Write time alone with Jesus into your job description.
Ask for a day each week, a weekend each month or a week every six months to work on your soul. These days can be spent in solitude, silence or on spiritual or prayer retreat—whatever it takes to listen for God in your life.
Help staff members focus on God and their call.
Suggest the staff members get together weekly, or even daily, for communion (that would be Eucharist) to help everyone remember his or her calling.
Ask the staff to brainstorm ways to increase the percentage of time during staff meetings spent talking about his or her relationship with Jesus. There always will be business to discuss, so be realistic. If the staff now spends 90 percent of the time talking about business and 10 percent about their souls, see if you can get them to agree to 80/20, then later maybe even 70/30.
You also may want to suggest the staff have annual (or semiannual or monthly) spiritual retreats where the only activity on the schedule is everybody caring for his or her own relationship with God.
Find a spiritual mentor.
Seek out a wise, older person who’ll agree to meet with you regularly to help you listen to what God is saying in your life.
Journal regularly.
Journaling gets you in touch with your interior. Your writing often reveals a part of you that you weren’t consciously heeding.
Stop impersonating yourself.
Youth ministry is a glittering image full of highly visible programs, activities and life-changing experiences. This makes it easy for youth ministers to dazzle parents and church members with their impact on young people. If you aren’t careful, though, you become your program—fun, busy, energetic, passionate about God, confident—but with an inner life teeming with insecurities, doubt and struggles with your faith.
If truth is at the center of the gospel, then truth also must be at the center of you. If teenagers are demanding reality today (and they are), then reality starts with you.
Admit your own brokenness.
Not that you have to list all of your sins publicly, but you somehow must admit your own sinfulness and flaws. If you want your students to feel safe in youth group, they need to know you’re safe, flaws and all.
Read like a maniac.
Most youth workers don’t read nearly enough. Yet reading is absolutely essential to your spiritual growth.
Begin by asking for a book budget that’s separate from your youth ministry book budget. Ask for money to buy books about the spiritual life—just for you, not to create lessons for your students.
What should you read? Here are two suggestions.
First, ask the people you admire and respect what books they read. If you’re drawn to certain people, then chances are they have the same reading interests you do—so trust them to get you on the right track.
Second, note those authors you resonate with, and then get all of their books. I read everything these authors write: Eugene Peterson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Wangerin Jr., John Claypool, Earl Palmer, Henri Nouwen, Calvin Miller, Frederick Buechner, Alan Jones, Will Willimon, Evelyn Underhill and Philip Yancey. (See youthworker.staging.wpengine.com for Mike’s book list.)
Somehow these authors know me. They name my struggles and put into words what I’ve been unable to find words to describe.
When you have found authors who do the same for you, place their books in a bookcase close to where you work. In my study I have all my favorite books—my friends—just to the left of my desk and within arm’s reach. I have lots more books in my study, but my friends are right next to me.
Interact with your books. Mark your favorite passages, make notes, mark and then file the quotes that grip you. Books are made to be marked—and stained with tears, too. Reading is more than gathering information—it’s a relationship.
Don’t worry if you take a break from reading now and then. Sometimes your soul needs space and time to process what’s going on in your life. At such times, reading can distract you from the soul work you should be doing.
Finally, whatever you do, don’t limit your reading to spiritual books. Read recent novels, old classics, biographies, short stories, essays, articles. Christians aren’t the only ones speaking truth. Truth is truth, regardless of who says it.
