Vision, Culture, Infrastructure

Introduction

Greet Everyone (Brief Introduction)

Dan wanted me to sell my credentials - but I genuinely am awful when it comes to talking about myself.

I think the most pertinent facts are that I’ve led youth ministries since I was 15 and took over my first youth group - and did so until I was 26 when I stepped out to an exec role in church. I know that God has graced me with a leadership gift, and I am genuiunely blessed to say that in my time as a youth pastor - my wife and I saw all of our ministries grow exponentially. Perhaps the greatest thing for me is that they kept growing even after we stepped out.

This is a workshop about growing our youth ministries.

DISCLAIMER: NOT SO SPIRITUAAL - TALKING TO YOUTH PASTORS. MORE TECHNICAL

I’ve been blessed with a spiritual Father (PB) that I travel with to Singapore. We go over there and consult for churches and leadership teams - it’s more a thing over there than it is here, for some reason it’s not really a culture over here yet. But in my travelling I notice this - most of the youth ministries are struggling with the BASICS of growth.

And one of the greatest misconceptions about growth is that all growth is good growth - and this is not necessarily true.

For example - accidental growth is not necessarily good growth because you can’t replicate it. Growth that outpaces culture is not good growth because it leads to cultural dilution (something I hope to cover later)

What is healthy growth? I believe healthy growth has two traits:

Sustainability - Growth that doesn’t burn out volunteers, growth that doesn’t outpace identity.

Directionality - Growth that heads towards a goal, Growth that heads towards the Godly vision/mandate of the group.

Before we get into this workshop can I just encourage you to heed this lesson, that it’s possible to grow in number and shrink in vision.

Today, I want to share with you the fundamentals of healthy growth - it’s basic leadership but so many churches let alone youth groups miss out on these fuundamental steps - and growth becomes erratic, unsustainable and irreplicable.

Pray

Vision (The Destination)

Vision may be one of the most important things we need to bring back into our youth groups, we don’t need to just bring it back we need to start obsessing over it.

Think of Vision like the Destination - it’s where you’re heading. And if where you’re heading looks bad, then nobody will join you on the journey. If where you’re going is Spirit-led and God appointed then it will supernaturally attract people.

Vision is one of the important duo of Vision and Culture - The vision and culture of an organisation = it’s Identity. In other words it is WHO you are as a youth ministry.

Without a strong identity growth has no direction. Who joins the group, nobody knows. What happens when they join? well nobody knows that either. What are the goals, the passions, the God-ordained purpose of the youth group, nobody knows again. It’s just “another” youth group.

Let me tell you that youth groups lacking purpose, not living out their God-given mandates are the key reasons I believe God witholds growth.

Because God entrusts growth where there is alignment with His purpose. Think about the parable of the Talents, Think Luke 16:10-12, Think about bearing fruit in John 15. (not here to preach)

Now let’s get more technical - Vision should ideally belong to the entire church but sometimes in the absence of an overarching vision it can be given specifically by the youth pastor - this really is a case by case basis.

But this matters less than what I’m about to say - because WHATEVER your vision is the most important thing is for you to OWN it. Understand it, study it, meditate on it, find your own conviction in it. (so few people do this)

The level of effectiveness of the vision is always decided by the level of ownership over it. Does it move you? Does it reflect the deepest passions, the deepest mandates that God has planted inside of you?

The thing to know is that Vision and Culture are transmitted by language - so if you want others to own your vision with you, then it must have memorable phraseology.

EXAMPLE: Kinetic Belong Believe

Kinetic’s Vision was Belong and Believe - this told you everything about where we were going as a youth group, it even revealed our overarching strategy. We wanted to build a place of belonging, a home - everyone could come in and feel a part of the family immediately. And yet we didn’t want to be just a social club - the ultimate goal was to bring them to belief in Jesus Christ. We wanted every single person to find not only a home but a relationship with Jesus. And also - that was the order in which we would do things. We would love people and help them to belong and through that love they would believe in Jesus Christ.

Belong -> Believe.

