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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Deciding whether or not to leave a youth ministry position is perhaps the most difficult issue youth workers face. It’s typically marked by gut-wrenching periods of soul-searching and cross-examination—coupled with a desire to seek God’s will and the constant fear of wrong motives.

So many conflicting signals. So many options. So much advice from so many corners. But there are no tried-and-true, fill-in-the-blank formulas that’ll lead us in exactly the right direction every single time.

What can we do? We can start by asking ourselves questions. Hard questions. And our answers should lead us down the right paths.

Here are five to begin getting us through this process:

1. Have I been here long enough to reach my most effective years?
One pastor put it this way: "In the first two years of a pastorate, you can’t do anything wrong. In the third and forth years, you can’t do anything right. By the fifth and sixth years, either you leave, the people leave who think you can’t do anything right, or you change, or they change, or you both change. By the seventh year, you start to really get productive."

While this pastor doesn’t refer to youth ministry per se, there’s good reason to believe the same is true for youth workers. No formal studies have proven a correlation between youth workers with long tenures and successful youth ministries, but the anecdotal evidence points in that direction.

Paul Borthwick—himself a prime example of a youth worker with a long tenure in the same locale—says that sticking with one youth ministry affords many benefits:

• Effectiveness with young people increases because they trust you.
• Results (a hard-to-find commodity in youth work) become more noticeable when those who’ve graduated return to join the youth team.
• Parents trust you more, which builds more continuity between families and the youth ministry.
• Lay leaders are trained with one consistent philosophy and ministry strategy over a period of time.
• You become the church’s expert on adolescents (from Organizing Your Youth Ministry).

2. Do I have a dream for this ministry?
Can you remember what it felt like to be excited about youth work? To dream about what God could do with your ministry?

If we’ve lost the ability to dream about the possibilities in our youth ministries, that’s a strong sign that it’s time to move on. Beware of professional stagnation. We need continuous challenge and steady vision if we’re to stay in youth work for the long haul.

3. Do my spiritual gifts match the present needs of my ministry?
We must bear in mind that our ministries may begin requiring gifts and abilities that we’re not equipped to fill. At that point it may be wise to decrease so that new leadership can increase.

Research shows that as many as 20 percent of youth workers report similar circumstances—the inability to adapt to their changing ministry settings or cultures.

Mike, a former youth worker for a suburban Philadelphia church, told me very matter-of-factly that he resigned his position because he "felt the ministry had grown to the point that it needed someone who was more of an administrator" than he was. So rather than try to squeeze himself into a role that was looking less and less like him, Mike stepped down and found a job to support his family while he continued to minister within the group.

4. Is my ministry philosophy compatible with my church?
This was the question Dana was dealing with: Can I continue to serve as my church’s youth worker even when leadership and some of the parents are trying to restrict which students I can work with?

Dana felt called to reach all the kids in her area, whether they were church members or not. For Dana, that was a nonnegotiable. And when the edict came down that she should restrict her focus to the kids in the church, she decided to move on.

5. Is the congregation still willing to support me?
Bob was a youth worker for a large church in North Carolina that underwent painful upheavals over the last few years, resulting in the senior pastor being asked to leave. Although the turbulence had little to do with Bob’s ministry, his much-needed support framework within the church had been deeply eroded. In conversations with him, my recommendation was to move on. "Time is too short to waste it fighting to be a leader for people who aren’t in the fight with you," I said.

On the other hand, some scenarios give youth workers itchy feet but don’t constitute solid ground for walking out on ministries. Plateaus are good examples (i.e., the youth program has no appreciable numerical growth, and there’s sense of lost excitement).

But the danger with reacting negatively to plateaus is that walking out may be more a reflection of our personal needs than the needs of our youth groups. Youth groups normally go through attendance ebbs and flows, often solely due to demographic changes in local youth populations. Even high schools experience enrollment fluctuations—and that’s with compulsory attendance!

If we leave our youth ministries just because they’ve reached some kind of growth plateau, it probably means we want to run to bigger, more exciting, faster-growing youth ministries.

And that’s not a sound motive.

Other Issues...

Problem People
Is a student, parent, parishioner, or board member making your ministry life miserable? (If the answer’s no, don’t worry—either it’s happened to you before or it’ll happen to you in the future!)

As we all probably know by now, the problem with running from problem people is that we can’t. They’re omnipresent.

In the words of one veteran youth worker: "There’s always going to be somebody in a church who just rubs you the wrong way. Let’s call him Tom Smith. No matter what you do, Tom’s there giving you a hard time. So you say, ’I’m sick of Tom Smith! I’m leaving!’ Then you breathe a sigh of relief and go to Church B...and guess what? Standing before you is Tom’s brother, Tim. And he’s just as much of a pain. You’ll never find a church in which every single person agrees with or likes you. It just won’t happen."

Money
Almost 60 percent of youth workers don’t believe their salaries adequately cover their expenses, according to LINK Institute youth ministry research. If that’s true (and who would question it?), almost six youth workers in 10 are dissatisfied with their pay.

