For episode four of a five part series, talking about Youth Ministry roadmapping, so we spent the last few episodes of where you caught up on those. If you haven't heard episode 1:10 about what it means to discover episode one, 11, whether to build or episode 1:12, but what it needs to develop your ministry. Then please rewind the station, go back those episodes, listened to those, and then come back and check out this one. We're Chad Higgins. We talk about phase four of the youth ministry roadmap, which is to scale scale, so me, my buddy Chad tickets. Going to talk about what it means to scale in your ministry today. Chad, get us caught up a little bit and introduce this idea of what are we scaling, what are we weighing, what are we measuring, and how it relates to growing a healthy human youth
Speaker 2:ministry. When I think of scale, all I can think of this fish fish will be arm up ready scales, scales on the fish. Now actually weighing the perfect. Yeah, no, I think when we're talking about scales, right? The first thing that I want to dive into, right as we've talked about this process that we're going through, right? Discovering we're asking the questions, we're building something, and then this development process, we're building these systems and all this kind of thing. Yeah. We're making it better and all that kind of stuff. To me, scales fits very well in this, um, this development phase if we're going to be really honest. Right? I think that, um, the scaling phase is, it's almost develop two point. Oh, if we're going to be real honest with her, it's this way, right? It's the developers, the stuff. And then the scale is the people that we give this stuff to. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Because I think as we talk about scale right there, there are shifts that are going to happen and we're going to talk about a few different shifts that have to happen and because one of the things I want you to understand when we're talking about scale across our student ministry, right? And we're not just talking about like individual, like events or programs, um, I think we can think of scale in those as well as, as we break that down. Um, but when we're talking to cross our entire ministry, when we're looking at scales, um, we were talking about, um, these, these points of shift and those happen at all different levels, right? Whether you're the youth minister of 14 students, right? And, and you've up until this point, everything you've been doing has been in circle, right? And you're moving to love. Let's have Bible study. It'll be great. Yep. Right? And you're moving to like stage, right? That there's a shift there. There's a scaling process there. You've got to start thinking of student ministry, different, all of those kinds of things. Then you start relying on other adults to start coming in, right? That are leading small groups and things like that. There's a scaling process in that. Then you start thinking about bringing on, you know, another layer into that, right into that process of making that even bigger to to effectively care for all the students that are coming and all that kind of stuff. There's a scale precedent that there's even a bigger scope process when you start bringing on other staff members. Right? Right into the phone
Speaker 1:journey may represent scale. You may have started as the volunteer leader and now you're getting paid to do this job because of the ways in which the ministry has shifted and grown before you got there and now in your tenure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so if you're hearing us tonight, right, and you're, you're just thinking of, oh, scale is for the guys of the really big church. No, no, no, no, no. Every one of us are going to go through different shifts in our student ministry, and so a lot of what we're talking about in this episode and when we talk about our scaling is we're talking about those kind of philosophical shifts that go in to our brain, into our people's brain, in our leaders brain.
