on Dietrich ( Deech ) Kirk on Training Youth Ministers Resources for American Christianity Training Youth Ministers By John M. Mulder Christians have been concerned about passing their faith to their children since the earliest days of Christianity. But the context and the strategies for communicating the faith have changed dramatically over the centuries. In recent centuries, Protestant churches changed their strategies for the formation of young people in the late nineteenth century. Pastors noticed that they had a youth problem. Young people were dropping out of church. These youth were no longer children, but they were also not ready to assume their place as adults. Dietrich ( Deech ) Kirk What alarmed pastors most was the recognition that most conversions occurred during this period of youth. Thus, churches realized that they needed to develop new strategies both to attend to the formation of young people during this transitional stage and to provide a practice field for their leadership development. Consequently, churches established young people s societies, and modern youth ministry was created. These societies really took off in the 1890s, and they became normative for most churches. During the first decade of the twentieth century, educators developed the high school, and in doing so, they discovered or invented the notion of adolescence a period in the lives of young people when they are no longer children but not yet adults. More recently, sociologists, psychologists and educators have developed the concept of extended adolescence that can stretch from 13 years old to the early 20s.
However the notion of adolescence is defined, congregations struggle with developing ministries to adolescents. The Lilly Endowment has long supported efforts to identify and strengthen ministries to this group of young people. One part of this strategy is focused on training youth ministers a relatively new position in the history of congregations. Youth ministers are usually but not necessarily young people themselves, often in their early twenties. As such, they have their own unique needs but also skills. They frequently have little training for their ministries. For example, in the United Methodist Church, 87 percent of youth ministers have no training for their work either in the basics of Bible and theology or the practical aspects of organizing and implementing a program. However, because of their age, they are often able to identify and communicate with the youth in congregations. The Center for Youth Ministry Training in Nashville was launched to address this challenge of training gifted but untrained youth ministers. The Center was cofounded by two youth pastors (Dietrich Kirk and Mark DeVries) and two Nashville congregations (Brentwood United Methodist Church and First Presbyterian Church) and with the cooperation of Princeton Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt Divinity School. Since its inception and with the support of Lilly Endowment, the Center for Youth Ministry Training has broadened the scope of its work and influence and has become a significant resource for addressing the lack of training for youth ministers especially in mainline Protestant churches. The Center for Youth Ministry Training offers educational resources both on-line and in specialized seminars and conferences. It is a graduate level program that combines theological and practical learning with hands-on experience in the local church. It is now possible to earn an M.A. in youth ministry through the Center and affiliated seminaries. Dietrich Kirk is the Executive Director of the Center for Youth Ministry Training (CYMT) and associate minister of Brentwood United Methodist Church. Known as Deech, he has been a youth minister for nearly 20 years. He became the Executive Director of the Center in 2006. Prior to his service in Nashville, he was a youth minister of two United Methodist Churches in Jackson, TN, and one in Memphis, TN. He is the co-author of Now What? Next Steps in Your New Life with Christ and has a new book coming out in the fall of 2012: Raising Teens in an Almost Christian World: A Parents Guide. He says of his life, When he is not leading and directing the CYMT, speaking at youth events, or training other youth workers, Deech enjoys spending time with his wife Kelley and daughters Carlisle and Hallie. Page 2 of 10
In the following interview, Deech Kirk reflects on his long tenure as a youth minister and his role in training youth ministers. He also addresses the challenges and opportunities youth ministers confront. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication. Q: You have said that youth ministry and the mainline church are undeniably in trouble. What is the trouble and why is it a problem? National research shows that church attendance, especially among young adults coming out of youth ministry, is in decline and has been for a significant period of time. It used to be true that folks came back to church when they got married and had kids. The newest research shows that they aren t coming back. What s more, youth ministries themselves are struggling. They re struggling to produce disciples of Christ who have a lifelong faith. One sign of this is the number of young people involved in youth ministries, especially when it s compared with the size of their home churches. Q: Why are youth ministries and churches having trouble retaining youth and nurturing faith in them? Research, such as Christian Smith s National