Youth Program Headaches
What aspect of your church's youth ministry has cost you the most sleep?
I put this question to several pastors across the country, wanting to know what goes wrong most often. Some of the stories sounded familiar. Others were the stuff of which nightmares are made.
"It was the phone call from an irate parent after a boy with 'punk orange' hair sang a Steve Taylor song in church."
"We had a bus wreck that put four of our high schoolers on the critical list in the hospital. One boy was paralyzed."
"A young man was shot while two high school boys were hunting on a youth mission trip."
"Our church is in the middle of a $5 million dollar lawsuit over an incident with a gun at one of our young-singles retreats."
"I had to pull the plug on a music group performing in our sanctuary at an area youth rally."
"We just fired our youth pastor. This is the fourth youth pastor we have let go in four years."
"I had to explain to our board why our youth pastor had put a $2,000 dollar deposit on a retreat center for a youth camp and then canceled it because not enough people registered for the camp. We lost the $2,000."
As I heard these stories, I was reminded of the best seller by Mark H. McCormack, What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School. We could entitle this book Lessons We Didn't Learn in Seminary. However, just because we have graduated from school we are not finished learning. The pastor must always be a student, eager to learn from those who struggle as well as those who are successful in the church. We develop our style of pastoring primarily from experience, not from books; from living in the church, not in libraries.
But lessons from experience can be costly, as the above war stories indicate. So what can we share with one another? ...
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