It’s concise, it’s memorable. If your youth remember it - then they can own it as well. Remember these things are transmitted by language, so if they can’t repeat it - it doesn’t catch.

The words belong and believe were always the two most talked about words in the youth group - intentionally.

Here’s the thing - Unity is derived from vision. A clear vision is by far the most effective way to get everyone on the same page - to get every soldier pointed in the same direction. Vision really helps to drive mobility (program recruitment, initiatives, responsiveness to instruction, evangelism drives, ministry drives).

As a side note - if you are trying to set vision just note that Vision does not come out of concensus - it causes it. What I mean by that is that too many cooks really do spoil the soup. Don’t go asking everyone what the vision should be - as the pastor - you need to lead the way in setting and following the vision.

EXAMPLE: Piano Tuning.

Let me tell you the superpower of Vision - The real power of Vision unlocks when EVERYTHING is directed at it. Vision is the filter through which everything in your youth group passes through, Vision is the lens through which everything in your youth group is seen. EVERYTHING GOES THROUGH THE VISION/VALUES CHECK.

Every song you sing, every activity you plan, every stategy, every culture.

Vision becomes the criteria that everything is critiqued by (which is why it is so important to make sure it is from God).

Don’t call a place a home if you plan on running it like a hotel

EXAMPLE: Belong Believe

We cut out games so that people would spend more time talking because we figured that providing cool areas to talk and get to know each other promoted belonging more than games did.

We figured people can’t belong if they can’t get there so we started up a transport ministry to drive and pick up kids from all over the city. We even redirected funds that were spent on the games to subsidise their fuel costs and pay for busses that could take multiple kids so they could fellowship IN the busses before they even got to youth.

Every youth that wanted to serve was first required to join the Welcome Team - which made it the largest ministry in the youth group, with the most manpower, which means more newcomers covered, more youth talked to, more people feeling belonging.

Like when I say obsess - we obsessed. We made everything point to the vision and it became so powerful. I was on the phone to youth pastors almost every week because their kids would VISIT and decide to stay in the youth, which was NEVER our goal; but the culture was so strong we had to tell people to go back to their churches.

I call this the principle of visional intentionality - that every possible variable that can be controlled is directed to further the cause of the vision. Let every decision you make be in service of the vision that God has given you - go all in.

As a side note - Vision and culture are the greatest ways to generate ownership in your youth group. If you’re struggling with ownership issues - like the kids mess around like they don’t take ownership of it; that’s not just kids behaving badly. That’s because they struggle to identify with the youth group. Remember I said Vision and Culture form the identity of a youth group - if you want kids to own the youth group, then give it a strong identity they can associate with and be proud of.

EXAMPLE: Belong

We built such a strong culture of belonging in the youth group that we started to have kids come up to me and ask - we want to bring this culture of belonging, of home into our high schools. How do we do this? And so we worked with them to start up and shape what became our school ministries. Kinect in WSHS and Unite in RSHS. These places were announced in school assemblies as places to make friends, school counsellors would send bullied people to these ministries, teachers would advise kids who were having a hard time fitting in/new transfers to give these groups a try.

At one point Kinect would have 130 kids every week on a Tuesday at lunch, Unite still meets with around 100 last time I spoke there. But here’s the thing, these are leaderless operations - the students started and ran these themselves. Why? Because when they catch the vision and the culture of the youth group it builds ownership - they seek personal expression of it.

Another one of our girls came up to me and told me that she wanted to take belonging to the people who needed it most - the poor and needy. And so she birthed a ministry called Kinetic Reach, which was the mission arm of the youth group - 130 kids signed up on their first week. These kids would go around the city giving out blankets during winter, meals to the homeless, praying for them, visiting the sick, the elderly - bringing that culture wherever they went. Why? Because one of our girls (who is actually the current youth pastor of Kinetic) decided that she wanted to own the vision.

See when people feel like they own something, they become empowered to act. When you reach a point of Visional strength in the ministry - your youth become the main carriers of your vision and culture, and isnt that exactly what it’s meant to be?

Culture (The Journey)

Now, if vision is the Destination - then Culture is the journey.