Speaker 1:I think the way that we want to push on this in both, again, because you've been a few booster, is all about healthy ministries and healthy ministers. When you get to the development areas, the phase for stage four that we're calling scale, you are testing the capacity of both of you as a leader and your ministry. How ready are you and how ready is your ministry for whatever the next thing is, and so again, you built something, you refined it, you developed it, now you're getting the pressure because you're doing a good job and things are growing like how ready are you to lead at the next level and how ready is your ministry to Minister at the next kind of capacity swell. And so whether that's 14 to 20 or 20 to 50 or 50 to 100, the numbers are all relative because every increment is testing the capacity and the readiness, the structural integrity, right? So we have development is US building the support beams to the ramshackle hut. That was the building phase. This is the like the storm is coming and the winds are blowing. How strong and ready are you both as the ministry and the minister for what the next level is and hear us say this with a charitable heart. There may be a season where you're scale is tested, where your structural integrity is tested and they may blow you back down to have to redefine a redeveloped. Some of those things you may get hit and not be ready for what was next, but that's okay. That's why this stuff grows in waves and it returns. I mean, I think I would share very honestly that we had an amazing kind of growth run over the summer of 2017 where I felt like we moved from a development to a scale phase, but to be honest with you, Chad Higgins, January 2018, we're back in development again. We've grown. Things have changed, but some of this stuff isn't as as I want it to be. We're
Speaker 2:going to have to go back through and not just patch it up but retained down some walls and renovate and revive some of the things that need to be a little bit better as you should. Right. And we talked about that in episode one of this, right? So much of what we're talking about is this circular pattern, right? Right. That that we built. We build something, we develop it. We started scaling it and it made an inmate even even in successful scales, right? Yeah. We come back to this place of development because here's what you need to know and understand. If you don't go back to that right, eventually you're either going to trickle down to where you don't need to scale or things continue to go well, and you should have scaled and you're not ready for it. Yeah. Right. Like you will miss out on growth. You'll miss out on growth because you didn't build the things in place. Right? It's so important for us when we're talking about building student ministry, that we think of capacity, right? In student ministry, not only for ourselves, but our leaders and our ministry, and I want you to think for a moment and ask yourself this question, what is the capacity for my student ministry right now? Because I think for a lot of people they say, men, I want to grow. Right? When you talked to most youth ministers, whether it's pure or not, they want a big student ministry. Right? More. Give me more, more, more and of everything. Everybody thinks that they're ready for more. Sure. And I dreamt it. I dreamt it. Chat, I should get it. If I have dreams, I shouldn't be getting it. But, but the reality of it is a lot of times we want more, but we're not ready for more. Right? We haven't built a process, right? The, we haven't developed a process that's ready for this scale, you know? Um, a, a good buddy of mine would always explain it like this, right? He would always ask this question of, um, how many students, right? Or how many people do you feel like you could adequately, you know, discipled, develop, that could walk with you if you personally, you personally, right? If you were going to be in the business solely and making disciples, what's the number? Right? And before you could always answer, he would always interject with. And remember, Jesus only did twelfth, right? Just go ahead and cap your cap, your expectations to at least less than 12, maybe 11 and a half at the most. Because I think for, for a lot of us, right? We, we think, oh, the student minister, right? I, you know, all this. And we look at all of our students, right? A lot of times when we just speak to them from stage or whatever and we think that we're quote unquote discipling them. But in the real knowing 60 names is not the same thing as discipling 60 kids. Correct. And so you start to ask that question and let's say, let's say you're an absolute rockstar. Zach work in and you say, you know what? 10 people, Ryan 10. All right, I can, I can effectively walk with 10 people. Disciple tend to. That's two a day on a work week, right? Okay. Let's say yours is yours is 10. All right, we're going to help these students grow. Develop as, as full time employed youth minister on staff. Your number is 10. Good for you. You're a solid 10 way to go. So we're gonna. Assume that you have 10 and let's say you've got three adults that are volunteer leaders for you, right, and of course, right? These people aren't paid staff and so obviously they can't do as many as you, but let's say these are rockstar leaders sold out their end of the vision that helps you build it. They've been through all the training courses, they've never missed a meeting. They are ready and good to go. Right? And so let's say each of those can do eight, right? Eight solid, solid, solid leaders. Man, these are the best leaders that we know of, right? Altogether, right? Your capacity at full blow go. All of you working as hard as you possibly can work, right? Is 34 students, okay, that's your maximum capacity. Now, if we're going to be really honest with ourself, right? Most of our leaders are going to maybe