Now think about this: If all youth workers dissatisfied with their salaries decided to leave their positions, what do you think would happen to the 18-month turnover rate? There would be utter chaos. Perpetual transition.

But even more important, many in that 60 percent group probably have moved to higher paying jobs within the last two years, thinking they’d be happier with higher salaries. Unfortunately, these folks will be among the many to discover that "enough" never seems like enough.

Finances are important. It takes money to support a family. It’s tough to concentrate on kids and their needs when rent and grocery money is always a concern.

And there’s always somebody out there willing to pay us a thousand dollars more than we’re making now—but is that the most important consideration? What about additional resettlement costs? What about uprooting the family? What about the will of God?

Chasing the dollar to a new position is a poor way to discern God’s leading.

Hurt Feelings
It happens to all of us at one time or another: We feel underappreciated, underaffirmed, undersupported, or just plain hurt.

Many times in youth ministry, people with whom we come in contact will hurt our feelings, knowingly or unknowingly. Some of us respond by changing jobs. But this knee-jerk response is misdirected and nonproductive.

If someone hurts our feelings, it’s understandable to get angry. What’s not understandable, though, is the notion that leaving will make things better. It just makes things worse. We hurt the students we’re working with even more than we were hurt; we hurt ourselves by putting our families through the trauma and trials of moving; and we hurt those in our congregations who support us.

How will all of this additional hurt make our pain any less?

Departing a position over some hurt or offense usually brings the most pain and the least satisfaction. You won’t find ministries without some pain involved. So quit looking!

When Is a Move Appropriate?
As much as I value and respect longevity in youth workers, there are some things that are unequivocally more important. In my estimation, the following four scenarios could justify moving on:

1. When staying with a church violates your integrity.
Bill was working in a large church in the southeast. Along with many members of the congregation, he learned that the choir director was having a not-so-discreet affair with one of the choir members. He watched their smiles week after week during the services. His stomach turned while watching the choir director help serve communion to the woman’s husband. He listened as the matter was tabled in a board meeting until the pastor could be further consulted.

By the time Bill spoke with me about the situation, he was eaten up inside. He felt he was somehow an accessory to the charade taking place on Sunday mornings. He’d even confronted the choir director—but was sternly rebuffed and told it was none of his business. When he went to the pastor, he was told there wasn’t enough evidence to take any action.

My recommendation to Bill was direct: "You’ve done all you can to confront and remedy the situation. If the church tolerates the situation, you must leave for the sake of your own conscience."

Trying to make peace when faced with a situation like that can damage our own integrity. It’s often wisest to leave.

2. When family needs take second place to ministry needs.
Our immediate families are more important than our youth groups. As God’s ministers, our first responsibilities are to minister to our spouses and children. But too often youth ministry—or the amount of time and energy we’re putting into it—can hurt our families.

Some scenarios:

• Ministry needs prevent sufficient time with our families.
• Ministry needs cause our families to endure unfair expectations.
• Special health concerns arise within our families.

Obviously in most cases, departures should be among the last resorts—perhaps all that’s needed is a bit of focused reprioritizing. But youth ministry jobs that effectively prevent us from carrying out ministry to and care for our families aren’t the kind we ought to stick with.

3. When relationships within our congregations deteriorate beyond reasonable hope of reconciliation.
Even as I was preparing this article, I had lunch with a young couple who, only 10 months earlier, faced precisely this kind of situation. Mark and Courtney had been working with their youth group as partners: Mark was paid by the church; Courtney loved kids and loved Mark, so she was right there beside him.

But soon a range of issues arose in the congregation. Some of them didn’t directly involve Mark and Courtney (budget concerns, a lawsuit against the church, the dismissal of the senior pastor). But when the deal went down, there were false accusations, distortions, and open statements of hostility and distrust directed toward the couple by some of the church leaders.

They perhaps could’ve marshalled enough support to override the church’s decision that they leave, but the cost to their students, their family, and the congregation would have been painfully high. So they chose to move on.

4. When it’s clearly God’s will that we move to a specific, new ministry.
This kind of call grows out of mostly positive circumstances—more an instance of being led to a position than of being driven from one. This kind of leading is usually confirmed through three channels (by order of importance):

• prayer
• brothers and sisters who know us and our gifts
• accompanying circumstances

But when all is said and done, sometimes even our most concentrated efforts to pray, seek counsel, and ask the hard questions aren’t enough to give us a clear sense of whether or not we should move on to a new work—or leave an old one.

Perhaps it’s beyond the ability of our brethren to comprehend why we’re moving on. Perhaps it makes no sense to them. Or to us. Sometimes only God knows, and sometimes that’s all we know.

But there’s one rule that takes precedence over every other—and in the long run, should bring comfort: If God says move on, we’d better move on.

Duffy Robbins is chairman of the youth ministry department at Eastern College in St. David's, Pennsylvania, a popular speaker, and a member of the Youth Specialties Resource Seminar Team. He's also authored The Ministry of Nurture and coauthored Memory Makers and Spontaneous Melodramas.