There is no point in having a brilliant destination if the journey to get there is tiresome and downright difficult. This is why Vision and Culture go hand in hand - you can’t really have them exclusive of one another.

Good culture with no vision, they lack direction. Good vision, no culture - they lack determination.

What is culture? Culture by dictionary definition is the Set of behaviours that define a particular group.

But in youth ministry I think we can simplify this down to the “Experience” (I think kids nowadays call it the Vibe).

The first thing to know about culture is that it is either by DESIGN or DEFAULT.

What I mean by this is that if you don’t design it - then it will default to whatever the majority behaviours are. And in a youth group - they’re rarely biblical.

EVERY GROUP has a culture - whether you call it that or not, there is no such thing as a group with no culture.

EXAMPLE: Always got your back

When I first took Kinetic we had a massive gossip problem in the youth group. Like I mean massive, it was almost as if nobody had anything nice to say about each other. Here’s the thing with gossip - it kills growth, stalls momentum and steals life. So I needed to get rid of it. So the first culture pillar that I taught the youth group was “Always Got Your Back”. Again remember - the culture serves to push people toward the vision. By removing gossip - we would build a stronger culture of belonging. This culture pillar didn’t just give us the language to do it, but the authority for any leader and any KID to stop the culture of gossip from spreading.

We pushed it hard - pulpit, enforcement through leaders etc. and in 6 months, all of the key gossipers had left the youth group - and that’s when our first major growth phase hit; but we used culture to combat the bad behaviour - and that culture of gossip never came back.

Culture, like vision, is transmitted through language - it is spoken.

So how do you decide on your culture? Your culture should be a reflection of your core values. You start with your core values - and when you practise them consistently you end up with culture.

Every leader of any organisation should always make the time to sit down and think on what their core values are and youth ministry is no different.

In fact it may be even more important in youth ministry than in any other ministry simply because youth don’t just need direction, they are ACTIVELY seeking it. Their years in youth ministry are literally the most formative of their life - and their ability to adopt good, biblical values will never be as good as when they’re in youth ministry.

Now since culture is transmitted through language - and should be a reflection of your core values. My suggested way to set culture is by establishing “Culture Pillars”. These are effectively statements that communicate your core values in applicable ways.

Culture Pillars are powerful tools for establishing core values within a group and normalising the culture that you feel serves the vision, or specific core values that you feel prompted to grow.

EXAMPLE: Excellence in Service

One of the ones very close to my heart is the core value of Excellence. Col 3:23 is one of my favourite bible passages, and my parents since young have always told me, “Jon if you want to do something - do it properly”. And this is something I really felt called to impart to the youth as their pastor. We pushed this culture pillar hard - and this really is quite a hard one to push through. But you know how I knew it set?

In 2016 we were at a YA Groundswell event being held at LifeChurch (Now KCC Canningvale). 1500 kids, inflatables, dark corners, mass bringing friends - went about as you would have expected it; the place was trashed by the time that everyone was done. The event wrapped up at 9:30 and people started heading home by 10PM. I gathered Kinetic in the auditorium while a couple of the leaders began to clean up the mess. I just happened to have a chat with one of them and he told me that they had planned to be here until 3 in the morning cleaning up, laying out chairs and the works - I then told him if he wanted help, our youth group would help them out - and he thought I was joking.

So I told Kinetic that since we are guests in someone else’s house - it is our duty to leave it in the state which we entered. 250 kids got up without a word and picked up the trash, set the chairs, vacuumed, mopped the floors - we were done cleaning up within 30 minutes. The guys from Life church were so shocked by what happened, they were like how did you raise youth to be so ..good? I think I laughed them off but honestly - culture. Kids aren’t idiots - they’re just looking for direction more aggresively than most.

Remember at the start how I was talking about how not all growth is good growth? Now’s probably a good time to explain a concept that all youth pastors (actually just all pastors) need to be familiar with: Cultural Dilution.

This occurs when sudden growth enters a house and upsets the culture. Because of the influx of new people (who are unfamiliar with the house culture and bring their own set of behaviours) - it literally “dilutes” the culture of the house.

