Trying harder:.
This morning I spent a couple hours painting a room in my friends Kerry and Randy's house as they prepare to adopt 5 siblings from Guatemala. I painted the room with another friend, who's been a youth pastor for 3 years. She was telling me about an experience she had 6 months ago, where a crisis occured that involved a secret parents meeting and some drama. It all unfolded while she was out of town and it took her by surprise. As she was telling me the story, she said something that jumped out to me. Something I can totally relate to, because I had lived it repeatedly.
To paraphrase her she said, "I just felt I had to work harder" after finding out that people didn't get what we were trying to do with the youth ministry. "I already was working sooo hard. I don't know if I could work any harder. But that's what it felt like I needed to do."
How many times have you felt this way. You experience a clash of expectations and there is drama. Emotionally you are spent. You want to do a great job, but somehow the are expecations of you, you didn't know about.
Deep down we want to meet people's needs. That's why we got into ministry. We want to help people, parents and teens. Of course it is God who actually helps people, but we get to participate in the journey in a first person kind of way. It's our hands, ideas and plans that are being played out and we hope that we are within the hopes and dreams of God as we do.
When drama comes, people are upset with you, your performance, your... inability to meet their dreams and hopes and it hurts. Our reaction is often like my friends. Like mine so often. I'll work harder. It's the ol' "What we need is a bigger hammer" sorta thinking. Sure I work 55 hours a week. I'll work 60, so I can somehow help these people, or maybe somehow show that I am worthy of being on staff to serve these folks.
This is generally when someone chimes in that we need to work smarter, not harder. Which makes me roll my eyes.
Working harder and working smarter both miss the point, but they are temptations we all fall into.
Why are these so often our default behaviors? Because they are within our control. We can actually change our effort and how we work. With the hope that somehow, maybe we just might be able to meet those elusive expectations our congregation might have for us.
To paraphrase her she said, "I just felt I had to work harder" after finding out that people didn't get what we were trying to do with the youth ministry. "I already was working sooo hard. I don't know if I could work any harder. But that's what it felt like I needed to do."
How many times have you felt this way. You experience a clash of expectations and there is drama. Emotionally you are spent. You want to do a great job, but somehow the are expecations of you, you didn't know about.
Deep down we want to meet people's needs. That's why we got into ministry. We want to help people, parents and teens. Of course it is God who actually helps people, but we get to participate in the journey in a first person kind of way. It's our hands, ideas and plans that are being played out and we hope that we are within the hopes and dreams of God as we do.
When drama comes, people are upset with you, your performance, your... inability to meet their dreams and hopes and it hurts. Our reaction is often like my friends. Like mine so often. I'll work harder. It's the ol' "What we need is a bigger hammer" sorta thinking. Sure I work 55 hours a week. I'll work 60, so I can somehow help these people, or maybe somehow show that I am worthy of being on staff to serve these folks.
This is generally when someone chimes in that we need to work smarter, not harder. Which makes me roll my eyes.
Working harder and working smarter both miss the point, but they are temptations we all fall into.
Why are these so often our default behaviors? Because they are within our control. We can actually change our effort and how we work. With the hope that somehow, maybe we just might be able to meet those elusive expectations our congregation might have for us.
Labels: youth ministry
posted by mark at
2:53 PM
1 Comments:
This is the most spot-on post I've read regarding youth ministry. I was run out of a youth ministry position because (I think) I didn't work "hard enough" for the workaholic senior pastor, and no amount of hard (or smart) work would actually remedy this. I could have been quoted the same as the woman you paraphrased in your post.
But that's not what God called any of us to. What part of "be still and know" did we miss?
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