Interlínc’s own Allen Weed had an extended conversation recently with youth pastor (and leader of the sorta popular band, Casting Crowns) Mark Hall. Here’s a bit of what they talked about. You can find more of this conversation at interlinc-online.com.
Allen: If youth leaders were to spend a week with you and observe your youth ministry, what do you hope he or she would discover? What do you hope they wouldn’t discover?
Mark: I can tell you what they WOULD discover. One of the things I’ve always been frustrated about when you hear youth speakers talk about their youth groups is that everything is awesome, all their programs are rockin’, and they had this many students. When I first started, it sounded like everyone’s student ministry was just amazing Then I went back to our youth group thinking, “Man, I’m doing terrible.” To hear someone say, “My youth group is doing great” is to hear someone that is not fully connected to his or her youth group. If you’ve got more than three kids, then you’ve got a split decision on how your youth group is doing. So I would say our youth group is going amazingly and terribly.
When you come into our youth group you’re gonna see teenagers who are brand new believers, wading through this new life, feeling the forgiveness of God, and they’re also feeling the conviction of God—they’re wrestling through all that. We have some students who are rocking, walking closely with God, and discovering His calling on their lives. We have some students that are totally determined to destroy themselves—they’ve chosen that they don’t want to hear it and they’re gonna do what they want to do no matter what. You’ll see every end of the spectrum.
Same thing goes for our youth leaders. We have some seasoned vets who don’t know what they’re doing, some rookies who are doing amazing, and everything in the middle. We have seen that experience doesn’t always mean you know what you’re talking about. Some, because of the time they’ve spent with teenagers over a matter of years, have built a strong ministry with the students around them—not from a dynamic personality but by the fact that they’ve earned the right through relationship to pour into teenagers. I’ve seen that happen with youth workers that have been here a year and with youth workers that have been doing it ten years.
You can come sit down at one spot in a room and you’ll learn something different about our youth group everywhere you go. Some of our programs are working, some of them aren’t. Our ministry is always on the altar; all of our programs are on the altar—they can come or go at any moment. We try not to get married to any one approach. We try to keep our theology very tight but the way we do ministry has to evolve.
How does your notoriety as a Christian musician help or hinder your recruiting volunteer leaders?
People have a lot of reasons for wanting to be in student ministry. Having Casting Crowns in charge of the youth group does attract a few people; but when someone comes to us and says, “Hey I want to be in student ministry,” we tell them to just come on in and hang out with us for about four months. We don’t put anybody right into ministry. A lot of times people think that student ministry might be cool, and then after a while they realize that they don’t even like teenagers! So, one of the reasons we have them just come in and hang out on Wednesday nights is so that they can just be around some students and be under the umbrella of our ministry without having a position but they get to have the hang time. That’s where they can discover if student ministry is what God really has for them, and we can discover if those people really need to be around kids or if they really need a small group of their own. We move slowly when it comes to an adult who wants to be in student ministry.
A youth leader with smaller numbers might hear that and say, “Well, that’s because you have so many leaders.” I’m telling you, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you make your decisions on youth workers based on your desperation for them. A lot of times we need youth workers so badly that we start flipping through the church directory and calling people. But, if we’re not careful, we’ll set our youth group back for years just because of the people that we bring on as leadership. You know how it is in church leadership—it’s like the Supreme Court Justices; they’re there for life. A lot of the trouble youth pastors have is they come into a church and they inherit leadership from the past youth pastor.
The way we do it is you come in, you spend time with us for several months, then we sit down and talk and pray through where we think your part in the ministry should be, and you sign on for a year. I think a lot of adults are scared to volunteer because they think it’s for life, so we have people commit to one year—at the end of that year we meet again. That protects them from feeling like they’re signed on forever and also protects us.
You’ve been a YLO member for years. What are some of your thoughts about Youth Leaders Only?
We know how important music is in a teenager’s life. Their music’s either urging them toward the life they’re trying to live or it’s dragging them back toward the life they’re trying to leave. So my conviction is, if a youth leader can show students that Christian music has totally caught up culturally and encourage students to give their music to God and to let Christian music be what they go to for their entertainment as well as for their growth, it will change everything about them. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have all different styles of music available, which most of us don’t. To me, YLO has been a great resource to find out what Christian music is out there that I might not find on my own. And, with YLO, I get to hear the heart of the band and what they’re about. YLO has definitely been a great tool for us.
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Check out this intro video to Casting Crowns' song "Until the Whole World Hears":