do three or four right now. They may sit in a room once a week, right? With these students and they may do some Bible studies and those are great, but we want to talk about actual discipleship because hopefully for us, right? First and so many student ministries and churches around the country, right? Their vision statement is to make disciples right about it all about it. If that's the process, right? And we look at our, our development process and we say, this is our vision, is to make disciples, right? Not just let students sit in a room and hear a Bible study, right? To make disciples, right? There's this process that we want to do. So let's say for us that is 34 students. We say right now, man, knocking on all cylinders, these are the best leaders I've ever seen in my life. Boom, we can knock out 34. That means this, that the 35th student that walks through your door is not cared for. And, and I think that we've got to let that sink in because oftentimes we want larger ministries, but if, if we're going to be real honest with ourselves, we may not be caring for the ones that we currently have. And so when we start to think of scale and we start to think of that development process that we start really getting honest with ourself of going what is our capacity? And so instead of just wanting more and wanting more, we really started getting on our knees and we asking, asking the Lord, God, help me build this. That if you were to give us more that we're ready, that we would be faithful to that. And so as we start
Speaker 1:to scale and in this process that we're asking these questions about our capacity. Well and I think this is the thing related to that chat and for a lot of folks to hear that the heavy, the heavy critique of what is your actual capacity is what does it take to go to that next level is a high, high level of trust. Because when you are starting to ask other folks to minister in a high regard kind of way, you are trusting that they're going to do a great job. And I think for a lot of our listeners that this is the kind of trust that takes a lot of time. That turns that number 10 for you may be into a four or five because you're spending time with leaders trying to raise them up in a way that you would trust them to administer or your recruiting other leaders to give some of this ministry away too, and so I think related to the idea of scaling administry is the openness that other folks are going to have to minister in places that you're not at, like if you really care about the disciple making process and your body into small groups and mentoring and caring deeply and in like in relationship with young people and you know that you're talking on stage isn't going to be the end all, be all for students. Ministry has to happen in rooms that you're not in and that's a high level of trust and it's a high level of delegation, which means a couple of different things for a lot of youth ministry friends. One, you're gonna have to spend a lot more time with leaders like you're going to have to actually like your leaders, meet with your leaders, reproach, rebuff your leaders. If they're not doing a good job, encourage your leaders so they can see what the good job is you want them to do. Training leaders takes a lot of time. If you think that you just had a meeting in the spring and the summer and the fall and you're done, not the case like it takes a lot of time to train leaders, which number two means you're getting spending less time with students. I think for a lot of youth minister, they don't like hearing that, but as you grow or seek to grow or desire to grow or scale your ministry, you're going to find that part of one of the things that comes with a growing ministry is less and less time with actual students and with those instead that are leading the students you're trying to minister to and that sounds like a weird like Middle Management Pyramid, vicarious scheme, but that's the way in which we really grow and scale this thing. Think about it in your small groups on a Sunday morning or a midweek, if you've got smaller groups that middle school guys, middle school girls or by grade or by gender, by interest group or whatever. There's ministry happening and all of those rooms that you're praying and trusting is good ministry and at the curriculum you handed out the questions, you offer it up. The thing that you prepared them with instructed and trained them on is good and they're going to minister in the place that you're not at and I think for a lot of our listeners and youth ministry folks, there's a readiness of our own self before we get into check the ministry and what the ministry is capable of has the capacity for because of the ways in which we have to shift how much we trust and delegate and inform and train those that would do ministry alongside us and not just what we are doing. The Youth Ministry
Speaker 2:at the place that we're serving. Yeah. You know, I think as we talk about this scaling process, right, like, like each of these processes, one is to be reminded that we're, we're communicating and we're leading through these, right? Um, for, for each of us, and hopefully we, we talked through this even in that discovery phase that this isn't just pointing people at a place, but we're walking people through something, right? Yeah. And it's helping our people understand as we scale, my role looks different, they're role is different, right? And we start to build in layers in our student ministry, right? That what we're developing is not just this one process, but we start to think in layers of leadership, uh, of this process of going, okay, we've got our small group leaders, right? Let's start from you in the bottom right? You're leading a small group of students, right? Every Wednesday night you're leading a small group of students, um, you, all of a sudden you hit 16 students write it no longer feels