.

But it was clear that we were hired to do the work of the church. The work of the soul was to be done after hours, on my own time.

Which is actually good news, of course, because we are responsible for our own spiritual nurture and growth. If you're going to survive spiritually, then take charge of your own relationship with Christ. Maybe along these lines:

• Write into your job description time alone with Jesus. Ask for a day per week—or a weekend per month or a week every six months—to be set aside for you to work on your soul. These days can be spent in solitude, silence, on spiritual retreat or prayer retreat—whatever it takes to listen for God in your life.
• Ask for a reading budget separate from your budget for youth ministry books. Ask for money to buy books on the spiritual life, just for you, not to make lessons out of.
• Suggest that the staff get together weekly or even daily for communion (that would be Eucharist), to help the staff members remember their call.
• Find yourself a wise, older person who will agree to meet with you regularly to help you listen to what God is saying in your life. (That would be a spiritual director.)
• Journal regularly. Journaling gets you in touch with your interior. Often your writing reveals a part of you that you weren't consciously paying attention to.
• Ask the staff to brainstorm ways to increase the percentage of time in staff meetings spent on their relationship with Jesus. (There will always be business to discuss, so be realistic.) If the staff now spends 90 percent of the time talking about business and 10 percent about their souls, see if you can get them to agree to 80/20, then, later, maybe even 70/30.
• Suggest that the staff has annual (or monthly or semiannual) spiritual retreats, during which the only subject is their own relationships with God.

You are more important than your students.

Sounds selfish, I know. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God," you remind me. Yet you'll tend to spend all your energy on the spiritual life of your youth group kids. If you're like most youth workers, you'll gradually wear down to the point of reading the Bible primarily for ideas for your talks and lessons rather than for your own relationship with God. If you're like most youth workers, your praying will tend to occur only during meetings or church events. Before you know it, you're living your spiritual life vicariously through others. You'll hear a sermon or read a good book, and you think only what a good illustration for a talk it'll make. When a teenager in your group makes a life-changing decision, that moment becomes a prop for your spirituality—rather than relying on your own decisions and your own moments.

If you want to avoid this terribly easy slide from Youth Ministry The Call to Youth Ministry The Job, then you'll have to remember that we are not about fixing people or situations. We are about being with Jesus. The best gift you can give young people is not to fix their problems, but to help them recognize the presence of a Jesus who will never leave them nor forsake them even when their lives plod along unfixed.

When young people observe the unfixed, broken you and your relationship with God, they learn the power of their own relationship with God in the middle of their brokenness. If your youth ministry begins with your relationship with Jesus instead of theirs, then working on your own soul isn't periphery or extracurricular—it's central to your ministry. It is your ministry.

Real ministry is not what you do, but who you are.

Don't spiritualize spirituality.

Taking care of your soul does not mean retiring to a monastery.

Knowing that during the previous year, my friend Brennan Manning had done numerous silent retreats (for varying durations—weekends, seven days, 30 days), I guiltily confessed to him my embarrassment at how comparatively little effort I had made at taking time to be alone with God.

"Mike, quit being so hard on yourself," he told me. "You think about God all the time. That's prayer. Even now you are praying all day long. Just because I'm on a 30-day silent retreat doesn't mean I'm on my knees praying the whole time—I'm reading, walking, sleeping, watching birds, thinking about my next speaking engagement."

I didn't recognize my own relationship with God because I put Brennan on a pedestal. I compared my life to his. And consequently, prayer became inaccessible to me. Whenever you compare what you don't know about someone else to everything you know about you, you lose. I couldn't be Brennan Manning, and I don't have to be. I still haven't been on a seven-day silent retreat. But what I have done over the years is find my own way of being with God.

Granted, my relationship with Jesus is erratic and irregular. I have periods of time where I read voraciously, pray a lot, and spend much time thinking about my Savior. Then there are dry, barren times when I wonder where God is. My irregular schedule has become a regular part of my life, and it works for me. I don't have a routine for my prayer life. I don't have routines for any part of my life. I'm not a routine kind of guy. What's important is to understand what kind of man or woman you are—and then be true to that in your walk with God.

Read like a madman.

Most youth workers don't read. Yet reading is absolutely essential to your spiritual growth.

