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The Backbone Meeting

I arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as the next youth worker candidate who promised to turn the thing around.

I had big shoes to fill—I was reminded of the glory days in my interview. The church was looking for the return of those days—and also someone to fix the problems that had led to a languishing youth ministry. Students had grown disinterested, apathetic—even indifferent. Nothing seemed to excite them or spur them on to grow in their faith.

I ended up getting the job of filling the big shoes of the past. But I soon learned that those youth group glory days were built essentially on personalities and ideas—and that can take a youth group only so far.

But as a self-confessed idea junkie, I must admit that I was greatly tempted to pull out my best event ideas and fill the youth group calendar with stuff I’d seen work in the past. But after further reflection, those thoughts exhausted me. At that time I was in my late thirties, and I had my own kids to put to bed! There had to be an easier way to cure kids of their attention deficit disorder without turning the youth room into a Barnum & Bailey act.

What was desperately needed was structure.

The Maiden Voyage
My first act as the new youth worker was to collect around me a small band of enthusiastic, faithful students. I asked them to commit to being at my office the day after our Sunday night meeting. When they got there, I pulled out a city map and plotted a route for our team.

Every Monday we would meet and put together bags of cookies, Christian music tapes, and other items to be hand-delivered to the front doors of each new student who came to a meeting the night before.

These kids never did anything like this before. I remember what their faces looked like as they left the comfortable confines of the church for the first time and stepped into the church van. They were more than a little nervous. They actually prayed like they were flying to a foreign country with the possibility of never returning!

But this simple step proved a vital piece in building a structure for change in that youth group. For the next three years this group of kids would serve faithfully as part of the leadership core. They watched as we developed, piece by piece, what I call a backbone meeting.

To use the words of Bill Stewart, a pioneer youth worker, you must develop one main meeting that "flies" before doing anything else. The backbone is the ministry time around which all other youth group ministries and meetings revolve and function. In fact, until a student ministry has established a backbone, all other facets to the group should be put on hold (or at least pared back) until a solid, regular, backbone meeting is established.

My experience has been that even the most apathetic students will respond positively to a weekly meeting that is purposefully carried out. Most ministries experience attention deficit disorder because they don’t rigorously focus upon the development of one main meeting that fires on all cylinders. Because without a well-organized and well-developed backbone—and it may take two years or more to get it right—students filter in and out of the church week after week with no real expectation or anticipation.

Below are some principles that should help get the backbone meeting off the ground. I found they worked for me. Adjust them as you see fit. You can develop yours and give it additional strength in time. Some of the points are reflective of a fully developed backbone meeting, so you might try using the first few for now if you haven’t started developing one yet.

Building a Backbone
A backbone meeting doesn’t have to be complex. (With a large group, simpler is often better.) God certainly used mountain-top experiences in the youth groups I’ve led, but the valley is where we can build a structure that God can use. The backbone can be developed not merely in its breadth, but in its depth as well. It can move your group from hunting for another idea to wondering how God might use next week’s gathering.

• Develop your values as a team. (And write them down!)
  
  
• Start anywhere. Determine what meeting is most crucial to the rest of what you want your ministry to accomplish. Sunday morning? Sunday night? Tuesday night? It may be wise to develop your backbone around the largest group that regularly gathers. And don’t forget to tell parents what you’re doing!
  
  
• Create thematic meetings. Here’s a place for creativity. A theme can stretch for three weeks or three months. If you have a speaker or speakers for each night, ask for the message outlines. You and a planning team can review each point to see how it might be enhanced at meeting time. Could a video clip highlight a main point? How about a song?
  
  
• Plan 16 weeks ahead. Get away with some students or adults and assign key areas. Dream a bit about the whole year. Brainstorm about experts who could contribute to your meeting. Write down names and dates. Devise a worksheet that helps you organize your nights.
  
  
• Publicize creatively and provocatively. Develop a consistent mailer and phone team. Take special effort with this. Find and commission students or other staff members to make this aspect of the ministry creative and worth noticing.
  
  
• Food, food, food! Feed your group unashamedly. And put a food hook in your promo mailer.
  
  
• Hold a preview meeting. All key players gather and strategize before the meeting. Here the theme is reviewed.
  