like everybody can talk. That's right. There's, there's too many voices. We're going to have to either split it up or we're going to have to say, you know, half of you can talk this week or we'll do the little straw thing, or everybody gets two straws. You get two comments per night. Yeah. So now you've, you've got, uh, you've, you're scaling, right? Yeah. So you bring in another leader. Maybe it's a female leader. She's going to take the girls. You're going to guys, girls middle school, high school grade, right. Alright. And so you start to function in that way. There are ministry happening in the other room that you're not a part of. Right. That shifts seems fairly easy for, for people to wrap their brains around of going, okay, yeah. Cool. Or Youth Ministry is growing now. It starts growing even more than that. Maybe you hit about 35, you're going to start doing a large group thing on Wednesday. Talk up front. Yeah. Yeah. Some small group stuff. You know it. There's like handouts with questions on the followup to the talk. Yeah, we got a band, right? It's all that kind of stuff. Right. And so it starts to look like that process and when, so we now, now there's going to be some different expectations, right? Chad, why are you leading a small group anymore? You've always lead a small group, right? And used to lead or, and you've always done the high school boys, right? And all that kind of stuff. And so now it starts to look a little bit different. Your role changes. Your, your leaders start to understand why that would be the case, right? You're communicating that through the process, all that kind of stuff. And now you get to a point, right? Let's say you've, you've grown even more, you've got, let's say massive growth. You've got now 20 different small groups that are going on, right? And in, in that process, your layer now is no longer just you, the small group leaders because 20 people, right? We talked earlier, all you can really care for is about 10 right now. What do you, what do you do with your leaders aren't getting cared for, your leaders aren't getting trained, all of that kind of stuff. And you start to develop another layer right now. You have people that are pouring into your small group leaders, small group, coach level. Yeah, small group, coach level, right? You're starting to build that. You're bringing on other staff members, those kinds of things. And so we're, we're scaling and we're walking through that, uh, in a process. And so you're starting to think of layers of leadership. One of the things that you talked about is this, this leadership shift, right? I'm a of that. You'll start to see. One of the things that I would encourage you in this scaling process is not only are you training your leaders to be great leaders now, but you're training your leaders to be great leaders in the future, right? That you're already building someone up, right? Even if you don't have those youth ministry coaches yet, you're starting to train up two or three. That could be that in the future, right? That's right. They do. They're like, they're like the best small group leader you have. And like everybody else wants to know what, what rod knows. Everybody else wants to know what, what dion knows because they're so good at what they do. They want, they want to learn from them and it's kind of almost like you see it and you kind of set it up because they stand out and again, like that's the part of you are like we talked about in the last episode, stepped back enough from the process itself that you can begin to identify the next thing, cropping up the next wave your ministry is going to ride because you don't want to miss it. The whole point of having the roadmap as they see where you're going to go so you don't miss it. You don't want to miss having that stuff tested in readying your capacity, expanding so that every kid that shows up is already ready to be brought into what you're doing. You're not trying to build the other stuff onto late because you were ready for the surge. You were ready for the big thing to happen. Yeah. You know, I think one of the big things too in scale, you talked about this, this relational shift, right? Like it seems like you get to be less and less around the students and you know, for me at a larger church that was always this man. I was like, ah, I love hanging out with students and all that kind of stuff. But I realized that the best way that I was able to care for these students was to really develop and grow other leaders, make sure that their spiritual, healthy, all of those kinds of things. Right. But I think that there's also this shift in us that even goes past the relational thing of our capacity as a leader, right? To start identifying these kinds of things to build these kinds of things that we're not just looking at student ministries as it always has been done, but we're starting to define the thing of what are the things that only I could do. Right. And leading in that kind of place. You know, I, I think when we start to get to that place and we started to develop, we're bringing people in the process and areas that we would have never thought about. Right. You know, I hear youth ministers all the time that just talk about how, Oh, I'm so glad I'm so bad at the administrative aspect of my job. Right? And my thought is always will find somebody who is right. Because a lot of times we only think of, you know, small group leaders as people that we can find is served. I promise you there are. There are people in your church right now that are so good at the financial pieces. They're so good at the administrative pieces, the hospitality, the welcome that wreck, the sound that the making the videos and getting this stuff done. You want to get done. That's right. And we're, we're all so busy trying to be the experts of all of those things that we're constantly in this place of learning, right? Instead