Ever wish you had your own personal youth ministry guru? Perhaps the next best thing is this YWJ youth ministry veteran, all-star, super-duper roundtable! We talked to Duffy Robbins, author and speaker with more than 30 years of youth ministry experience to glean his hard-won wisdom and help you in your work with young people.
Duffy is professor of youth ministry at Eastern University in St. David’s, Pa., and speaks around the world to teenagers and people who love teenagers and is the author of several books, including Memory Makers, Everyday Object Lessons, This Way to Youth Ministry, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts (recently revised and updated) and the best-selling Enjoy the Silence. He co-authored his latest book, Speaking to Teenagers, with Doug Fields.
YWJ: What makes for long-term success?
Duffy Robbins: Make sure there’s more to you than your ministry. Who you are is not just what you do. To be engaged in relationship with my wife and daughters reminds me life is bigger than what’s happening in my ministry.
Secondly, recognize one changes how he or she does ministry through time. When you’re younger, you can do some things really well, so you play to those strengths. When people get older, they either try to play to the strengths they had when they were young or get frustrated because they can’t. Ultimately, it’s about recognizing our abilities and wisdom now that we didn’t have when we were younger and to play to those strengths. If you want to stay in football long enough, at some point you have to cease calling the plays on the field and be willing to coach from the sideline and pour your life into somebody else who’s going on the field. Even those who have stayed on the front lines for decades have learned they do not have to be the whole show. To me that’s the key to growing old gracefully.
Also, the books I read — I love history, anthropods. It nurtures my brain beyond youth ministry. I don’t believe people are called to do youth ministry endlessly. What we’ve been invited to do by Christ is to follow Him. I didn’t invite youth ministry into my heart; I invited Jesus. I actually believe people who do youth ministry well have been trained to do almost any other church position or ministry position and many other non-ministry positions.
At some point, it might even be healthy to say, “Hey, it’s time to get out — to have a willingness to say, “I’m not going to just keep playing at this, because it’s not who I am anymore.”
YWJ: What developments in youth ministry have encouraged/concerned you?
Duffy: I’m encouraged that there’s a lot more discussion of youth ministry in the context of theology and certainly more schools saying this is more than just water balloons and creativity. One concern is we’re neophiliacs. Youth ministry by its nature seems to be in love with the new, the novel. Because we’re around kids and kids really have no sense of history (history is so “last month”), last year is ancient history. We’re around that mindset so much that we’ve embraced it ourselves. Everything has to be re-this and re-that. Everything has to be a new way of doing church and a new way of thinking, as if 2000 years of our brothers and sisters in Christ were ignorant — as if missionaries never have done cross-cultural ministry before — as if we’re the first people to deal with sexual temptation in a non-Christian culture. There’s an arrogance there that’s insulting. We don’t know how much we don’t know, so we think we know it all. I’m sure I was the same way when I was younger. That’s one of the great things life does: It points you to a lot of questions that you don’t know the answer to.
It’s discouraging that youth ministry still is attached to the shallow and immediate. Thinking is hard; people don’t pay us to think; they pay us to execute. None of us is paid on the basis of how reflective we are, but out of deep, good and thorough reflections come better actions.
Youth ministry hasn’t changed that much in the sense that it’s still about helping kids come to know Christ and then helping them to get to know Him better. That comes intentionally through relationships and getting kids in the Word. I don’t know that that’s ever going to change. It certainly has been the history of Christianity thus far. So, whenever I read books that say everything is going to change, I think that depends on how far you want to look. Do you mean we’re not going to use overhead projectors anymore and everything will be communicated digitally? OK, I can accept that; but in terms of what we have to do, at it’s core it’s amazing similar.
The digital piece is good and it’s bad. The medium is not neutral. To limit our communication to tweets, texts or a worship song stunts our growth. There’s no nuance. It’s stunted the dialogue for our kids; it’s dumbed down their understanding of Christianity because we’re afraid to teach. It’s not as engaging as the culture.
YWJ: What do young leaders most need to succeed as they start out?
Duffy: Three things: First, obviously they need to have a heart for Christ. Very seldom does anybody cultivate that in you. Some people want to make sure you stay in budget and get your job done, but not too many people want to make sure your relationship with Christ is real. This takes a group of people where you ask them, “Will you help me?”
Second, they need good theological roots. That’s the soil out of which everything else grows. A lot of youth work is based on the blossom people see, but that blossom grows out of soil that nobody sees and isn’t very glamorous. It’s the depth and richness of that theological soil which sustains the blossom over time. This helps us understand questions in the context of biblical truth as opposed to psychobabble, pop culture or the latest management book.
Third, a vision of what are we trying to accomplish, otherwise you’re just in retail. You’re just trying to do something in a very creative and entertaining way. That might sustain some interest for a little while and will win fans for a while, but to do what God wants us to do long term there must be a vision that sustains us, drives us and guides us.
YWJ: What’s one perennial problem that all youth workers face, and how can they address it?
Duffy: Seeing parents as adversaries when in fact we’re called to be their allies and an asset to them. Also, family balance — you have a good accountability group that asks you tough questions and give your spouse permission to ask those questions.
YWJ: What developments in youth ministry have encouraged / concerned you?
Duffy: Youth ministry has grown, deepened and enhanced as a profession, where the word profession comes from the Latin for “promise.” Youth ministry in it’s best sense is a profession, a vocation. It’s not a job (something you do just to please your employer.) A vocation says, “I don’t care what you’re paying me to do, my approach to this task is not defined by the contract but by the promise I’ve made to myself and to God.” The downside is that it’s bred a kind of professionalism. In my generation of youth workers, everybody wanted to be a youth worker. Nowadays, many younger folks just want to be a consultant.
YWJ: Any other insights you would like to share?
Duffy: Cultivating one’s own heart and soul is big. In general, youth ministry gets that now. Early church fathers didn’t just practice, they believed. We’ve embraced the practices but dismissed the practitioners. The culture reduces everything to technique. It’s not about better technology, but about thinking better.