  
• Funnel toward one moment. I’ve found that the backbone meeting works best when it consists of a singular focus that’s driven home by students. You can put together a small leadership team to take a five-to-10 minute spotlight time. This is where your student leaders will shine. They can be used to challenge apathetic or indifferent students to take the next step in following Christ.

We designed our backbone meeting around a seven-minute period of time called "Student Spotlight." From my perspective, this was the whole purpose of the night. The lights dimmed as five students walked up front and sat on stools with microphones in their hands. They would address the night’s topic which might have been introduced with a movie clip, skit, or a testimonial. But the key value driving our backbone meeting was that students challenged their peers to make spiritual commitments.

• Establish levels of commitment beyond the backbone. We found it was vitally important to make small group participation a privilege. A student had to commit to groups that were forming throughout the academic year. For us commitments originated from challenges made at the backbone meeting.
  
  
• Focus creatively. Is the theme on alcohol abuse? Assign someone to fill the whole stage with empty beer cases or park a smashed car outside the meeting place with a sign promoting next week’s meeting. Are you going to discuss teamwork or challenge them to aspire to greatness? Why not try a climbing theme: Hang rock climbing gear all over the stage and give pieces to students who make commitments at your meeting. This will remind them to be strong in their faith.

The key here is finding students who are willing to track down visual aids that will speak volumes to the group.

• Use checklists and place students in charge of them. Attention to detail can mean the difference between an okay meeting and a great one. Was the room cold last week? Why? Who can make sure that doesn’t happen again? Will we have to deal with that faulty cord on the overhead? The VCR didn’t seem like it was tracking correctly.
  
  
• Follow up. Determine how valuable this is to your ministry. But first try to foster its benefit in your student leaders. As I wrote earlier, my Grand Rapids youth group included a team of students who, within 24 hours of the Sunday night meeting, knocked on the front doors of all the new students who had come the night before. This consistent personal contact helped build many bridges.
  
  
• Commit to evaluating. Go after this. The meeting isn’t over until it’s been evaluated. I found it best to not evaluate a meeting on the same night.
  
  
• Hold a weekly review. Not much will be improved until a team of adults and students can review what took place at the last meeting and get it out in the open to look at it.

You’ll find students saying positive and not-so-positive things. And you’ll also find that over time they get better at evaluating the backbone. If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have a leadership team of students developed, begin informally. Look for problems, both attitudinal and technical. Keep the team motivated by asking, "Tell me how you saw God working last week?"

Leaps and Bounds
Several of my original student leaders joined me on a missions experience a few years after I started at the church. We’d talked about doing a trip like this for quite a while. I’d flown down to Honduras two days prior to their arrival and was at the airport to greet them. Was this the same group of kids who nervously stepped into that church van to deliver cookies a few years back? Not a chance! I was watching a group of 15 students stride off the plane excited and confident, anticipating how God would work through them.

Over the years they had experienced hands-on ministry at our weekly meeting, and it had given them confidence that God could use them. Somehow this ragtag group of students got the message that their calling was to serve God by serving their fellow students at a backbone meeting—and it was now a privilege to venture out and do something else.

For us it took rigorous discipline not to leave our group behind and do something else—until our backbone meeting had been established. But now was that time: While we ministered for 10 days in Honduras, our weekly backbone was going on as planned in Grand Rapids. We learned that it went smoothly. Whatever had been structured and implemented was the result of adults and students embracing the value of establishing a core meeting.

But beware! Don’t be swayed by the ministry down the street that has more ink on its event calendar. I encourage you to plod along, if necessary. Make little improvements on a weekly basis. Step by step. Piece by piece. I believe a mature, focused weekly meeting will bring about great fruit in time.

Later, as the backbone meeting took shape and became established, I became less vital to its operation. Adults, interns, and students began leading that meeting. These individuals had become more than able to plan, execute, and evaluate it without me. And I became free to concentrate on other ministries that needed attention.

And after you’ve done your backbone work, you may find the problem of youth group attention deficit disorder—if you remember it at all—has faded from sight.

Before he became senior pastor of Trinity Church-Windward in Kailua, Hawaii, two years ago, Todd Capen was a youth worker for 15 years in California, Michigan, and Florida.