sticky faith | Aaron Buer

Green Dye and Dr. Seuss

People learn best through hands on experience and observation. At least, that’s how I learn and I’m assuming you’re the same. In our student ministry, we spend every other Sunday night preparing our high school seniors for college. We talk to them about everything we can think of: money, faith, dating, balance, picking a major, drinking, etc. I firmly believe that these conversations have an impact in helping our students prepare for the their transition to college but one event from a few years ago trumped them all. You see, every spring we do an event for our seniors called Senior Sneak. It’s a weekend retreat to an undisclosed location for fun and extended training on college transition. It’s one of our milestone events and it’s a little fancier than anything else we put on. It’s our way of blessing our seniors one last time before they run off to college.

We’ve learned over the years that the weekend we choose for this event is hugely important. For example, don’t schedule it on a Prom or musical weekends. We fancy ourselves at being highly skilled at picking the right weekend. However, sometimes things surprise us. As it turns out, one year we inadvertently scheduled our retreat for Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Call me boring, but I don’t really pay attention to St. Patty’s so it was completely off my radar.

The funny thing about Chicago on St. Patrick’s day weekend is that it gets nutty. Actually, it gets really nutty. They dye the river green and then proceed to party down. In the words of Dr. Seuss, they “drink, drink, drink, drink, DRINK!” This is what I mean by learning from experience and observation. We essentially provided our students with a front row seat of first semester frat parties. On a side note, how do they dye the river green? Is it just a whole lot of green Kool-Aid?

Although there were quite a few awkward moments as we walked through the city, the weekend ended up being a great experience for our small group leaders and students. All the partying around us provided context for great conversations about boundaries, balance and the partying scene. Sometimes youth groups and churches are guilty of ignoring the realities of the “real world.” One way or another, we need to make sure that our students aren’t surprised by what they encounter. They ought to be prepared to face reality.

I don’t know that I would recommend taking your students to Chicago for St. Patrick’s Day but I do recommend getting your seniors away with their small group leaders for strategic conversations about their upcoming freshman year of college. Are they ready to face the pressures, challenges and opportunities? Now is the time to talk about it.

I’d be happy to share the playbook for our Senior Sneak weekend if you’re interested. And if you have a recipe for green dye please let me know.

7 Reasons You Should Do a Youth Group Reunion Event

One of my passions in student ministry is to remove the cliff–the graduation cliff. Student ministry is at it’s best when it bridges high school and adulthood. I’m done with the days of graduating students and forgetting about them. That was one of my greatest mistakes as a new youth worker. Now, I believe in equipping students for the transition to adulthood and setting them up with mentors to walk with them through the process.

One of the ways we work toward this goal is hosting a reunion event over Christmas break. Basically we’ve invited all of our 2013 graduates and their small group leaders back for an event. I’m so pumped for this event that I’ve come up with 7 reasons why you should do it too.

1. Reconnect Students and Mentors

The best reason for putting on a reunion event is to reconnect students with their mentors. Our graduates, even though they are freshmen in college, still need quality adults in their lives to mentor them. And, truthfully our adult mentors need students in their life too. Mentoring brings life to both sides. Anyone who has ever mentored a student knows this is true. You always get more out of it than you give.

Relationships are the key to growth. Rekindling the relationship between students and mentors is reason enough to do a reunion event.

2. Evaluate Your Ministry

Getting graduates together for a reunion event is a great opportunity to listen. We are very intentional about creating a curriculum for our senior class that will help them transition. Did the curriculum work? A reunion event is a chance to ask our graduates, “What surprised you? What do you wish you would have known? How could we have prepared you better?”

If many of your graduates are struggling in their faith maybe it’s time to rethink how you are doing student ministry. But, you’ll never know unless you ask students who have graduated out of your ministry.

3. Reorient Your Graduates

A reunion event is a great opportunity to speak truth to your graduates. Getting them together over Christmas is like speaking to students at Winter Retreat. They are out of their normal environment. They are more open to truth. They are evaluating their first semester choices. Take advantage of this to remind your graduates of what is important.

4. You Still Belong

It’s terribly disorienting to go off to college. Even after only one semester, your hometown feels different. Church doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. You’re not really welcome in the student ministry and your old friendships have changed. A reunion event is a great way to tell your graduates that they are still a valued member of the community. They still belong. Their small group leaders and mentors still care about them.

