But you did it. This is episode five, part five of the five part series for the Youth Ministry booster roadmap success today. You did it, but if you haven't heard episodes, 1:10, 1:11, one slash 12 slash one slash 13, right? I don't know. This is the success episode. If you've gotten to this point, hopefully if you listen to the first four episodes of what it means to discover, build, develop, scale, and then now six seed, and this is not the success maybe that you were thinking about, but hopefully by the end of this episode you feel encouraged that this is a place that you were hoping to get to all long. Let us say from the very beginning, this is our working thesis. Hang out with today with my best friend Chad Higgins, talking about success in youth ministry and the line is this woods, your ministry live if you left, because if your youth ministry would live after you leave and that is successful ministry, we believe that successful ministry has very little to do with a number. Let's just say it openly. There is no number of students that will ever satisfy you if you've been involved in the student Ministry of 50, you're going to want 60. Have you been involved with 100? You're going to want$200 and if you've been involved with 300, you're going to want 3000. There is a known number that will ever feel ultimately satisfying, but what might feel satisfying is knowing that if you left, if you got called to serve somewhere else or you felt like your time and you finished your was done, but that youth ministry at the church you're at now was still thriving, going strong even when you weren't there. That is good. Good success.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I think a lot of times when we think of a, what is a successful student ministry look like, right? Um, you know, they're going to point to numbers or they're going to even point to some great things, right? Health and all those kinds of things. And they're part of the process, right? Don't hear us say that, you know, healthy thing shouldn't grow. And all those kind of deals like, yeah, we believe in that. We believe that there's a process for that. We would look at the development phase, the scaling phase. I you've heard us talk about these kinds of things, but I want us to start wrapping our minds around and start thinking about success in student ministry as a kingdom thing and it has a thing that withstands, right that holds, that continues to grow even after we're gone. That when you walk out of a place that it is better than the way that you left it, the way that you found it, and that we're able to to succeed, right? In a way that's healthy, that is beneficial for everyone involved, that the leaders of this church are a quipped, that they're. That they're trained, right? That they're excited, that they're wanting to engage. Not only the students will walk through your doors with the in that community. Right? And that to me is successful student ministry. And what's great about that right is it doesn't matter if you're a student ministry. If I have three kids, right, or 3000, we can all look at that differently, right? Part of this roadmap for us was trying to look at it at all different sizes, all different contexts, and we say, what are the things that are true in student ministry across the board, and we believe that this is what success for us needs to look like, not only for us personally and our churches, but on a kingdom, right? That we're looking at it and in that mode that what we're trying to do is bigger than ourselves. It's bigger than these people, right? And it is something that lasts. And so for us, as we think through this process, right, of secession that we're asking ourselves, hey, what are we building to get here? What are we developing to make that better? How do we scale in such a way? Right? It builds these systems that's going in that it's going to last. It's not just this house of cards built on us, right? But it's something that is sustainable.
Speaker 1:Well, I think about somebody, youth pastors chat either because they didn't stick around long enough or they didn't set up things in the right way that after they leave there is that like hollowing out period where you. You've been there before friend or if you have you probably one day will be you come in to interview for the job and the students are just
Speaker 2:just crestfallen and
Speaker 1:morose and sad because the youth ministry before used to be great and then it wasn't. Or there's parents that feel so let down or people are finding ways to try to say nice things about the youth minister before you, but they're struggling to do so and you just want to know why. What happened? Like why in this day and age is they're not always good youth ministry everywhere and it's because so many folks build it around their personality, around their strategy, around a particular unique personal philosophy of ministry. And it doesn't loop back into. It doesn't interpret out of what the vision of the church is. And so when that person leaves, the whole ministry falls around them because it wasn't integrated into the life of the church like that. That's why we go back to the very, very beginning. Those questions matter so much because you're not trying to answer your questions about youth ministry. You're trying to answer for the church what good youth ministry looks like for this church in this context, for this community, because if you're answering those questions all along and building out developing and scaling to answer those questions that it was never about you, it was never about you because if it was always about you, then it's going to die when you're not there. Right? Like it's the thing that like if you were the root and it wasn't the answer to what the students needed, the Gospel message in that group, then when you uproot, they're going to be uprooted and that's why I think it is so important to think through this long journey, this, this map, if you will, of what it means to do ministry well, because we need to have a plan. It is youth ministry had been around too long for us not to have a good plan of what it looks like to come in grow and find health or youth ministry that's not topsy turvy or week to week. There should be planning, envisioning intact so that way one day when you will leave, because here's the bottom line. We're all at the place that we're at now for a temporary season. None of us are going to be there for longer than maybe a few years, a decade, two or three. Right? Like everybody's temporary. Somewhere in the hope is that because there's always more young people that we're finding new