Study of Youth and Religion, indicates that we are doing a dismal job of passing the faith to our teenagers and children. In addition, we probably have a group of parents who also had faith poorly passed to them. Christian Smith describes a subversive religion that is actually the primary religion of teenagers in America. He calls this Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Although there aren t Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Church signs across the country, many of our churches are operating on and conveying the idea that the Christian faith is really about being good and living a good life. If you do those things, God does love you or bless you, and everybody goes to heaven when they die if they are good people. What Christian Smith and others found was that this is how teenagers were articulating the Christian faith. That is a far cry from the sacrificial, unconditional love that Jesus displayed for us on the cross. It has no grounding in the conviction that Christ is someone who was willing to die for us, and this conviction transforms one s life. So the lack of transformative faith being passed to teenagers is the primary reason for the problems in youth ministry. If we offer them weak faith, they say Page 3 of 10
that they have been there and done that. They vote with their driver s licenses and don t come back. The church needs to offer young people a faith that transforms their lives. Q: What is the content or the substance of the transformative faith that you want to substitute for the kind of therapeutic religion that Christian Smith talks about? The substantive faith would call us to recover the importance of discipleship and the power of the Word and the Bible. Research shows that young people are incredibly inarticulate about their faith. They don t know the Scriptures. They may know about Noah and the rainbow, but they don t have a clue about what that story meant or what it means for a faithful follower of Christ today. Another part of the transformative faith that young people need is adults who model that faith. They need to see what mature Christian faith really looks like. They need to know through experience how adult Christians live their lives, how they understand the Word, and how they experience relationships with God. Young people need to be able to recognize in adults how faith anchors people not only now but as they move forward in life. Q: What are the main theological issues that come to the surface when you are doing youth ministry? Kids are great theologians in the sense that they ask more questions than adults do. Sometimes adults are afraid of the answers, but kids truly and genuinely are interested in the answers and they question everything. I think the main questions kids are trying to answer are: Who am I? Why am I here? Adults, of course, are trying to answer those questions too. There is a worldly response to those questions and a Godly response: You are a beloved child of God, who has been redeemed by a Christ. As kids wrestle with these questions, the church has a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to help them understand who they are in light of who God is. I tell you that this is the primary theological question that all teenagers wrestle with. They are also asking other questions about who God is and how God relates to the world, and this connects with this particular generation s great interest in justice issues. They re trying to answer questions of justice with their moralistic, therapeutic faith, but the church has the opportunity and responsibility to say we don t just do these things because they are the right thing to do. We do these Page 4 of 10
things because the folks who are in need of justice are also beloved children of God. Because of Christ s death and resurrection, we are called to help bring about God s intention for them and for our world. Q: What are the obstacles for youth developing their spiritual and religious faith and practice? I think the greatest obstacle we see is the indifference of teenagers who say that God makes no difference in their everyday lives. That s an enormous obstacle for youth ministers as they reach out to teenagers. Kids have no shortage of entertainment at this point in their lives, and so drawing young people to your church because you are doing something exciting is very difficult. The great challenge in youth ministry is that we have to be able to go out and show young people the difference that Christ is making in our lives and the lives of other teenagers so that they can see there is a void in what they are doing. But another challenge is the nature of family life today. We continue to paint a picture of a family of a mom and a dad a few children. Most of our families look nothing like that in churches. Youth ministers are faced with dealing with broken families and a broken society that is full of violence. If teenagers are apathetic about religion, it s partly because the church s view of the world doesn t address the world they know. Q: The Center for Youth Ministry Training has been operating for six years. What have you learned? First and foremost, we ve learned that youth ministers need peer cohorts and mentors. The burn-out rate for youth ministers in our country is 3.9 years. That is not how long they stay at a particular church. That s how long they stay in youth ministry before entering into some other kind of work. We ve learned from other studies of ministry that having a cohort of peers to support youth ministers and a mentor to guide them is absolutely critical to keep them alive and flourishing in youth ministry. Our cohort model of education has allowed youth ministers to be in conversation together about the theological issues they face in working with teenagers. It creates a very rich environment where those relationships are just as important as what they learned about youth ministry because those are the folks who help walk with them when youth ministry is hard. Those are the folks who pray for them when they have personal issues in their own life or when they are facing challenges related to youth ministry, such as a family going through a divorce. This is a group who understands their call and understands because they have Page 5 of 10