5. Evaluate Your Church/Ministry Recommendations

One of the things we do in our student ministry is connect each of our graduates with a church or ministry wherever they are going after high school. Our goal is that the church or ministry would connect with them before they arrive on campus.

A reunion event is a great time to ask about these recommendations. Were a few of your recommendations duds? It would be good to know. I love it when a student falls in love with a new church in their college town. That is a great feeling!

6. Encourage Your Graduates to Plug In

So maybe a few of your recommendations were duds. Or, maybe you didn’t make any recommendations. Get on it for next year!

We know how crucial community is to growth. A reunion event is a good opportunity to remind our graduates of how important community is. Encourage them to plug in. Maybe Christmas break is new opportunity to help them find a good ministry.

7. Remind Yourself of the Goal of Student Ministry

Hanging out with graduates of your student ministry will force you to grapple with the outcome of your work. It isn’t about numbers. It isn’t about great bands, environments or talks. It’s about students pursuing Jesus after leaving your ministry.

Listening to graduates talk about the joys and struggles of life after high school will help you better understand what topics you need to address while they are still in high school. It will remind you of the importance of mentors. It will remind you of how powerful inter-generational church is. It will remind you of the goal of all we do and will help you reorient your practices around these goals.

So, schedule a student ministry reunion event. There’s still time and your graduates will be bored over Christmas break anyway. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Bring together your graduates and their small group leaders. Encourage them, listen to them and reorient them. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it went.

Cancel Sunday School

What would you do if you could go back in time and undo something in your student ministry? Maybe you’d undo your youth group name, “BOB”—Bunch of Believers. Or perhaps you’d like a mulligan on that youth room color scheme that was so hip back in ’83 “when you could still throw a football over them mountains.”

Want to know what I would go back and undo? Sunday morning programs. No, not all the church services! Sheesh, I’m not that crazy. I’m talking about high school programming. Let me explain.

When I launched out as a youth pastor ten years ago, I inherited a Sunday morning high school program that was on life support. My superiors charged me with bringing it back to life so that’s what we did. By the end of my first year we had grown the attendance by 80%. At first, I assumed that this reflected how awesome our high school program was—and by extension how awesome I was as the youth pastor.

Our Sunday morning program was so epic that students liked it much better than the adult church services. I began to notice that the students would either sneak back into our junior high program the following hour or jump in their cars and hit up the local coffee shop. Very few of them were attending the adult church service. I was so blinded by the numbers and the positive attention I was getting from leadership that I never bothered to think through the ramifications of what was happening.

Even worse, when I heard students complaining about how boring the adult services were, I kind of liked it because what I was hearing was, “What you do is awesome. What they do is boring.” Call me a jerk, but I like to be awesome.

After a few years (I’m a slow learner) the flaw in my approach finally dawned on me—like a pile-driver to the face. I realized that when our seniors, who had been regularly attending our high school program but not the main services, graduated from our ministry they disappeared. Sometimes they found a church that better suited their tastes but more often than not they peaced out from church all together. This is one of the great regrets of my life.

When students walk away from faith, we as youth workers are quick to blame the student, parents or culture. “Well, I’m sorry but he shouldn’t have been hanging out with those guys.” “His parents were just clueless!” “Our culture is just so messed up, it’s practically impossible for kids to stay committed these days.”

Although it’s much more painful, I think it’s far more valuable to look in the mirror and to evaluate our structures and programs. The logical reason my students were walking away from church is that I was training my students to walk away from church. How? I was isolating them from the church services and community. When they graduated from my ministry they didn’t possess the tools or desire to integrate into the larger body. For many, this was the end of church.

So what would I do if I indeed did have DeLorean? I’m glad you asked:

cancel Sunday morning high school programming
encourage high school students to attend church with their families
encourage students to serve in the children’s ministry/junior high/larger church body (if you have 2 or more hours of Sunday morning services)
refocus high school youth group programming to Sunday night or Wednesday night
build the high school youth program around solid teaching and adult mentor relationships

That’s it. Oh, and if you do happen to have a DeLorean…CALL ME.