and healthy ways to do youth ministry that are relevant to that context and helpful and healthy for that church and so if you're hearing this and you're using minister who feel stuck or on the way out, our challenge to you is not to go back and look at the receipts of how many students were added or how much money was saved or how big the youth ministry building is now because of you. But is it healthy enough of an ecosystem to transform the lives of young people to make disciples out of 13 to 17 year olds that if you left that process would be still in place, healthy and growing even if you weren't there to manage. So when we think about success, right? We think about what is it like when we leave? The other thought that I would love that. I'd love to give you two as you evaluate success in your ministry is where are the students that when they leave, right, the students who graduate, you know, when, when they, when they had out of what is that process look like? Now we can't build our, our thought of are we successful? Are we not on every single student? Right? We understand that they're going to make their own life choices. That's not an all that kind of stuff, but I think it is fair to start looking at it on a, on a grander scale and asking, Hey, what are these students getting as they walk out? Right? What do they know? How, what, what have, what tools have we given them? Right? To hopefully give them the best opportunity for them to be successful in the future, continue to grow all of those kinds of things. Right, and we evaluate it in that way that we're not just looking at the moment to moment in our student ministry, but we're looking at it at a longevity, right? We're looking at down the road a way down the road often because you've ministry is this, we've said it before on the aftertime podcast. Youth Ministry is a long game in a short season yet, so what we're doing now in five to six years for hoping has impact for the next 50 to 60. That is no small task and that's why it requires such an important kind of vision and such healthy kind of structures because it's not just about the you did or the summer camp experience, but the whole concept in big picture, what you were behind and about and for and what you worked tirelessly for and why you cared so much about a bunch of snot nose 14 year old because you saw the potential in them now that they themselves did not see. And for you, the success was not just having more of them in the room, but that when they graduated or when you laugh or whatever was next, they were rooted, deeply planted the seeds of the gospel word work in their life because of the things that you worked to lead into, put into place. I remember one of my
Speaker 2:very first disciple disciples in my life that discipled me, he, he made this statement and I met. I was probably like a junior in high school at the time, uh, and it was, it was probably like a passing statement too. But I always remembered to this day, he said, don't aspire to be billy Graham. Aspire to be the guy that discipled billy Graham. Right? And, and that thought process of our life right enough. Oftentimes we want the accolades. But really the thing that we want to strive for is to be just the faithful thing that we see the people that we walk through life do great things. And, and I think for us as youth ministers, I hope that that is our hope and our prayer. So Zach, I want to give my very best advice for that. Is the success part of the roadmap? Are you ready for this? Because I think it's really, really good. All right,
Speaker 3:best for last. We go in. Here's why. Because it's done, right? We've. We've gotten to this place and it's done.
Speaker 2:The only advice for us as dentists that we go back to this place of discovery and we're asking questions that we, once we get to that success, it's successful. We come back to this building phase and we know, okay, I got, I got to build this to get to that place of success and we go to this development phase. When we go, I got to work on this and I'm going to build these structures so we're not left empty handed at this success phase. We've got to get to this scale phase because we get there. Then we're going to have more students and we're going to have a better ministry structure that grows into this place of succession that it's not about me. It's not about one person or even one small group of people, but it is about churches by the ministry. It's about the Kingdom of Jesus Christ at the end of the day that we will be found to be faithful in ministry and that is my advice because if we're just hoping that the things that we do one day like is that there's going to be a lot of great things. Don't, don't hear me wrong, right? You can run blindly, as hard as you can through ministry in and I believe that God's gonna, he's gonna, use that and you're going to be able to disciple many students along the way and it's going to be great. Right? But if we want to get really structure and we want to try to do this, the very best we possibly can do, we don't just hope that it happens, right? But we put all of our efforts to try to get to that place that we leave. Well and at the end of it all right, and maybe if a sad note to end on, but at the end of it all right, have success. We're not just talking about leaving a church right at the end of our life one day, right, and it's all done and we look back at it all and we say the all these years of student ministry and all these years of ministry and all these years of life. What was it for? Right. Yeah, and and hopefully my, my biggest prayer for each and every youth minister listening now that there will be after your long gone that there will be grandchildren have grandchildren
Speaker 3:that are affected because of the faithful ministry that you sweated over today and to me that makes the late nights lock ins worth it when they fit in the vision. Right and makes the long nights of camp worth it. It makes sense, painstaking process of writing out our philosophy and our vision of ministry and putting that to paper that we can hand that to our leaders of our senior pastor and we could say, this is what we're about, that we don't know who that will affect years.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's the challenge. Are Worthy of the high calling in your life. I would hope that this roadmap has been helpful for you. Please feel free to listen and relisten to any episode parts that you need because you will been going through them at various times in your life, administrate various seasons and so friend, if you're listening, this is the challenge worthy of the call.