been there themselves. Over the last six years, our classes of youth ministers have already surpassed the average burn-out rate and show no signs of slowing down in their vocation. We have also learned the importance of mentoring or what we call the coaching component of youth ministry. It s crucial to plant a veteran youth minister who walks and develops a relationship with youth ministers as they acquire the practical tools for youth ministry. It s one thing to go to seminary and learn the Bible and theology, and it s another thing to learn how to work with boards and pastors and sessions. Our veteran youth ministers walk and journey with new youth ministers as they learn these practical things. We have continued to see that those relationships make a real difference in both the short and long term. We have learned that the most difficult component of hiring and placing the new youth minister is not their gifts and skills. The most challenging component of working with 22 to 26 year-olds who are working in youth ministry is that they are what we are calling emerging adults themselves. They have a lot of their own stuff that they are dealing with and are still answering the questions, Who am I? How am I going to respond to God and live in this world? They may be struggling because they are moving to a new part of the country and developing new relationships. They may be single or they may be about to be married. We have found that how they deal with their personal issues is as much an indicator of their success as what they possess in their giftedness and their skills. We had not anticipated that we would be so intimately involved in helping youth ministers work through their own issues to help them be effective in ministry, but that has become a very important component of what we do. Congregations frequently don t have many people who are the same age as a youth minister, so the peer cohort groups address the isolation and loneliness of youth ministers. And the coaches or mentors become a resource for practical wisdom about how to work with volunteers or how to build support for a youth ministry program. Q: What are the spiritual resources youth ministers need to keep going and avoid burn-out? I ve talked about the importance of peer groups and mentors or coaches, but in addition to those two things, we think being able to develop a rhythm of life is essential. It s really a spiritual discipline a time for family, time for God, and time for work. This is something that we work on adamantly with our young youth ministers. Many of them are single and fill their lives with work. That s a bad habit and leads to the feeling of just being tired and unsupported. A disciplined rhythm of life breaks that pattern. Page 6 of 10
Another spiritual discipline is developing faithful friends within the congregation and accountability systems that create space for open dialogue about the health of the ministry and the health of the youth minister. This means a group of people who are going to love each other honestly and help everybody as issues are addressed when they are small, instead of waiting until they become much larger. Q: As you look at youth ministers as a group, what do they look like? I spend a lot of my time pointing out that they don t look the same. The church has created a lot of stereotypes of youth ministers, but they come in a variety of shapes and sizes and with a variety of skills and gifts. What they have in common is a deep love for teenagers and a desire for kids to experience the love and grace of Jesus Christ. Some of them are great teachers, and some of them are great leaders, and some of them are highly organized, and some have a bit of all those things. What they share is that they can t let go of the knowledge that God has placed this on their hearts, and this is what they are supposed to do. So we work with them to develop their strengths and shore up their weaknesses in the different fashions that they come in. Every one of them is different, and every congregation is different. We seek to walk with them and help the church and the youth minister develop a strong youth ministry. Q: A popular conception is the youth minister as a kind of Pied Piper. Does that fit? People sometimes believe that because there are gaps in the church s membership, they need a Pied Piper to bring the kids to church. Well, that might be true, but when we see the moralistic therapeutic deism in the church, someone who can get kids to come to church in and of itself may not be all that helpful. I hope the Pied Piper version in the church will go away. It blocks youth ministers from displaying their particular gifts. For example, an introvert can become a very effective youth pastor by recruiting volunteers to help lead the group. An introvert can also be an enormously powerful presence in one-on-one relationships with kids. One of the things we think is unique to our program is that we not only train youth ministers; we also train churches and help them provide fertile soil for successful youth ministry. In the United Methodist Church, 87 percent of the people serving in youth ministry have no training. Obviously, they need training. But we also have church upon church that believes in youth ministry and thinks Page 7 of 10
