Organizational Leadership for Gospel Centered Youth Ministry: Mission Statements and Ministry Values
Since launching Youth Pastor Theologian, I’ve received multiple requests about how to develop a good mission/value statement and how to determine ministry values. YPT has shared a few helps for you regarding goal-setting, building a healthy ministry culture, and growing a gospel culture, those may also help those who are interested in this organizational leadership. It’s also important to keep in mind a few distinctives about what it means to be a youth pastor theologian.
Mission statements don’t provide a secret key for leading effective ministries. I do recommend them, but with the reminder they’re for the sake of clarity and organizational health. Some so-called leadership gurus talk about mission statements and values as if they’re what will determine your success or failure. I know good youth pastors who don’t have one, because they naturally lead with clarity and focus. I also know others who have spent considerable effort to craft excellent statements, only to see very little benefit. Here’s why – because a statement alone means nothing.
The culture of your ministry is the most important thing to cultivate – not a catchy slogan you can write on a shirt. A mission statement is only helpful if your ministry’s vision and practice align. To some degree, every mission statement is aspirational: it’s what you hope will become true of your ministry. If your ministry values don’t provide guardrails to lead you towards fulfilling your mission, then there’s a big problem. That is, by far, the number one reason I’ve seen mission statements prove useless.
On Mission Statements
A mission statement is one sentence that clearly and simply captures your ministry’s goal. Some mission statements paint a portrait of what they hope students are like by the time they graduate (“we graduate teenagers with a maturing faith in Christ who are committed to lifelong faith”), others are more straightforward (“We want students to know Christ and grow in him for the long haul”). However your mission statement is worded, it’s a big picture statement that helps you focus yourself and others around a shared outcome.
As an example, here are the two mission statements I’ve used in ministry, and my reflection on their distinctive strengths.
“We are here to welcome teenagers to worship and walk with Jesus Christ
and to witness to those around them.”
I developed this statement fairly early in my ministry career and used it for fourteen years to lead my team. This statement contains what I called the “four W’s” – Welcome, Worship, Walk, Witness. I wanted to make sure that youth group welcomed students into relationships with Christ, with one another, and with youth leaders who would care for them. Since nonChristians cannot worship, that was our verbiage for conversation and leading students into saving faith. Youth ministry is primarily about discipleship, and so, we obviously hope to train students to walk faithfully in Christ, and to be witnesses of Christ saving grace to their friends through evangelism.
This mission statement is helpful as one (long) sentence that captures our ministry’s core commitments. But that’s also it’s weakness – it’s trying to do too many things. By enfolding the mission and values into one sentence, it became tempting to focus on just one of the W’s to the oversight of others, while missing the bigger picture of why these matter. In the end, this mission statement was more of a “value statement,” so we periodically focused more on how rather than what. When I started at my current church I didn’t feel compelled to revive this, so I started over.
“We make adult disciples whose faith took root in their teen years.”
This is a short and crisp mission statement that paints a picture of what we’re trying to do over the long haul. It tells you how we measure effectiveness in our ministry. When we build our ministry schedule and evaluate opportunities, this statement is our guide. In this way, there are times when it’ll be more “on mission” for us to invite students to participate in a church cleanup day than to plan a fun youth event where teenagers will come to be together instead of working side-by-side with adults from the church.
Counsel for crafting your mission statement
Keep it memorable and simple. I cannot express this strongly enough. If no one remembers it then it’s useless and you’re always going to be frustrated that parents and leaders and students aren’t on board. Maybe they are on board, but the statement isn’t well-crafted. Listen to how others describe your mission – maybe they’ve come up with a more memorable way to put it than you originally did. Let it be a work in progress for your first year or two.
Remember the Great Commission. Your statement should reflect the Great Commission, for obvious reasons.
What’s Next? Students will graduate and leave your ministry. What do you want to see happen next in their lives? Your long-term vision for them should affect how you minister to them today.
Think about the big picture. The youth ministry is not the only hope for students. How does your mission statement reflect partnership with parents and a commitment to integrate them into the church? This doesn’t always need to be explicitly stated (remember, you want it short and memorable), but if your statement is dependent on a particular program of your ministry, then you’re thinking too narrowly.
On Ministry Values
Whereas a mission statement highlights your end-goal, your values define the guardrails that keep you on track towards fulfilling that mission. Your values won’t be exhaustive of everything that you do, but they highlight the particular aspects of your ministry that set it apart from others. Hopefully, when students describe your youth ministry they’ll accidentally list your ministry values.
Try to identify two or three ministry values that are absolutely central to your ministry convictions. These are the hills you will die on. If your pastor or elders asked you to minimize these things, then you’d seriously consider finding a new ministry elsewhere. There are other commitments you may have, but these few ministry values shape and drive all others.
For my own ministry, I’ve emphasized two primary values: gospel-community and theological-depth. Maybe hyphenating these values is cheating, but it’s important to highlight the centrality of the gospel to the way we build community.
I don’t have any empirical research to back this up, but I suspect community and fellowship are the most common values across youth ministries. This emphasis on community can easily devolve into merely “hanging out” or an unhealthy obsession with fun and games. Please, do not make “community” or “fellowship” one of your values without clearly articulating what you mean - otherwise it will most likely devolve into a commitment to “hanging out,” and teenagers can never do that enough so your emphasis on discipleship will slowly erode.
Aligning Mission Statements and Ministry Values
Your ministry values will keep you on track to fulfill your mission statement, otherwise you’re wasting your time by having either. I’ve been in meetings where a ministry or event was proposed and approved because, “it’s biblical.” But if we approve every ministry opportunity that has a biblical basis, then we could be hosting a different event every night of the week. Obviously, we should only do things that “are biblical.” But we need clarity and focus, or else we’re going to attempt every good opportunity and burn out.
Whether you’re evaluating a ministry program or your considering a potential new ministry or event, your mission and values are crucial. Will they move the needle in those areas, or not? Sure, you can do the occasional event that’s just fun or that emphasizes a different aspect of evangelism or discipleship – but if you do not consistently use your mission and values to discern what gets a “yes” and what gets a “no,” then your mission and values have become useless and you’re just hoping discipleship will happen on its own.
A Final Analogy
If the mission statement is your destination and your values are guardrails that keep you on track - then other ministry opportunities are off ramps, potholes are unexpected challenges, and stop signs are setbacks. A car crash could be represented by a crisis that comes from the outside – someone who intentionally causes division or a significant event that affects you or your community. If you aren’t careful, you can fall asleep at the wheel or run out of gas – so remember to take care of your soul to rest in the gospel, and to fuel your youth leaders and parents to keep moving forward over the course of the long journey.
