Madonna—musician, actress, dancer, business woman, mother, author—is a rocket scientist when it comes to mastery of reinvention. Madonna has had more lives than multiple felines. She gives Oprah (another practitioner of reinvention) a run for her money, literally.
Please note that this article is not an endorsement of Madonna’s music, message or lifestyle. It is a challenge for youth workers to reinvent themselves.
Perhaps you are bored; perhaps your time with God has become stale; perhaps what you are doing in youth ministry isn’t working. Perhaps you feel as if you have misread John 10:10, where Jesus stated that we could have life redundantly—oops, make that abundantly.
Let’s explore a couple of areas in our lives that may need reinvention.
Personal Reinvention
As I write this article at 31,000 feet en route to a speaking engagement in Atlanta, I realize the month has felt surreal.
For one thing, I attended my son’s high school orientation. (High school for my kid—wow, I’m old!) This is a major change in our family dynamics, as my son leaves his eighth grade cult of travel soccer to enter freshman year of academics (and more soccer).
And recently, I had a burning passion to return to teaching. I applied at a nearby Christian school. After interviewing and praying, I accepted a position as the seventh and eighth grade Bible teacher at the Red Lion Christian Academy in Bear, Delaware. Please pray for me as the Lord works a major reinvention in my life (actually, pray for the students!), which will allow me to spend time at home with my children, who are entering adolescence, and my wife.
What type of reinvention is going on in your personal life?
Professional Reinvention
Is your youth ministry in a holding pattern? Is it just Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night as usual?
I was recently at a small lunch gathering listening to the guest speaker, Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. A pastor in attendance asked Hybels what was the secret recipe to growing a church numerically and spiritually. Hybels responded, “I had to keep reinventng my leadership style at different stages throughout the history of the church.”
Are you adapting your leadership skills? How are you handling reinvention as a leader, as a youth worker?
I often tell youth ministers and lead pastors I am training that throughout modernity we as a church have diluted, compromised and changed the Word of God, while the methodology of ministry has remained the constant status quo. What needs to happen is the reverse: to change ministry and not water down God’s Word to fit the culture.
Several years ago, I was speaking to pastors in Milan, Ind., the location of the high school basketball team depicted in the movie Hoosiers. I asked a rhetorical question: “Why are we still doing ’60sand ’70s-style youth ministry in many of our churches?” A tall, commanding denominational leader corrected me. “David, you are wrong. We are still doing ’40s and ’50s youth ministry in most of our churches!”
Don’t compromise the message; change the methodology—or better yet, the messenger. What part of your professional life needs reinvention?
Reinvention Day
The good news is that the living God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The same eternal God who knit you together in your mother’s womb is the Holy Spirit who breathed upon Paul to write to the church at Philippi, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6, ESV).
Why not take the challenge to have a quiet day, a contemplative day, a private retreat and ask God about reinvention in your personal and professional life?
David Burke is a speaker, writer and consultant who works with youth and adults. He is the co-founder of Youth Ministry Coaches (www.youthmincoaches.com).