it s important but has no idea how to build a youth ministry that will be sustainable and develop disciples. So our mentors or coaches work very closely with the churches to help the church leadership to provide the resources and context in which youth ministry can prosper. Q: What is the most important advice that you would give to youth ministers and their churches? The most important advice that I give most churches and young youth ministers is to understand that there is no instant youth ministry. To build a healthy youth ministry takes time and work, and if it was easy we would have a whole lot of them. If there was a book that truly told all churches how to do this, everybody would have read it and followed it, and it would be working across the country. The best youth ministries in this country were built not by Pied Pipers, but people whom most would describe as average youth ministers but have gifts and a love for their ministry and happen to get to work at a church that has invested in youth ministry. They built a volunteer team, and little by little every year the youth ministry got strong. Ten years later their youth ministry was the envy of the community and everybody in their community was trying to imitate their youth ministry by doing it within the next six months. My best advice is that it takes the church and a strong youth minister working a little bit at a time to grow a youth ministry that honors God and reaches kids. Q: When a youth ministry succeeds, after five or even ten years, what does it look like? Successful youth ministries tend to have some great common themes. One is that they have reached sustainability. Every year they are graduating strong classes of seniors. There might be some ups and downs, but on the whole they graduate strong classes and bring in strong groups of sixth or seventh graders. They have reached a sustainable level and have volunteers to help keep all the wheels turning. But beyond the numbers and beneath the surface, you will see that there are foundational relationships between the adults who are invested in youth ministry and the kids themselves. They are relationships of love and caring, but they are also relationships of mentoring and modeling the faith. The adults mentor the kids and embody the faith. The older kids do the same for the younger ones. The Page 8 of 10
kids are recognized as leaders and given responsibilities within the church, and the adults find that their own faith has matured. One of the other things that I think is an extraordinarily strong indicator of healthy youth ministries is how many young people of that congregation hear a vocational call to ministry itself. That could be to youth ministry or the pastorate or to missions or to work at non-profits or as teachers, but the trend will be that they will look at their future as fulfilling a vocation, rather than pursuing a job. They are pursuing what God desires for them to do in their lives, and you can see that in healthy, successful youth ministries. Q: You have stayed in youth ministry for almost 20 years. How did you make it this long? I would say that I made it in my early years because I was lucky enough to end up in churches which were grace-filled enough to live with my mistakes. They loved me through my mistakes. I didn t know what I was doing when I started. I felt called and believed I had gifts, but I had no training as I began and learned on the job. It was communities of faith who worked with me and helped me grow. Youth ministers frequently talk about how they are not supported or are underfunded or not appreciated. I was blessed to be part of congregations where the opposite was true. They loved and supported and encouraged me as I tried to lead the way and show what it meant to be a youth pastor. But the issue of short terms in youth ministry is changing. A lot of our students may become pastors, but we now have our first group of youth ministers who have been in it for 30+ years and who are creeping up on 60. Their youth ministry looks much different than when they were 25, but they are all still people who love being with teenagers and who have learned to continue to build strong systems in churches over the years. Q: When you dream about youth ministry, what does it look like? I dream of not just a country but a world where those whom God has called and gifted to work with teenagers can find the education, training, and resources they need to bring the Good News to teenagers who are desperate to hear it. That sounds like a very simplistic vision of what I hope for, but I want the world to be a place where finding those resources is not so difficult. The vast majority of our youth ministers across this country don t know where to turn for help and don t know where to be educated. I imagine a world where those things Page 9 of 10
are readily available to them so that they can most effectively do what God has called them to do. Page 10 of 10