Posts Tagged ‘Stress’

It’s easy to be an insecure youth pastor.

Think about it. You are the only one in the entire church that “does youth ministry.”  There’s nobody to compare yourself to. There’s no “standard” to say you’re doing a good job, great job, or terrible job.

At the end of the week, who’s to say you did everything you were supposed to? What shows you that your priorities were straight and that you spent your time wisely?

Better yet, what tells you that you did a good job and made a difference?

That’s when insecurity can so quickly set in. With nobody giving you a thumbs up or thumbs down, there’s a temptation to just feel like you’re not doing it right and all your efforts are in vain.

Plus, with no shared standards or common expectations, every expectation any leader or parent might have, quickly becomes the standard they hold you to. You’ll never live up to all their expectations, so a lot of the feedback you actually do hear is, “Why didn’t you do this?” or “How could you possibly let that happen?”

I’m just being honest here. This is tough stuff. So how do you deal with this pressure?

I pray for the Lord’s favor in each of our lives so that we can survive and thrive because of His love, and in spite of our environment. And I know that His mercy and blessing is greater than all the worst the world could throw at us.

I was surfing around reading about stress the other day and stumbled into a study from NASA–that’s right, the people that specialize in hurtling stuff into space and spend a whole lot of tax dollars doing it.

The study was interesting enough. It said that a daily routine is a primary source of stress in most people’s lives. Deadlines, traffic, last-minute sermon preperations (I added that last one)–they all take a toll on you, but because they are so common in life, you don’t notice their cumultive effect.

It’s like using a credit card but never paying it off. You use it to buy whatever you want and don’t think about the long-term effect. The same with stress–things happen every day that drain you, but you have to press through and just keep going. There’s never enough time to really deal with it, so you just move on.

Each month, you pay the minimum balance and don’t even think about all the interest building up. With stress, everybody has a way to cope or vent to get by–whether it’s sitting in front of the TV for hours on end or getting frustrated for no reason. This can go on for months and you can try to “managing” things, but when your account dries up, it all catches up with you and things can get much worse. This is burnout can happen and people ask, “Why do I even bother with all this youth ministry stuff?”

Being in youth ministry only intensifies the whole process, especially if you’re part time and hold down another job. With so many expectations from some many different people in the church, it’s unbelieveably easy to experience a little bit of stress every few minutes, every day. And it all builds up.

That’s why it’s so important to have a regular habit of slowing down to focus on the Lord. If He is truely our source of strength, like we always pray about and sing about, then we need to take that time to plug in and charge up. I like working out at the gym, but when I get out of the habit (which happens more often then I’d like), I can tell. The same happens in our relationship with God, but this time it affects every area of our lives.

“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7, NLT).

Lord, I pray that we would all experience Your peace as we give You all our needs and stress and thank You for all the incredible things You have done. You’re worth everything we have to give, plus so much more. May Your name be lifted high in our lives and in our students. In Jesus name, amen.

Whenever I’m around youth, all I want to do is build relationships & minister. That’s what it’s all about, right? It gets me so worked up when everything else gets in the way.

I think we all believe in the importance of relationships, but when the rubber meets the road, the struggle is finding time for it with all the boring planning & detail work. Programs seem to continuously crawl up out of nowhere to soak up all our time and energy, and the thing we want to do the most–be with students–is squeezed out of our weeks.

Here are a few quick tips you can use to evaluate your own ministry and become more student-focused.

Are you an idea-aholic?
Are you constantly looking for new ideas and giving them a try? Are you known for being extremely creative? Innovation is great–and necessary in youth ministry–but too much is still too much. Trying new things every single week can be a real time drainer. Building strong relationships is a ministry model that’s been proven to work for thousands of years. One day you might have an entire youth staff to help you out, but until then, try pulling back a bit to purposefully make more time for one-on-one discipleship moments.

Are you a lone ranger?
I know some youth pastors that are surrounded by energetic adult volunteers but still do all of the work themselves–from preparing everything, setting up the youth room and leading the actual meeting, to running the cafe, tearing down, cleaning up and locking the doors. If you love your programs so much that you’re not willing to share the work with others, it’s no wonder that you don’t have the time you wish you had with your students.

Is the weekly sermon required?
This last one is may be a bit more outside of the box, but I think it has the most potential. Do you really need to spend time every single week teaching students via a sermon?

A recent study of Illinois youth pastors found that they spend an average of 80% of their time preparing sermons. If time is money, that’s quite a chunk of change! Now look at it from your students’ perspective. They just spent an entire week listening to boring lessons at school and are already in the habit of zoning them out. What if we instead aggressively engaged them with an entirely new teaching format?

Try converting some of your sermon times to extended hang out times for your students. Then make a careful plan for you and your adult leaders to sit down individually with your students during those times to let them know you care for them, find out what’s going on in their life, and pour into them. You will learn incredible things about your students and have amazing opportunities for ministry. Give it a try and let me know what happens. I’ll be posting more about this idea in a future post.

The Heart of the Matter
The goal isn’t legalism. It’s having more room for ministry. We should always be looking for ways to free up our time so that we can do what we know has the greatest impact: Building solid relationships with students and student leaders, and pouring into them individually.