Cultural dilution occurs when physical growth outpaces cultural growth

Of course, if you have no culture - then this won’t matter - but note that without culture, you will be at the mercy of whatever the default culture is, for good or bad. And that means it is only inevitable that your growth is temporary and fragile - because you are literally leaving it to chance.

Why is it important to be able to identify this? Because when cultural dilution occurs - you will notice that default culture kicks in. And default culture is rarely ever good, in fact there are always certain predictable signs of default culture.

Eg. Cliques - poor fellowship culture, Low ministry uptake - poor service culture, bad retention - poor pastoral culture, resistance to change - poor leadership culture. These are almost normal “default” cultures.

The goal is actually to weaponise your culture into a pathway for attraction.

The best thing about culture is that it attracts like for like, and vice versa - it repels bad culture as well. For example - a culture of strong discipleship will attract people seeking deeper growth. A Strong family-like culture will attract those that value close-knit relationshipis. A strong ministry culture will attract people who want to serve.

Culture, when built correctly - is a powerful tool for retention. Whether people realise it or not, they all want to be in a place that has good culture - even if they don’t contribute to it immediately.

So how to spread Vision and Culture? 3 ways:

DEFINE - Clearly define it, write it down, explain it to your leaders, explain it to your teams, make sure everyone knows exactly what you mean by “belong” and “believe”.

DISPLAY - Never underestimate the power of visual cues. Print banners, Make Phone wall papers, projector backgrounds, instagram, everything, make sure people are sick of seeing it.

DEMONSTRATE - Leaders must embody the vision and culture to the youth. Being the vision and culture, promoting behaviours that align with vision and culture and calling out behaviours that tear it down.

Infrastructure (The Vehicle)

The final component of the 3 is Infrastructure. If Vision is the destination, Culture is the journey, then Infrastructure is the vehicle you use to travel.

Are you using a bicycle or a train? The better your Infrastructure, the more people are able to join you on the journey.

And I really do mean this in almost physical terms, because Infrastructure is all about capacity and sustainabiility. In other words - how many, and how long.

Good infrastructure will always be the key to sustainable growth AND the key to not burning out your leaders.

There are 3 major groups of Infrastructure that need to be considered:

Leadership Infrastructure

How are you training and equipping your existing leaders?

How are you raising and recruiting new leaders?

Pastoral Infrastructure

How are individuals being integrated into community?

How are individuals being cared for?

Operational Infrastructure

Misc. Transport, Event

EXAMPLE: Connect Group and Leadership Development

Connect Groups are a perfect example of pastoral infrastructure. We put everyone 100 people in a room and it’s nearly impossible to care for people pastorally, so what do we do? We divide that by 10 and allocate each small group a leader - much more manageable, and people feel more pastorally cared for and seen.

We can take that infrastructure another level and ask pastors - what is the function of your CGs? Are CGs the place where people are meant to bring friends first (because this would dictate the program and events) or do they bring them to service first and then get them into connect (which would affect the way services are run etc.) things to think about.

Kinetic had a pretty aggresive leadership development pathway because the growth was so exponential we had to make sure we were raising leaders early to send down the line. We start them in a ministry called Kinetic Anchor which you have to join before serving in any ministry in Kinetic. It’s basically a 8 week course that really helps you catch our vision and culture. Then from the time they’re in year 10 - they would be picked to be a part of a “Core group” in their CGs and introduced to the basics of organising CG meetings, transport, word, refreshments etc on a small scale for 20-30 people. Once you were in core you were invited to a “Kinetic Core” meet which happened 4 times a year and it’s where I would address the entire core team (about 200 kids) on the vision and culture of Kinetic. Then by the time they’re in year 11 they would be selected to co-lead alongside an experienced leader at our 2 camps each year. By the time they’re in year 12 they’re solo leading teams at our camps and are being mentored individually by their CG leaders.

The moment they graduate - we have a list of 15-20 trained and experienced leaders who are ready to jump in and take on CGs and serve.