of trying to play our piece right and trying to find who are the people that God has blessed and brought into this church to serve the people that are in here and to serve this community, that we can start to activate them in the gifting that God has given them to serve these people. To reach this community well, so the way that I would frame it this way, so there's the leadership paradigm is to move from being an artisan, someone who makes or does something, to being a leader who someone who is aware of something. I think for a lot of us, we put everything that needs to get done within our own ability. Well, whatever's going to get done is the stuff that I can do. It's okay to take the leadership stance and say what's going to get done at the staff that I see that needs to get done and having the awareness or the attentiveness to see it and in the capacity to begin to delegate it away. It's not going to get all delegated away today, but you should be taking note of the things that need to get done and that can be given away because it can't just be what you do. That's a bottleneck and that's not good leadership. Just because you are the pinnacle or the point of like whatever might be the things that flow out of it. That is the wrong model for having a successful or a succession based Ministry strategy. The end of the roadmap that we'll get to in the next episode is not you standing on top having everything you thought you wanted, the highest point of the mountain, but it's you having left the forest at you, having left the journey and everyone behind you. They're doing a great job so you can go rediscover new things in new places. That's the ultimate goal is to give it all away and so if you are hinged to the whole thing and the old thing rises and falls with you, hear us say listener, Youth Ministry leader worker. Whether you are a volunteer part time or full time, you've got to begin to identify the places that ministry can happen without you and if it can't, find ways that you can begin to give it away. When it comes to the scaling process, the big advice that I would give in this, if you've identified a. This is where I'm at, my big advice is this. Find people. Find a coach. Find somebody that is at that next place and learn from them. That's right. What ever you've got to do to get yourself beside them to figure out what they're doing. That is the absolute best thing that you can do for yourself. Be because for, for each of us, when we talk about this leadership capacity, uh, you know, I believe that that is something that we can grow into, right? That we can develop and we can learn what that next thing needs to look like, right? How we get there, all of those kinds of things. But we don't do that by just examining what we've always known. That's right. For some of us, we grew up in a student ministry, have, you know, 35 students and you're now a student minister of 35 students and you're going, man, how do I get 60 or whatever? Right? And, and we're constantly like baton up against this, right? I see youth ministers all the time, right? They'll hit 50 students and then they'll come back down to 30 5:50 students in the compact under 35, right over and over again. And they just, they get frustrated, right? Right. Why won't we grow? Why don't we grow, we grow, but it never stays. Why don't I have a moment right now? And you continue to just wrestle with the same structure over and over again without realizing that there's gotta be some actual shifts in the way that you do things. And we don't learn those until like, we're truly in it and we're truly walking with somebody and they're able to look at your ministry and go, wait, why do you do it this way? Right? And, and, and a lot of times like we've got to walk through that process that sometimes hard and sometimes makes us scratch our head and, uh, and go, wait, why does that matter? Right? Because I've found that oftentimes when we talk about scaling the things that we scratch your head and go, wait, why does that matter? When we finally implemented it, you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, that changes everything. And so men there, there's those things in scaling that that I would really encourage you to find these people to find a great coach that can walk you through this, that you can learn from that you go and you go, hey, I can I just come sit in your office for a week, right, and shadow you and, and, and all that kind of stuff. Leading me to the place that I haven't been before. And I think that's the reason that the metaphor for us is the roadmap, right? Like this is a place that you could get to if you knew what was next. And for a lot of you that listening, it's
Speaker 1:not for lack of hustle, it's not for lack of effort. It's not for lack of care. You work hard, you care for your students. It's just you don't necessarily know what's the next thing. Because I know that for us, we don't always know what the next thing is. That's why we always try to surround ourselves with good friends that have gone further, that have run farther, and to ask them to follow in their footsteps, to learn from them. That's the true secret of great leadership is to put people around you that have outrun you and to say, how did you get there? What steps did you take? What journey, what path did you walk down? And so for those that are maybe on the borderlines, on the board, places of developing into scale, maybe the best thing you can do for you as a leader and for you as a minister for your ministry is to find someone to help you identify what it might take to move from that to this. But then we'll see you back for the next episode when we talk about what it means to have a successful ministry, and we're not just talking about big numbers, but we're talking about something that lives and last. So we'll see you back the next episode. Episode Five. Success.