The Danger of Not Digging

Have you ever read a situation completely wrong? I have. I once got a person’s gender completely wrong. “Hey Jon, is this your mom?” “Nope.” “It’s my brother.” “Oh….”

I’ve read people wrong in student ministry too. A few years ago, I received a letter from a former student—a student who had been regularly involved in our student ministry for all seven years. He was in a small group with the same leader for 4 years, attended snow camp and even attended a mission trip. His letter informed me that it was all an act. He never believed any of it. He is an atheist. He was playing along for the sake of his parents. We never knew because we never asked. We never dug beneath the surface.

WHY THEY WALK AWAY

Based on the published research I’ve read and my own experience I would say that the majority of students who walk away from church after high school do so for the following reasons:

They never figured out what they believe
They never worked through their doubts
They never understood why Jesus matters

I would attribute most of this to a lack of digging—from parents and youth workers. We assumed things were fine because they were coming to our programs and weren’t smoking pot. We never gave them permission to talk about their doubts because, well, that’s uncomfortable. We never connected them to the mission of Jesus because we were more concerned about intelligent lights and transition videos than we were about actually connecting them to what Jesus is doing in the world. We never gave them the chance to participate.

PICK UP A SHOVEL

The lesson I learned from that letter is that we need to start digging. There is far too much at stake for us to simply assume. We need to get messy by asking harder questions, listening better, and connecting them to the mission of Jesus. The fact that students are walking away from church because they were bored with Jesus is unbelievable.

HOW TO DIG

So, how do we dig beneath the surface? Here are some thoughts:

1. Get on their turf

Who are your students at school, at home and in the world of social media? You might be surprised. Most students have multiple selves and aren’t terribly bothered by the dissonance of being one person at church and another at school. Only by digging into their world can we really see who they are.

2. Drop Your Guard

Honesty unlocks honesty. If you want your students to be real then you must be real. You must be honest about your doubts, struggles and mistakes. They won’t be willing to go anywhere you haven’t already gone. Free them from pretense and masks by dropping your own.

3. Ask Incredibly Awkward Questions

Digging is messy and uncomfortable but let’s be real, there’s a lot at stake. Be direct. Be blunt. If their eyes widen then you’re on the right track. Ask that question that makes you blush. Drag sin out into the light. Force them to verbalize their thoughts. Be ok with silence and unleash the power of the “why” question.

4. Overstay Your Welcome

Digging beneath the surface is a long term project. You have to earn the right to speak truth into the lives of your student. There is no such thing as trust without time together. Students don’t need a quick spiritual surgery to set them right. They need a guide to walk with them as they journey through adolescence. Stay in the lives of your students. Students need small group leaders who will walk with them for 3 or 4 years. Stay engaged with them as they transition into college. Overstay your welcome.

I never want to read a letter like that again. Let’s dig into the lives of students and help them as they struggle to build a faith of their own.

3 Ways to Help High School Seniors This Year

As we approach the fall, there is much that we can do to help our high school seniors transition well. Here’s a post from earlier this summer with some ideas….

We’ve all seen the doomsday statistics about how many students are walking away from church and faith when the get into college. If you’re like me you probably have a few names and faces that represent the numbers in those statistics. What’s difficult is that while you’re spinning on the hamster wheel of weekly student ministry it can be difficult to think strategically about college transition.

The temptation is to become paralyzed by the hugeness of the problem. Guilt and fear tells us that we need to restructure our entire ministry because everything we are doing apparently sucks. This is a dirty lie. The truth is most of what we are doing in student ministry is great for the long-term faith development of our students. Instead of scrapping your entire structure consider tweaking your ministry. What is one thing we can do differently to improve college transition? Here are 3 suggestions of ways to tweak your approach to college transition.

Who am I?

Perhaps the biggest issue our students face as they graduate from our ministries is that they don’t know who they are. They don’t have a cear picture of how God has designed them or what He might be calling them to. Helping them make progress in this area can be a huge service to your students and maybe even save them a few thousand dollars in college tuition.

Maybe the way to tweak your ministry is to help your seniors discover a little about how God has wired them. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to helping students understand who they are. Currently, we are using Donald Miller’s Storyline as a template for our discussions. Jon Acuff’s Start may be more geared for adults but it’s hilarious and insightful. Finding Your Way is also another great resource that is specifically designed with this purpose in mind.

