My History of Youth Ministry #4

This is post 4 of 6 of my history of youth ministry. We have hit the halfway point.  I would like to thank all 3 readers for sticking it out this far…let’s hit the home stretch.  If you are interested, you can read parts 1,2, 3.

About two weeks before graduating from college, I interviewed for the Director of Jr High Ministry at Hope Church.  Yup, it was the church where Tobin was youth pastor.  I was offered the position and with great excitement I started in full time ministry.  What I lacked in experience, I was gong to make up with enthusiasm and youthful zeal.  Hope is a large church with a long history of vibrant youth ministry and truth be told.   I had no business being hired for this position.  I am just thankful the committee saw something in me and took a chance.  I am also glad I didn’t know then what I know now, or I would have been scared silly to be doing ministry of this scope right out of the shoot.

It’s funny how somethings have changed so much in ministry over the years, yet some of the core principles remain the same.  I say this because they way I did ministry back then  resembles very little how I do ministry today.  When I came on board at Hope, it was all “bigger is better.”  We created teaching themes with skits and games to match.  We had students broken down into teams, and kept points for games and attendance.  We created reoccurring characters like “Brief Man” and his sidekick “Boxer Boy” battling the “Evil Dr. Hanes”.  We did stunts with eggs, whip cream, flour, goldfish.  We we high energy and borderline insane. We were also super busy.  If you were a core student, you could be involved in something for church 3-4 times a week…like I said, we were borderline insane.  We also taught students about Jesus and his love for them.  We had students in small groups being discipled.  We ran camps and retreats and even though this is not how I do ministry today, we had a lot of fun.  I also ran an after school drop in center for at risk kids from the neighborhood.  We had gangs, drugs and fights and I called 911 more times in those few years than I ever have in my whole life.  It stretched me and challenged me and showed me that there is no such thing as a throw-away kid.

It was also during my time at Hope that I experienced one of the most significant, life changing experiences I have ever had.  I went to Africa.  I thought I was just going with a great group of people from Hope and because it was fulfilling one of my wife’s dreams.  I had no idea that my entire worldview would be rocked and reshaped.  I had never been out of the country and what I experienced and saw changed me forever.  I suppose my Africa trip could occupy an entire post or 10, but suffice it to say I had to deal with things I had never given much thought to, like poverty and justice and God’s goodness.  It has been 15 years since going, and if I smell diesel fuel, I am instantly taken back to the streets and slums of Nairobi.  My trip to Africa significantly shaped how I saw ministry and what I thought was important.  It lead me to begin the first ever junior high mission trips from Hope.  This was when not many churches were doing mission trips, and taking junior high students on one was just plain crazy-talk.  I was able to find an organization (CSM is still one of my favorite organizations for urban trips) willing to take junior high groups and we went and served in inner city Chicago.  Those first couple of trips really began to cement into my soul the importance of getting students out of their comfort zones and into places where they can serve, invest and make a difference.

After a few years at Hope, Tobin left student ministry for good and became our missions pastor.  I knew I wasn’t ready to apply for the position yet.  I think I had learned a bit in the 3.5 years I was there.  The church put together a search committee to find Tobin’s replacement, and as sometimes happens (the frequency is up for debate) they called the wrong guy.  I tried, I really wanted to be in lock step with the new guy, but it just didn’t seem to work.  Coupled that with a wrong call of a new senior pastor and I was literally thinking how can I get out the door?  I managed for a little over a year more, and I knew the writing was on the wall for me at Hope.  I began searching for my next call.  I remember applying for the Director of Jr High Ministry at First Presbyterian Church of Spokane and my wife freaking out even though she agreed it looked good.  We had just bought our first home 8 months before, Spokane was quite a distance away although it wasn’t anywhere close to Seattle as I had originally thought.  Life was changing fast.

I don’t know if it is irony or providence or what, but 2 weeks after leaving Hope, they fired the youth director…and within a year of me leaving the senior pastor and the church had dissolved their call.  So within a year, both situations that caused me to leave were no longer even in play.

In February 1998, we packed up everything we owned and headed west to Spokane.

As I said earlier in this post, Hope has a long and vibrant history of youth ministry, and I am proud to be part of that.  I learned so much there about ministry, churches, my strengths and my shortcomings.  It was there that some of the gnawing suspicions I was having about how we were doing ministry, discipleship, and how lives were or were not being transformed began to take root, and I think would begin to bloom during my time in Spokane.  I am thankful for this step in my journey.