• Ask people you admire and respect what books they read. If you're drawn to someone, chances are they have the same reading interests you do, so trust them to get you on the right reading track.
• Note those authors you resonate with, then get all their books. I have my own group of authors, who through their books have become my reading-world friends: Eugene Peterson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Wangerin Jr., John Claypool, Earl Palmer, Henri Nouwen, Calvin Miller, Frederick Buechner, Alan Jones, Will Willimon, Evelyn Underhill, Philip Yancey. I read everything they write. Somehow, they know me, they name what I am struggling with, they put into words what I have been unable to find the words for. Put those few books that have really affected you in a bookcase close to where you work. In my study I have all my favorite books—my friends—just to the left of my desk, in arm's reach. I have lots more books in my study, but my friends are right next to me.
• Interact with your books. Mark your favorite passages, make notes, mark then file the quotes that grip you. Books are made to be marked—and stained with tears, too. Reading is more than gathering information—it's a relationship.
• Don't worry if you take a break from reading now and then. Sometimes your soul needs space and time to process what's going on in your life. At such times reading can actually distract you from soul work you should be doing.
• Whatever you do, don't limit your reading to religious books. Read recent novels, old classics, biographies, short stories, essays, articles. Christians aren't the only ones speaking truth. Truth is truth, regardless of who says it.
• For what it's worth, here's my recommended reading list. Let it start you making your own book list.

Robert Bensen, Between the Dreaming & the Coming True (HarperCollins)
Bob Benson, Disciplines for the Inner Life (Word)
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress)
Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews (Doubleday)
Christopher DeVinck, The Power of the Powerless (Zondervan)
Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (Seabury)
Suzanne Farnham and others, Listening Hearts (Morehouse)
Arthur Gordon, A Touch of Wonder (Jove Books)
Thelma Hall, Too Deep for Words (Paulist)
Abraham Heschel, Man's Quest for God (Scribner's)
Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (HarperCollins)
Alan Jones, Passion for Pilgrimage (HarperCollins)
Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (HarperSanFrancisco)
Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (HarperSanFranciso)
Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits (HarperCollins)
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (Pantheon)
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (Noonday Press)
Johannes B. Metz, Poverty of Spirit (Paulist)
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead)
Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead)
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin)
Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (Crossroad)
Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (Doubleday)
Henri Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak (Image)
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (Jossey-Bass)
Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known (HarperSanFranciso)
Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Word)
Eugene Peterson, Living the Message (HarperCollins)
Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity Press)
Eugene Peterson, Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans)
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Cowley)
Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent (Cowley)
Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life (Morehouse)
Evelyn Underhill, The Ways of the Spirit (Crossroad)
Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines (HarperSanFranciso)
Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan)
Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing about Grace? (Zondervan)

Stop impersonating yourself.

Youth ministry is a glittering image, full of highly visible programs, activities, and life-changing experiences. Which makes it easy for youth ministers to dazzle parents and church members with their impact on young people. If you aren't careful, though, you become your program—fun, busy, energetic, passionate about God, confident—but with an inner life that is teeming with insecurities, doubt, and struggles with your faith. If truth is at the center of the gospel, then truth must also be at the center of you. If teenagers are demanding reality today (and they are), then reality starts with you.

• Admit your own brokenness. Not that you have to publicly list all your sins, but you must somehow admit to your own sinfulness and flaws. If you want your students to feel safe in youth group, they need to know that they're safe, flaws and all.
• Don't be afraid to admit your own struggles and doubts. Your students will respond, not with disappointment that you struggle, but with recognition of your faith in the middle of struggle and doubt.
• Humility is the first sign of genuine faith. Too many youth workers talk down to young people, bludgeoning them with, "You need to do this," and "Unless you do that…" They invariably use themselves as examples of commitment and dedication—despite the words of John the Baptizer: "He must increase, but I must decrease." Your job is not to impress young people with how spiritual you are, but with how faithful Jesus is. Your remarks about Jesus should always be sprinkled with gratitude.
• Listen to what your students tell you about their walk with Jesus. Don't teach them as if you're the only source of knowledge. Young people have much to teach you about Jesus.
• The call of youth ministry is all about Jesus. Your passion and desire should be to constantly bring people to Jesus.

The closer you get to Jesus, the less you know.

When I was 20, I knew everything about Jesus. I swaggered into high schools afraid of no one's arguments. The Bible is true, Jesus is God, and we all need him.

I still believe those things, but the swagger is more like a limp now. I know Jesus, but I don't know much about him. I love the Bible—it's even more true to me today than it was 37 years ago—but the truth I see now is much more complicated and mysterious. Jesus is very real to me, but he is also very elusive. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm following him or he's following me. Life has left its scars on me; my soul is thick and leathery, faded and torn, knocked around a lot. I'm not as sure about things as I used to be.

Yet here's the amazing part, the one absolute I cannot shake: Jesus. As many times as I have disappointed him, as often as I have run from him, he has not given up on me. Every time I turn around, he's there. Every time I run from him, he's there.

I don't know as much about Jesus as I used to, but I do know one truth for sure. He's closer.

One of the original youth workers, Mike Yaconelli started Youth Specialties in a previous millennium—out of his car. After years of working with students and youth workers, he's best known as an authentic and unconventional advocate for the souls of youth workers.