Senior Retreat

Maybe you don’t have time to create an additional program just for seniors but I bet you do have a weekend available somewhere during the year. A retreat just for seniors is a great first step toward improving college transition. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Find a cabin or a lake house and spend the weekend helping them build a strategy for how to grow spiritually during their first year of college. Our version of this is called Senior Sneak. See what we did there with the two “S”s? Genius.

Transition Mentors

Programs will never compare to relationships. An entire year’s worth of transition curriculum isn’t worth much unless caring adults are pouring into the lives of your students. Without mentoring relationships students will have trouble implementing the principles you are teaching.

Perhaps you’re too busy for either of my previous two suggestions. That’s fine. Delegate it. Recruit other people to do it. Find mature and caring adults who are willing to mentor students and turn them loose. Even if you do have the time and resources to develop a college transition ministry, you should still pull in quality adults as mentors. Inter-generational mentoring relationships are like a magic bullet against faith abandonment in college.

Faith abandonment in college is a huge problem but don’t let it paralyze you. Instead of restructuring everything, simply take a step in the right direction. For now, pick whatever suggestion sounds best. If none of them sound good then invent your own. Just take a step.

My College Transition Curriculum

Look, I’m not famous or anything but I did develop a college transition curriculum. Well, actually, I borrowed most of it but it’s still pretty awesome. I’ve been perfecting it for a few years now. Below is this year’s version. You’re welcome to use some or all of it. Check it out.

KICKOFF

We play a trivia game about college. My slideshow is as basic as they come but the point is to get students thinking about the next phase of their life. After playing the trivia game we set the stage for the year–talking through our topics and generally getting the students amped about their senior year. Here’s the slideshow:

[Show as slideshow]

FIRST SEMESTER

Our entire first semester is devoted to Donald Miller’s Storyline workbook. It’s a great journey for graduating seniors. The book generates a ton of great conversation and helps the students think through their gifting, God’s mission and what a meaningful life looks like.

JANUARY

We’ll spend January going through a few key concepts from Andy Stanley’s The Principle of the Path. I think this book is perfect for helping students understand how the decisions they make over the next few years will be connected to the rest of their lives.

FEBRUARY

1. Leaders Share: Our small group leaders share their post high school experiences, offering advice on colleges, majors, partying, money, friends and whatever else they feel like talking about.

2. Money, School Loans and Debt: My approach is to help students understand what their lives will actually be like if they take on a heavy debt load. My goal is that anyone who is paying for school on their own would think seriously about cheaper options.

MARCH

1. Graduates Share: Recent graduates return to LifeLine to talk about what their college experiences have been like. I ask them to talk about money, finding a new church or campus ministry, partying and whatever advice they have for our current seniors.

2. Senior Sneak: This is our retreat designed for seniors. It includes a whole lot of fun and 3 senior specific teachings. Sorry, the content and location are secret.

APRIL

1. Understanding God’s Will: How do you make decisions based on God’s design, plans and calling?

2. Dating, Marriage and Divorce: How exactly to you end up happily married?

Well that’s my curriculum for this year. I firmly believe that helping students transition well begins with helping them ask the right questions and engage in the right conversations. This curriculum is designed to spur on these conversations. In the context of small groups that have been together for 4-7 years and an invested adult mentor, these conversations can be very powerful.

Transition is my passion so if you have ideas I’d love to hear them!

Why Christian Students Walk Away From Faith

For the last 3 years, I have obsessively focused on this question. As a pastor to students, this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

One of our former students and current volunteers shared this article with me and I think it is worth the read. The article is written by Larry Alex Taunton who is the executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation. Honestly, I know nothing about him or his organization but the study intrigued me because it offered “members of Secular Student Alliances (SSA) or Freethought Societies (FS)s” an opportunity to share “your journey to unbelief“. Here were some of Larry Alex Taunton’s observations:

1. “They had attended church”

2. “The mission and message of their churches was vague”

3. “They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions”

4. “They expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously”

5. “Ages 14-17 were decisive”

6. “The decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one”

7. “The internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism”

Personally, I believe we are losing students to irrelevant faith and atheism because they don’t find Christianity compelling which is ridiculous because the mission of the Gospel is insanely compelling. But, this is on us–not them. Students want to be part of a mission bigger than themselves and if we aren’t connecting them to it they will go elsewhere for meaning.

Also, research shows that many students are walking away because they didn’t have a safe place to wrestle with doubts. We MUST become churches where it is not only OK but also encouraged to openly wrestle with doubts.

The article is definitely worth a read. Click here to check it out.

3 Things You Can Do to Fight Faith Abandonment

Who am I?

Perhaps the biggest issue our students face as they graduate from our ministries is that they don’t know who they are. They don’t have a clear picture of how God has designed them or what He might be calling them to. Helping them make progress in this area can be a huge service to your students and maybe even save them a few thousand dollars in college tuition.

Senior Retreat

Transition Mentors

Image courtesy of t0zz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

College Transition: 4+Life

A few nights ago was the season finale of our senior cell family. In our ministry structure, cell families are regional collections of 6 small groups. One of the things we do to help our students with college transition is cluster all of our senior small groups into their own cell family. We meet together every other week and talk about transitioning into adulthood. Last night was the last cell family of the year. It’s tradition for us to give our small group leaders the floor on the last night and let them share their final words of advice to our graduating seniors. They all shared from the platform of years invested in their small group so their words carried some weight for all and immense weight for a few.

One of our leaders said something that I will remember for the rest of my life—something that reminds me that connecting small groups of students with a caring adult is probably the most important thing we do. This particular leader said, “Whatever happens from here on out, whatever mistakes you make, we want you to know that we are here for you for the rest of your lives.” The beautiful thing is that I know from watching her lead her small group that she meant every word of that statement and I know the same is true for the other leaders sitting around that circle.

Ever since I heard Kara Powell explain the core concepts of Sticky Faith in a breakout session at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference, I have made the “4+1” concept a key component of our volunteer recruiting and training. We’ve asked for a four year commitment for as long as I can remember but we began visioning volunteers to continue mentoring their students during their first year of college. I believe that this concept has made a significant impact in the lives of our graduates.

Here’s the clincher: if you recruit the right people and vision them the right way, not only will they give you 4+1, they will give you 4+life. I understand that not every leader has this kind of capacity and not every small group relationally cements together in this way but even if only half of them do—think of the incredible lifelong impact our student ministries could have. This is why I believe that nothing we do is more important that leveraging inter-generational mentoring relationships. Life-changing student ministry isn’t complicated. Find adults who love Jesus and are willing to love a handful of students, equip and vision the heck out of them and unleash them to be the pastors in your ministry. 4+life.

Ultimatum

A few years ago my boss read a couple books and became paranoid—this sort of thing is pretty common around my church. He pulled me into his office and asked me a series of hard questions.

“How many of our graduates are plugged into a good church?”

“Uh, I’m not sure.”

“Where are our graduates going to college?”

“Umm…I know a few are going to [insert college] .”

“How many of our graduates have walked away from faith?”

“Uh…hopefully none?”

“What are you doing to ensure that our graduates will pursue faith beyond LifeLine (our student ministry)?

“Uh…I gave them a book and an appropriate side-hug?”

Needless to say, he wasn’t amused. Then he gave me an ultimatum, “This time next year, I need to know the answers to each of these questions.” That’s how my boss works. He’s a genius thinker but he’s really annoying because he actually makes you do stuff.

Since I need a paycheck, I spent the next year researching, experimenting and finally implementing. Along the way I discovered a passion that keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morning. The question that haunts me is this, “Will my students pursue Jesus after high school?” That was about 3 years ago. Since then we’ve made significant changes to our ministry philosophy and structure. We decided that we were unwilling to continue doing what wasn’t working.

Here my challenge: do you know what happens to your students after graduation? I mean, do you really know where each of them is going to college, what ministry they will connect with? Will you or someone else walk with them through the transition? How do you plan to encourage them throughout their transition? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, (let’s be honest, most of us don’t) then we have some work to do.

The journey starts with an accurate assessment. Ask yourself, what really happens to my students after graduation? Where do they go? What does their faith look like? Take some time to learn the truth and then develop a strategy to respond to what you learn. The good news is that you probably don’t need to reinvent the wheel because there is a ton of great research out there on the issue of transition and faith fade. Keep reading this blog and I’ll share some of what we have learned.

Tag: sticky faith